Recruitment software can make hiring faster and cheaper… but is it better?

Faster, cheaper, better.

That’s the three-pronged promise of digital transformation in recruitment, but the truth is that many solutions fail to deliver a return on investment across all three areas.

Many of the recruitment software packages that recruiters have invested in such as applicant tracking systems (ATS), automated job placement tools, and candidate relationship management (CRM), certainly make hiring faster and cheaper… but not better.

The problem, according to AbilityMap Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer Kevin Chandler, is that a failure to make hiring better undoes any tech-driven advantages in speed and affordability.

“It may be cheaper and faster to hire someone using digital tools, but if that person turns out to be an unsuccessful placement, those gains will rapidly disappear,” he says. “Think about the opportunity costs of having an unproductive new hire in an important role, and the client’s recruitment costs – both in time and money – involved in replacing that person.” 

Research has shown that the cost of replacing an employee can range from 30% to 150% of their annual salary, depending on seniority. 

“If your recruitment tools make hiring faster and cheaper but fail to tick the ‘better’ box, then you’re simply not getting an ROI”, says Kevin.

But here’s the good news: hiring better doesn’t necessarily need to be slower or more expensive. In fact, “better” accelerates “faster” and “cheaper” because it improves the successful placement rate for recruiters and removes the wasted time and expense caused by poor hiring.

How to hire better

A typical modern hiring process leveraging a recruitment tech stack might look something like this:

After being briefed by a client, a recruiter writes a job ad and uses an ad-placement solution to quickly and cheaply place ads across thousands of job boards and social media platforms. Within days, hundreds of applications flood in, and the recruiter uses the resumé screening capability built into their applicant tracking system to screen for keywords and create a shortlist. Time-to-hire and cost-to-hire are further shortened with tools such as automated interview scheduling and automated candidate messaging.

So far, they’ve managed the process in a way that is fast and cheap, but what about quality? Screening by keywords is a hit-and-miss approach that risks discarding top talent, and you may end up with a shortlist of 10 candidates who are great at packing keywords into their cover letters, but not so great at their chosen profession.

“This is why we’re still seeing businesses with a third of their workforce underperforming, despite recruiters leveraging all these whiz-bang tools”, says Kevin.

The missing puzzle-piece

The missing piece of the puzzle is, of course, an evaluation process that ranks candidates against critical measures that drive high performance in the role.

“Say you receive 900 applicants”, says Kevin, “and you use an ATS to screen them down to a shortlist of 10. What about the other 890 candidates? What if you’ve missed out on a potentially brilliant hire just because they didn’t use the right keyword?”

With AbilityMap, every candidate that completes our imprint is ranked from highest to lowest-fit against a capability framework specific to the role. Recruiters then save a lot of time by choosing candidates from the top of the list with the confidence that they have the skills required for the role.

“It’s a no-brainer”, says Kevin. “Recruiters save time by presenting the 5, 10, or 20 highest-ranked candidates to the client without the need for going through 900 resumés.”

In other words, it’s faster, it identifies better candidates, and (because the evidence-backed placement is more likely to be a success), it’s cheaper. AbilityMap’s science-based evaluation process works alongside other tools in the recruitment stack to optimise the overall technology investment.

Hire faster, cheaper and better with AbilityMap

If you can’t nail “better”, you’re undoing the gains technology has given you in terms of time- and cost-to-hire. Contact AbilityMap today to start hiring better.

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