Hey, if Navin R. Johnson can get excited about new phone books, we can surely get excited about this, can’t we?

We’re thrilled today to announce the release of the inaugural Jibe Talent Acquisition Survey, available here for complimentary download. Over the summer, we teamed with Kelton Research to survey more than 100 in-house recruiters to gauge their thoughts on a variety of topics. We asked about the best way to measure recruiting success, the importance (and difficulty) of improving candidate experience, the need for better analytics, the usefulness of their current technologies, and what new technologies would help them better do their job.

Their answers were pretty revealing. A sampling:  

• More than a third of recruiters surveyed (35%) said they spend more of their recruiting budget on technology than anything else. However, 46% of respondents reported that they were deeply dissatisfied with their current technology. And 27% actually said their current technology gets in the way of their ability to do their job.

• Three-fourths of recruiters revealed that, due to lack of integration they are unable to get data from their systems to provide a complete “talent lifecycle” snapshot. At the same time, 53% of those surveyed said the best indicator of a ‘quality hire’ is impact on company performance, something that’s near impossible to measure without complete lifecycle data.

• 47% of recruiters indicated that integration of their recruiting and HR systems would be the most valuable technology upgrade, far and away the most desired upgrade amongst respondents.

• Fewer than one in three (32%) recruiters find it easy to extract data or metrics from their current recruiting tools, which is probably why respondents reported that they spend, on average, 22 hours a month manually sorting through or manipulating data.

• 80% of recruiters describe candidate experience as very important to their hiring practices, yet 44% report they are struggling to improve in that area. More than anything else, optimizing candidate experience was identified as the top recruiting trend heading into 2014.

There’s much, much more of course, which is why we’ll be taking a deeper dive into the data over the coming days and weeks on the Jibe Blog. We’ll dig into the different sections of the report, try to put some context around the numbers, and pontificate on what they might mean. So go get your copy of the survey results, put on your Opti-Grab glasses and give it a read.