When looking at recruitment technology, the first thing you need to answer why you need it.  You need to determine the “what” in terms of the actions and functionality you need it to provide in order to successfully implement your recruitment marketing strategy.

I encourage you to sit down with your recruitment team and brainstorm.

• What do you do today that could be better?
• What initiatives are you not doing today that you would like to?
• What functionality is needed in order to be successful in these endeavors?
• What can your current technology can provide in terms of this functionality?

Flesh out what you currently have with your recruiting strategy and start mapping out where you want to take it.  This will help you determine that functionality and technology you need to drive this evolution.

To get you started here’s a stream of consciousness list of recruiting functionality you may ask about when evaluating the recruitment technology you need:

• Automatically attaching web and social data to all CRM contacts including Twitter, Facebook, Blog, etc.
• Build your Talent Network automatically through recruitment ads, Career Site, social profiles and other recruiting content.  And centrally house these contacts
• Mobile Friendly Job Pages, Talent Network forms and Career Sites
• Quick and easy ways to create automatic Talent Pipelines for use in email & SMS campaigns
• Smart recommendations from your Talent Network on candidates that fit new job openings
• Create simple landing pages and custom content on the fly to target specific candidate types and local employer branding
• Make sure that your recruiting & job content is SEO friendly.  Just as important, have ways to increase the number of inbound links to this content
• Automatically post jobs to job boards, niche sites, social networks or anywhere else you distribute your jobs
• Job Distribution to any global or domestic recruiting channel & job board
• Tracking and measuring qualified candidates and hires back to the recruiting source
• Track all the candidate interactions that led to a hire / apply
• Collective benchmarking data from different companies and industries for best recruiting sources and candidate drop off rates
• Predictive metrics that enable you to easily understand what recruiting sources you should use and provides useful recommendations
• Measure and track all the touch-points with a candidate including email, SMS, phone calls, etc.
• Easy video embedding into apply process for employer branding.
• Full administration metrics on recruiter and sourcer activities to determine effectiveness
• A better quicker apply process that enables candidates to also link their social profiles
• Identify Alternative Recruiting Channels that can be used to increase ROI
• Recruitment marketing metrics to determine bottlenecks in your attraction / apply process
• Resume Sourcing to a number of different resume databases

Some of the recruitment initiatives above can be achieved with today’s technology, however, there are some that still require innovation to be fully realized.

Once you understand what you need and want out of your recruiting process, it will make it easier to determine the technology to get so you make the best decision for your company.