“Have you put that on the system yet?”
Guest post by Tim Parker, MD of our Main Sponsor, yu:talent
Throughout my recruitment career I would often hear managers asking consultants ‘have you put that on the system yet?’ often followed up with ‘why not?’. It seemed that ‘putting things on the system’ was rarely done as part of the flow of work – it would always be a set of tasks, a chore, an admin job.
But why is it the case that using recruitment IT software(whether a CRM or ATS) should be separate from the job itself? Why is it that there is this divide between doing the job, and working with data that in truth should speed up what you do rather than slow you down (or demand that you hire support staff).
The evolution of recruitment software has gone something like this:
- Hand written cards in a box, paper forms in a filing cabinet, fax for sending CVs and maybe one PC in the branch for mail merging a mail shot or printing that letter to slot in with the shiny brochure.
- Manually inputting candidate and client information into a computer system (creating a data entry task)
- Increasing scope of software capabilities aligned with increasing rate of ideas along the lines of ‘wouldn’t it be great if the system did this?’, causing an exponential increase in complexity of use as more and more things are added.
- Decreasing use of software by consultants or omission of data due to memory lapse, because using the system actually created a new set of tasks bolted onto the side of the recruitment consultants job.
In other words, individual use of ‘the system’ has declined as the number of features added to improve consultant efficiency has increased. The result has been no increase in efficiency for the high billers who choose to bypass their system duties to focus on the recruiting, and a decrease in efficiency for those who follow the rules and use ‘the system’ diligently.
Now let’s imagine you go to buy a new smart phone or excitedly walk into the phone store as free upgrade time roles around again. You look at the mock up phones attached to the wall in retractable wires and find the one you like. You take it home, give it a cursory charge and get playing.
What if when you turn that lovely new phone on you find you can’t move any of the apps round to personalise the it and make it work for you exactly as you want? What if you find the app store is bare of any new ones you imagined you could add? What if you find you can’t remove any of the apps you don’t like?
Arguably, you would push for the title of smartphone to be removed from this product. This isn’t what we expect from smartphone world.
Yet we have come to accept it in recruitment software world.
At yu:talent we believe that technology should bend to our needs, not the other way round.
So what if you had a CRM & ATS system that had a simple intuitive core, just like a smartphone. What if you could choose optional plug ins to activate as required for your business, just like apps?
What if those optional apps would continue to expand and grow in number, as the provider listened to you and the changing demands of your market?
At yu:talent, this is exactly what we believe a recruitment system should be – so that’s exactly what we’ve built.
Tim worked in the recruitment industry for 15 years prior to becoming one of the founders of @yutalent, the latter 12 of which spent at Search Consultancy. Having recruited across multiple sectors and disciplines, his mission is to channel that hands on experience into making yu:talent the optimum tool for the recruiter.