Nowadays, we are facing the new digital ecosystem since the media landscape is more fragmented than ever before, explosion of channels (web, blogs, RSS, instant messaging…), boom of connected devices (iPhone, video games…), the consumer is now always-on, immersed in a digital pool growing every day, and the candidates are now in control of communication and trusts more his friends and relatives than traditional advertising when it comes to decision purchase.
Accordingly, in the recruitment industry, we see job portals still lead the way but they see the rise of new niche actors. Meanwhile, the traditional players also face the threat of B2B social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing… and many others. User-generated content impacts the reputation of your company and its attractiveness as work place like google always does. Recruitment is getting more social to track talent and attract the right profiles.
Therefore, online recruitment is more than online job postings, and recruitment technology is more than applicant tracking system (ATS). Beyond the ATS, along with the web 2.0 technology coming in vogue in China, we should also look at new approaches in online recruitment, including social networking, RSS job feeds, job aggregator web sites and web-powered referral programs, ect. In that way, your company’s ATS should be not only for processing applications, scheduling interviews, and sending rejection letters automatically and so forth, but also with the talent community concept and functionalities, which means it should be an organized group (database/website) of individuals where employers can interact with current and future prospective employees, communicate currently active or future job opportunities, candidates are proactively aware of the best possible opportunities to maximize their careers based on their specific skills and interests ( Automatic skill matching with candidates’ preferred jobs), and they might interact with each others for sharing and learning resources. All of us might evidence linkedin’s expansion to recruitment market and also we see there are many successful cases. The social/talent community methodology is the fundamental principle to ensure we could source qualified and up-to-date profiles from it. But most of recruitment professionals regard it as sourcing channels rather than ATS since linkedin’s recruitment solution has quite many limitations itself compared with ATS and vice versa. Then, the idea might come to your mind, why don’t we have a recruitment technology solution which combines ATS and more or less talent community functionalities. In another word, if we say candidate relationship management as the key value provided by a talent community, then, should we upgrade our ATS to ATS + CRM? If in that way, corporate recruitment professionals or recruitment technology providers should reengineer current platform to integrate those two into one seamless platform. Once that, applicants won't die any more in your recruitment system.
