While recruiters and hiring managers disagree when it comes to performance perceptions and onboarding needs, they agree that talent acquisition technology could use an upgrade.
According to a report released by RPO provider Orion Novotus and HRO Today, recruiters expressed low levels of satisfaction with five aspects of the tools and technology they use: offer delivery and new hire processing technology, screening for skills, CRM, candidate sourcing and pre-labor behavioral assessments.
Satisfaction was also low for applicant tracking systems: Barely 14 percent of recruiters were “very satisfied” with theirs, compared to 25 percent of hiring managers, the report—titled HR and Hiring Managers: Where They Differ and Agree on TA Performance—said.
While both groups say that the labor market is exceptionally challenging, recruiters underestimated hiring managers’ perceptions of the TA process and their satisfaction with it. While hiring managers feel good about the process overall, about 40 percent said they were “very satisfied” with TA support.
Cory Kruse, president of Cary, N.C.-based Orion Novotus, said that while collaboration between recruiting and hiring managers “is the lynchpin of successful talent acquisition,” the survey revealed that both groups are not always on the same page about critical parts of the TA process.”
Communications could play a big part in closing the gaps, Kruse suggested. He predicted sourcing challenges will only increase and said HR and hiring managers must have the proper tools and strategies in place if they’re to succeed in identifying and acquiring the best candidates for each role.
Elliot Clark, CEO and chairman of SharedXpertise, which publishes HRO Today, said he was encouraged by the level of satisfaction among hiring managers when it comes to HR and the TA process. Like Kruse, he believes the key to improving their satisfaction is for recruiters to “communicate better, leverage better tools to find and present candidates, and improve their involvement with onboarding to increase retention and the success of the relationship.”
Not surprisingly, the tight labor market has exacerbated an already challenging environment when it comes to candidate quality and quantity. Both groups believe the applicant pool is tight for each position, with hiring managers rating their satisfaction at 3.93 and recruiters rating theirs at 3.09.
Onboarding: Who’s in Charge?
Just more than 42 percent of hiring managers said onboarding is mostly an HR function, while only 24 percent of recruiters agreed. Nearly 60 percent of recruiters believe each side is mutually accountable.
With that said, 86 percent of hiring managers agreed that “our onboarding process makes new hires feel they have everything they’ll need to succeed in their new role.” the groups’ responses differed greatly. Only 48 percent of recruiters felt the same way. That’s yet more evidence of a communications gap at work in the TA process.
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