HRO Today Baker's Best 2016 - 8

TOP RPO PROVIDERS
being made in the application of candidate relationship
management (CRM) systems to produce superior
experiences for job applicants. These experiences
result in positive word of mouth about the employer's
brand and can be cultivated over time to nurture the
company's future employment needs.
Big data is also generating bigger benefits, by not just
helping employers improve traditional metrics like
time-to-fill and cost-per-hire, but also resulting in the
development of new metrics to assess performance and
benchmark the organization against its peers, talent
acquisition-wise.
Challenges remain though, chief among them the need
to integrate all the different software tools at the user
level, a problem that is not likely to be solved soon, given
the rapid pace of technological development. Another
challenge for HR leaders is deciding whether to source
these technologies from software vendors on a best-ofbreed
basis or lease them individually as part of a suite of
capabilities from an RPO provider.
Despite these issues, it is clear that the war for talent
is being fought with new and highly sophisticated
weapons. " These innovations are driven by the
desire to be proactive-to be better at predicting the
organization's future workforce needs based on its
strategic growth initiatives, and then having the right
pipeline of talent in place internally or externally to
ensure these needs are met, " says John Wilson, CEO of
global RPO firm WilsonHCG.
This burst in technology tools must have purpose,
serving a company to best its competitors at the
recruitment game. " What has been really impactful and
is absolutely needed today is talent analytics and business
intelligence, " says Andrew Gadomski, founder and CEO
of New York-based Aspen Advisors. " HR leaders want
clearer visibility across the enterprise and better means
to turn data into information to make better talent
decisions driving the business forward. "
A Different Approach
Talent acquisition begins with advertising: Delivering the
right messaging to potential or targeted job applicants.
To source them, virtually every company these days
clicks on LinkedIn, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, and
similar sites. The problem with this approach is that once
everyone is doing the same thing, the playing field levels.
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BAKER'S BEST 2016 - www.hrotoday.com
This explains rising interest in software tools like
Entelo, which sifts through tens of millions of potential
candidate profiles that are indexed from a multitude of
social media sites. " You want to have sourcing strategies
that are differentiators, " says Kathy Kalstrup, executive
vice president, point solutions and RPO, at provider
Aon Hewitt, which uses Entelo and a similar product,
TalentBin. " Both sites aggregate different things from
different places to produce a profile of someone that is
exactly what you may be looking for-or as close as you
can get. "
Another searching tactic that Aon Hewitt uses to find
talent on behalf of its clients is called semantic search.
Rather than simply type up a bunch of search words
and hope they give you what you're looking for, the
technology sorts through different words and their
proper order to yield the optimum results. An example
of this search technique is Google Hummingbird.
Reaching the right job seekers also entails broadcasting
a message that resonates with candidates. When it does,
he or she hopefully takes the next step and applies for
the job. In this regard, Aon Hewitt is providing clients
another software tool called Textio, a machine learning
software product that helps users determine if a job
listing can capture the right responses before it is
published. If not, then Textio corrects it.
" It helps you understand how effective your words are
in conveying the job description, " Kalstrup said. " Maybe
it has too much jargon or is too feminine or masculine
when it should be gender neutral. The tool makes
changes on the spot. "
Please Reply-Later
Even the most refined and enticing online messaging to
a potential job candidate is worthless if the person finds
it difficult to reply to the posting or cannot find the
website address to respond.
" You wouldn't believe how much money is spent in
recruitment advertising to get candidates through the
door, and then the door swiftly closes, " says Susan
Vitale, chief marketing officer for talent acquisition
software suite provider iCIMS.
She explains that job seekers often browse for jobs
when they're away from the office, on the train, or bus
headed home by clicking through their smartphones.
" Suddenly they find the perfect job and sadly realize
http://www.Monster.com http://www.hrotoday.com
HRO Today Baker's Best 2016

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