It’s undeniable that we’ve entered a new era of talent and with change brings different needs and the demand for invention. Perhaps that’s why pundits and staffing leaders alike are seeing an incredible surge of staffing technology and software in the past year.
It wasn’t that long ago, the situation was very different. Short on time, short on money and eager to get the placement first, staffing firms were, by and large, all about volume. Fortune (and massive fees) favored the boldest and fastest. Margins favored those staffing firms who could get a great placement without all the bells and whistles.
Fast forward to 2019 when candidates sit firmly in the driver’s seat and recruiters are tasked with more than filling a requirement. Today’s staffing firms are espousing technology at a rate that would surprise their counterparts from yesteryear, in some cases leading the charge before corporate colleagues. Here are some of the trends sweeping staffing firms and the technologies rising to the forefront of staffing tech.
Staffing Firms Are Using Assessments
Assessments sat strictly in the purview of highly technical positions or in sales and marketing. Even then, many staffing firms wouldn’t administer the assessment themselves due to cost or time. Very high-level positions may have received an assessment just before the offer, but it was rare. Essentially, candidates were only assessed if the client demanded it.
How are #staffing firms using #tech like @VervoeHQ and @MyaSystems? Learn more from @TalentTechLabs: Click To TweetToday, staffing firms are getting in on the assessment game in a big way. Why? Possibly because retention has fallen more on the shoulders of Talent Acquisition professionals than ever before, and staffing has been brought into the fold. Concerned about getting lapped during an incredibly tight economy, recruiters within staffing firms are starting to use assessments to focus on quality candidates, rather than quantity.
But staffing firms aren’t planning on sacrificing their time to do so. Getting the candidates in front of the hiring manager is still priority number one, assessments just make sure the candidate has a better chance of being selected and sticking around once they get there. In a labor market this competitive, staffing firms want to put better candidates in front of these firms.
Tech to Watch: Vervoe
What it is: Vervoe is an assessment platform which includes skill assessments, simulations, talent trials, projects and other ways to essentially vet candidates for staffing firms, so they can pass along quality candidates for their clients.
What it is not: Vervoe is not HackerRank, because recruiters can build all kinds of assessments. It’s also not a personality profile database or a cultural fit platform or assessment.
What Staffing Can Do With Assessments: Build your own assessments quickly and easily. Assessment templates use data from projects and skills assessments your fellow Talent Acquisition professionals have already built. If you prefer a faster route to quality, use one of the hundreds of crowdsourced assessments around the world contained in the library.
Who’s Using Assessments: Staffing firms are seeing success with Vervoe in light industrial, administrative, clerical, healthcare and more industries.
How Staffing Firms Are Using Assessments: Many are putting candidates through verbal talent trials and using the properly assessed candidates to dramatically increase their interview to fill ratio. Other firms use Vervoe to highlight candidates’ strengths and capabilities so that hiring managers can place candidates in the right role from the get-go.
Tech to Watch: Mya
What it is: Mya facilitates candidates through open-ended, natural and dynamic recruitment conversations, allowing recruiters to screen, qualify, and schedule more efficiently while increasing candidate experience and satisfaction.
What it is not: Your average chatbot solution. Mya is integrated with ATS and Recruitment CRMs staffing firms use at scale. Their differentiator is the neural network approach to candidate conversation automation, as opposed to the more common approach of NLP alone.
What Staffing Can Do With Bots: Obviously, the best use for a tool like this is speeding up qualification and scheduling times. Less often noted in the “chatbot” conversation is the ROI of significantly less career site or job advertisement dropoff. 60% of candidates who start an application don’t finish, so…without a candidate capture tool, that’s a lot of advertising dollars down the drain.
What’s the latest in #staffing firm tech? @TalentTechLabs has the answers: Click To TweetWho’s Using Bots: Those with massive high-volume hiring needs, like retail, hospitality, customer service, and manufacturing. Staffing firms serving multiple regions and time zones are using chatbots and dynamic conversations to ensure they can keep up with demands on candidates’ schedules.
Tech to Watch: WorkLlama
What it is: WorkLlama helps staffing firms capitalize on one of their biggest and most reliable assets—the network each recruiter and candidate brings to the table. Theoretically, this network grows naturally, but asking for referrals has often fallen by the wayside as digital increasingly becomes part of the standard recruiter-candidate exchange. WorkLlama offers what they call “viral recruiting.”
What it isn’t: An on-demand staffing firm. While WorkLlama has its roots in staffing (an obvious advantage for a vendor), they have pivoted along with their team of roughly 30 to flesh out the full candidate engagement platform.
What Staffing Can Do With a Candidate Engagement Platform: Firstly, referral management can go on (almost) autopilot and exponentially increase your network. The real advantage of a tool like WorkLlama is its many distribution channels. From text and voice chat to surveys and polls, the platform allows staffing firms to expand their networks and communicate efficiently with prospects, candidates, and employees.
Staffing firms must adapt and innovate to keep up with the changes in the talent landscape which is why many are adopting these assessment, chatbot, and engagement technologies. At Talent Tech Labs, we’re constantly looking at new staffing technology and software throughout the Talent Acquisition Ecosystem. To learn more about how we advise staffing firms, offer acceleration services for TA startups in our Labs, or offer membership to companies who want to get more innovative, fill out this form.
