Enhancing the Candidate and Client Experience With Technology

It’s an exciting time for anyone involved in talent acquisition. While recruitment at its core remains unchanged in its purpose to connect talent with opportunity, emerging technologies are fast-transforming the process, as noted in our Talent Advisory Survey, a benchmark study of the behaviors of high-performing organizations.

For example, surveyed hiring managers and talent acquisition professionals spend a bulk of their time on activities that automation could enhance. Specifically, 26% of organizational time is spent screening candidates for open positions and 18% is spent sourcing candidates for open positions. Leveraging digital sourcing channels and intelligently automating screening technology can reduce these parts of the process, freeing recruiters to spend more time investing in relationships and improving measurable outcomes.

Technology can also improve candidate communications. For example, two in three responding job candidates report having issues receiving communication from employers with whom they have applied for a job. Candidates want more interactions than most organizations can currently provide. Tasking recruiters to make personalized phone calls to every candidate at each stage of the recruitment process is unrealistic, particularly in large organizations. However, modern marketing automation technologies can digitally augment recruiters and ensure personalized communication where appropriate. Triggered by candidate behaviors and business workflows, communications can occur at the desired frequency and deliver a delighting candidate experience.

Furthermore, technology can progress decision making and drive higher ROI on recruitment processes, specifically as it pertains to analytics. High-performing recruitment organizations know that the proverbial wisdom rings true: “What gets measured gets done.” They are more likely to measure submittal-to-interview and interview-to-hire ratios, satisfaction ratings related to recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers, as well as ROI by sourcing channel. Advances in analytics and reporting are making measurement in these areas more accurate, relevant, and available than ever before.

How Allegis Group Approaches Technology

“As we partner with clients around the world to address their talent needs and challenges, Allegis Group has established a strategic approach to applying technology innovations to evolve talent processes and improve results,” says Executive Director of Corporate Strategy and Marketing Rachel Russell. “Being agile means we can embrace innovative thinking and empower change agents to positively shape our position as the global leader in talent solutions – all while fulfilling our mission to match great talent with great opportunity.”

So in line with the last trends reports from our innovation partner, Talent Tech Labs (TTL), we wanted to share a few of the ways Allegis Group is responding to emerging and disruptive industry trends to provide the absolute best service to our clients and candidates.

Mobile Matching Systems
Mobility is not an option but an imperative. Today’s recruitment teams are expected to provide a simplified, mobile-optimized process throughout the customer journey, particularly during the job search stage.

At Allegis Group, we understand the evolving expectations. Through our enterprise-wide product development group, known as “Connected,” we’ve achieved an unprecedented mobile footprint for front-office technologies, revolutionizing the customer experience by applying best-practice Agile processes to stay ahead of the innovation curve. For example, all of our branded career sites are mobile-responsive. We’re also enhancing the job seeker experience by expanding our mobile app capabilities.

“Because it can leverage capabilities such as access to contacts, push notifications, and geolocation to reduce manual input, mobile can make the application process frictionless without sacrificing the quality of the candidate pool,” says Allegis Group’s Product Owner – Customer Experience Derek Boyle. “We’re excited to pilot innovations and refine our strategy to ensure our mobile capabilities continue to deliver the high quality of talent our clients have come to expect.”  

Evolving Freelance & Temporary Labor Marketplaces
Interest continues to boom when it comes to leveraging new ways to manage a more flexible workforce, with some pundits suggesting that more than 40% of the American workforce, or 60 million people, will be independent workers by 2020.

As we partner with companies to develop and execute holistic talent strategies, the growing SOW and freelance worker pool is an important part of our approach. For example, our workforce management solutions company Allegis Global Solutions (AGS) is developing a platform to give organizations “Universal Access to all Forms of Talent to Get Work Done.” This platform, along with our consultative talent advisors, guides clients through a strategic assessment of their workforce needs to advise on the optimal work fulfillment /talent acquisition model – whether through employees, contractors, SOWs, permanent hires, or otherwise. The platform also aggregates all sources of supply, so the talent advisor can see who’s available in the client’s HR system, applicant tracking system, candidate talent pools, supplier pools, FMS, or another source, and improves matching relevancy regardless of the model tapped to fill that need.

“Gaining transparency and advice through a ‘one-stop-shop’ will showcase the best available talent pools and the most effective and efficient ways of getting work done,” adds AGS’ Head of Innovation Bruce Morton. “This technology as a true enabler shows massive promise.”

Integration with Inbound Marketing Tools and the CRM
Over the years, the integration between CRMs and advanced marketing software has become a competitive advantage for companies seeking to optimize the customer experience.

At Allegis Group, our Connected product suite strategy ensures all front-office technologies integrate seamlessly to optimize quality, time, and cost. Through our Automated Customer Experience (ACE) team, for example, we have mapped the client and contractor journey from the first point of interaction through ongoing engagement and are actively building out relevant, value-added experiences to enhance our personal connections. These experiences will leverage marketing automation software and social analytics tools to augment and enhance client and candidate communication – and will integrate all information about a client’s and candidate’s behaviors into the CRM systems. The result is a 360-degree view of our customers made possible through a richer experience with them.  

“Each day, multiple departments and roles across Allegis Group interact with our customers through a variety of channels,” says Allegis Group’s Product Owner – Customer Experience Andrew Wren. “The only way we can provide the consistently positive and transparent experience our customers demand is by ensuring alignment in the technologies used by the employees creating their experience. Internal technology alignment enables all of our employees to provide a unified experience externally no matter the channel in which we are interacting with our customers.”

Analytics-as-a-Service (Aaas)
As companies embark on digital transformation efforts and accumulate more and more data, IT systems are being built with open architectures, enabling easy access and cross-communication between applications to fuel superior business intelligence and analytics.

Allegis Group’s Data Science and Industry Analytics Team has been building capabilities to unlock the value of massive volumes of data across the Allegis Group network, as well as external sources. Their mission is to aggregate supply and demand into one global view and leverage AI to gain predictive insights about labor market dynamics. This team is also partnering with our ATS, Search, and CRM product teams to intuitively package insights for our customer-facing roles to use to enhance consultative relationships with our clients and consultants.

“Adding data points including sentiment analysis, best time-to-contact, and prioritization/automatic creation of opportunities will help us leverage prospects across our entire ecosystem without precluding us from pursuing other innovative pipelines,” says Allegis Group’s Director of Market Analytics Ron Hetrick.

Gamification
Gamification of desired behaviors has grown in popularity based on its effectiveness. Fun incentivizes getting work done. Recruitment teams are increasingly exploring the realm of gamification to drive sales and services activities, enhance their databases, and improve results.

At Allegis Group, we’re discussing plans to gamify our Talent Communities product within Connected to create a sense of belonging, encouraging our consultants to ask questions and find answers to each other’s inquiries. We’re also investigating ways to gamify the profile build of our consultants to ensure we have the most detailed and up-to-date information about them and can match them more intelligently to our available openings. Additionally, our staffing company Aerotek recently launched a Fantasy Football-styled gamification program across North America to drive increases in sales activity and placements during seasonal ebbs in their business cycles.

“We tapped into the competitive spirit of our employees to help them achieve success earlier in the year because we know a strong Q1 and Q2 leads to a successful year overall,” notes Aerotek’s Director of Experience and Technology Solutions Kelly Van Aken. “Bragging rights, prizes, and a trophy are on the line for our teams, but many are finding the biggest reward is the impact the competition is having on their personal business and most importantly those they serve.”

The results at Aerotek have been impressive with increased camaraderie among offices, regions, and divisions via weekly contests and in-office display of real-time results. Van Aken also points to other benefits including higher-quality data, better visibility into business development execution and requisition demand, and increased engagement.

Parting Thoughts

“Matching talent with opportunity remains our core mission, but how we do it will continue to evolve as we revolutionize the customer experience,” concludes Allegis Group Product Owner Stephen Hill, CSP. “We are making strategic investments in digital solutions, but the human touch remains our differentiator in helping businesses win and careers soar. Technology hasn’t changed our core mission; it’s just helped us raise the bar and deliver on our promise better than ever before.”