How to choose the best recruiting solution for the first time buyer
B u y e r ’s G u i d e :
2
In today’s talent-driven economy, your employees are your biggest competitive advantage.
Hiring the right talent with the right skills is a key component to your business success.
However, thanks in part to a globally evolving job market and the demand for new skills,
organizations are struggling to fill existing openings while planning for future needs.
According a recent Manpower report 45% of companies globally indicated they were
having difficulties filling open positions1. Weather your organizations has just a few
openings or a few hundred chances are you have experienced difficulties meeting the
hiring needs of your business.
Recruiters are battling for efficiency and quality, tasked with tracking and managing
hundreds of candidates through the hiring process with little or no automation.
While today’s Candidates are looking for a high touch, easy to use experience that provide
them both a sense of fairness and transparency throughout. If your recruiting process
fail to meet their expectations the impact can be massive. In fact, according to the Talent
Board whose primary research focus is candidate and employee experience the impact
can be massive.
Why recruiting matters
of candidates who believe they have had
a “negative” overall job seeker experience
say they will take their alliance, product
purchases and relationship somewhere
else, an increase of 7% from 20162.
Increasingly organization are turning to technology in order help recruiters make faster,
more informed hiring decisions, while delivering the experience candidates expect. If you
recognize that you need help streamlining and automating your recruiting process, then
it’s time to start exploring software options.
3
Recruiting technologyStand-alone conventional software solutions treat recruiting as a separate process from
the rest of your talent management processes. The Cornerstone Recruiting Suite is
designed to deliver a seamless experience from recruiting to onboarding and beyond.
With Cornerstone’s Unified Talent Management System Recruiters have increased visibility
into internal talent pools, allowing them to make faster more informed decisions while
fostering greater internal mobility.
We define Talent acquisition as “a strategic approach to identifying, attracting and
onboarding top talent to efficiently and effectively meet dynamic business needs.”
What is an applicant tracking system (ATS)? An ATS centralizes the recruiting process. With this technology, you can reduce time
spent on manual processes, improve collaboration, and make smarter hiring decisions.
What is onboarding software?Onboarding software is a technology solution that facilitates a new hire’s or seasoned
employee’s transition into a new role. With tools that make it easy to track the progress
of each hire through the onboarding process, collect critical employee information,
and route important forms, onboarding solutions improve efficiency and standardize
onboarding processes. It allows organizations to provide a personalized experience
and ensures new hires have everything they need to be prepared for their new role
even before day one. With this technology, you can engage employees faster, ensure
compliance, and accelerate a new hire’s time to productivity.
4
The first step in the search for new technology is deciding what you need in your recruiting
and onboarding processes. Start by auditing existing processes and documenting all steps
and interactions. To determine your organization’s needs, you’ll want to identify problems,
limitations, and pain points within your organization, and determine how these processes
can be improved. Common pain points in companies without recruiting software are:
• Clunky or overly complex
application process
• Inefficient processes or lack of
standardized processes
• No way to measure and track
important recruiting metrics
• Giving feedback on candidates
is cumbersome
• Compiling interviewer’s feedback
is time consuming
• Internal candidates don’t have visibility
into open positions
• Interviews are difficult and time
consuming to schedule
• Lack of a centralized database of
employee information
• New hires do not receive the necessary
forms they need to fill out
• Lack of a secure place to store critical
employee information
Once you have clearly defined your current processes, determine your organization’s long-
term goals and think about how this solution can help improve those processes and help
you achieve those goals. Analyze what doesn’t work about your current manual processes
and develop a detailed list of problems you’re looking to solve. This will help you decide
what functions you are looking for in a new software. Then prioritize business needs by
determining which features you absolutely need to have and which features you would like
to have. For example, if your organization is looking to improve efficiency by eliminating
manual processes, then you will have automation as a mission-critical feature.
1Understand your needs
5
One key part of the buying process is securing buy-in from company leadership and key
stakeholders. You will likely have multiple stakeholders with their own objectives that are
important to them. Below is a framework to help you put together a business case for
purchasing and implementing recruiting software.
Identify business objectivesYour organization may have a set an objective to increase hiring over the next year, or
perhaps it’s to reduce the use of third party recruiters. Whatever your organization’s
high level objectives, it is important to identify them so that you can understand how
recruiting software will help you achieve them. Make sure you understand exactly what
your organization is looking to achieve and what the key success measures will be.
Demonstrate pain pointsLeadership and key stakeholders probably don’t know your pain points and how a lack of
recruiting software is hindering the organization from meeting its recruiting objectives.
You will need to demonstrate how your current processes aren’t supporting company
success. Some key problems of hiring without recruiting software are:
MANUAL, TIME-INTENSIVE PROCESSES
• Considerable time lost to manual processes
• Inconsistent processes lead to inefficiencies
• Cost of losing good candidates to long hiring process
• Poor new hire onboarding experience
2 Build a business case for new recruiting software
6
INEFFECTIVENESS IN ATTRACTING AND HIRING TOP CANDIDATES
• Poor employer brand and candidate experience drives down applications
• Inability to close top candidates with long and cumbersome recruiting process
• Complex application process
LACK OF VISIBILITY AND COLLABORATION
• Disparate processes with no centralized view into the entire process
• Lack of centralized database of employee information
• Compiling feedback is time-consuming
Prove ROIFinally, explain how recruiting software works and how it will improve each of your
organization’s pain points. You will need to prove that implementing recruiting
software provides a holistic value to the company. Top benefits of implementing an
ATS and onboarding solutions are:
STREAMLINE YOUR RECRUITING PROCESSES
• Decrease requisition process time
• Better candidate communication
• Reduces administrative burden and manual tasks
IMPROVE HIRING TEAM COLLABORATION
• Interview scheduling makes scheduling interviews painless
• Interview scorecards and guides standardizes interviews and feedback
• Feedback is collected in one place
BETTER CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE AND STRONGER EMPLOYER BRAND
• Create personalized and targeted career sites
• Engaging and painless application process
• Improve candidate communication
7
When identifying a solution to meet your unique recruiting needs organizations should
consider their entire recruiting lifecycle from Attracting, Engaging and Screening talent
to Hiring’s and Onboarding.
AttractSOURCING
• Easily create job ads and distribute them
• Ability to post jobs to internal employees
• Seamless experience for posting jobs on third-party job boards and social media
• Manage campus events
CANDIDATE RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)
• Ability to track and manage passive candidates.
• Ability to mass email passive candidates.
• Ability to Integrate with 3rd party CRM solutions
EMPLOYEE REFERRAL MANAGEMENT
• Advertise eligible openings to existing employees
• Real time referral tracking
• Payout management
3 Know what to look for
8
EngageCAREER SITE
• Branded, configurable career site that allows you to showcase your
organization’s culture with interactive media, messages, and resources.
• Ability to create multiple candidate landing pages based on audience.
• Share Social channels
• Candidates can search, browse, and apply using any device
• Easy and simple application process
• Candidates can create profiles to manage their applications
• Candidates can save progress
• Candidates can apply quickly using LinkedIn and Seek
ScreenPRE-SCREENING
• Ability to configure candidate pre screening questions
• Ability to integrate with 3rd party assessment providers as needed
• Ability to search and tag candidates system wide based on a variety
of criteria
INTERVIEWING
• Schedule interviews
• Outlook Integration
• Video Interviewing
HireWORKFLOW MANAGEMENT AND AUTOMATION
• Easily track and manage all job openings and postings
• Provide visibility into the entire hiring process
• Supports multiple configurable hiring workflows
• Generate, track, and manage offer letters
• Engage hiring managers and track feedback
• Background Screening Integration
• WOTC (Work Opportunity Tax Credit) Information
Onboarding• Automate forms and document routing, tracking, and storage
• Branded, personalized onboarding pages with interactive media,
messages, and resources
• Employee pre-boarding
• I-9 & E-verify integration
• W-4 integration
• Socialize new employees
• Integrate with learning management
Reporting and dashboards• Track and visualize key talent acquisition metrics
• Gain insight into your hiring process
• Create custom reports
• Use out of the box reports
Security and infrastructure• Role based security
• OFCCP Compliance
• EEO
• GDRP
9
After speaking to some vendors and testing their solution, you’ve likely narrowed your
list down to a few providers. Before choosing your winner and signing a contract,
research the vendor themselves. Look at product reviews on directory sites like Software
Advice and Capterra. Be sure to also ask to connect with references from the vendors
themselves. Hearing feedback from someone outside the vendor’s organization ensures
you get a better understanding of how the system performs and how it could benefit
your organization.
Once you’ve set up time with current customers, make sure you ask questions that will
provide the best insight into the factors that will influence your decision. Don’t be afraid
to ask difficult questions to make sure you pick the recruiting software that best fits your
needs. Consider some of the questions below:
1. What were your primary business needs and what made you choose this solution
over others?
2. Are you satisfied with the solution? Has it met your expectations?
3. Do you have the ability to make self-administered configurations to fit your
specific processes?
4. Do you anticipate that the system will be able to accommodate your business as it grows?
5. How has the software made your recruiting and onboarding processes more efficient?
Has it improved things like time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, and time-to-productivity?
6. Have you seen an improvement in time-to-productivity or day one readiness in
new hires?
7. In what ways has moving to a recruiting software improved your recruiting and
onboarding processes?
8. What is an area do you wish the software handled better?
9. Can you tell me about your experience with implementation and support?
4 Connect with customer references
© 2018 Cornerstone OnDemand | [email protected] | 888-365-CSOD Stay connected:
Cornerstone OnDemand is the global talent management software provider that is pioneering solutions to help organizations realize the potential of the modern workforce. csod.com
Once you’ve narrowed down your search, it’s time to choose the solution you think will
bring the most value to your organization.
Many organizations, just like yours, are using Cornerstone Recruiting Suite to streamline
and automate their recruiting and onboarding processes to attract, hire, and retain top
talent. Designed for the complexities of today’s hiring needs, Cornerstone provides the
tools you need to elevate your brand and deliver a positive candidate experience, reach
all talent, and help the entire hiring team make faster and smarter decisions.
If you’re in the market for a new recruiting software, please check out Cornerstone Recruiting Suite. Feel free to contact us. We’d love to show you how Cornerstone can help you optimize your recruiting processes!
5 Choose your winner
1. Solving the Talent Shortage: Build, Buy, Borrow and Bridge, Manpower Group. 2018. 2. Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research Report, Talent Board. 2017.