Can you imagine spending $140 billion dollars on something you aren’t happy with? ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY BILLION DOLLARS.  That’s enough money to buy each citizen of Brazil coffee every day for the entire year. You’d be a saint down there.

This is the dilemma the recruiting industry faces: $140 billion is the amount spent EVERY YEAR by companies on their HR software, and 88 percent of these companies are unhappy with the product they buy. 

Here’s the problem: if you as the HR person convinced your higher-ups to spend all this money on software to attract and filter candidates, and the software didn’t do its job, at the end of the day, you’re going to end up a candidate yourself.

#RCNVS solved this problem, bringing some of the UK’s top HR solution providers to America’s breakfast taco capitol to connect with some of Austin’s best companies on the technology issues facing talent acquisition.

So what was learned from #RCNVS Austin?

•  It’s all about Candidate Experience- Creating a good experience throughout the hiring process is extremely important for your candidates. Candidate experience can come in the way you communicate your brand’s story, or how you deal with candidates who you might not have an opportunity for at that time. Solutions providers understand this, and are helping companies looking for that edge in providing that experience by providing better video interview technology, and other software designed to ease a candidate through the process. 

• The Way We Think About Recruitment is Wrong- It’s like clockwork; when thinking about the candidate marketplace, every recruiter reverts to the 80/20 rule- 80 percent of candidates are passive, and 20 percent are actively looking.  And they’re wrong. Nowadays, 85% of people actively look for jobs, with 65% doing it once a month. Not only that, but many candidates are on indeed WITHIN 90 DAYS of the start of a new job. Think about it- what if husbands and wives were back on Match.com within 90 days of marriage? The relationship pool would be a hell of a lot bigger. This is the new way to think of recruitment.

• There’s a Huge Miscommunication Between Companies and Vendors. There were a few recruiters who told me that they get a lot of fluff from vendors when trying to find new talent management technology. HR leaders want vendors to understand that they’re expending a lot of political capital within their organization to implement that vendor’s software, and the hardest thing for practitioners is actually finding a vendor that makes sense. Companies are already at a massive disadvantage, as technology updates force them to adopt new software every two years, while vendors talk about software every day. The key for vendors is to cut through the fluff- how can they be more of an asset than monetary nuisance to a company for their HR needs?

• HR Leaders Want Technology To Help Streamline the Recruiting Process, and How to Procure the Right Data- Data and process were two of the most common words thrown at me by some of the recruiters at #RCNVSTEXAS. The majority had problems either automating their referral program, or they wanted to create a way to better screen applicants on the front end. The key question was “How can I improve this process?”

The follow-up question most often was “How do I measure this in the right way?” HR leaders were looking for software that could help them identify the key data trends with regards to hiring metrics for candidates, and KPIs for their recruiting teams.

• Self-Education is Becoming Increasingly Important in the Recruiting World- Companies are finding e-learning to be an effective tool for employee engagement and improvement, especially their millennial employees. One senior Talent Acquisition Manager told me he was interested in Social Talent, an e-learning platform, specifically because it allowed his recruiters to not only improve their skills individually, but it also had the capability to compare his recruiters to one another. His quote: “I didn’t realize how important self-education is.”

For more info on the RCNVS Austin Session, check out the #RCNVSTEXAS hashtag on Twitter.