10 Technology
It is almost axiomatic these days to say that technology is a driver of business success. Yet many in staffing still struggle to get a foothold in the fast-changing information technology landscape.
“People have been reluctant to dive into it. Technology is perceived as having a big price tag. It’s seen as being big and messy and challenging,” says Brian Delle Donne, president of Talent Tech Labs, a research firm specializing in analyzing talent technologies that solve operational and recruiting challenges. To help staffing firms chart a path, Talent Tech Labs partnered with ASA to build its Staffing Tech Center.
For those ready to embark on the journey, Delle Donne says, it’s helpful to begin by looking at tech uses in a broader context. “It can start with what people see and use in their personal lives. The convenience and the capabilities that they see there can drive changes within the enterprise,” he explains. “If you want to book a reservation in a restaurant, it takes three clicks. When staffing industry people see that, it becomes a driver. But you have to be open minded, you have to be willing to examine these things.”
To best explore the wide range of emerging tech offerings, it makes sense to start by thinking about the user experience. “When you think about the candidate experience, what do they need as someone seeking a job? You have to think about the recruiters, too, and their specific challenges,” says Delle Donne. For each potential technology solution, “you have to ask: Does this make the user experience better or worse?”
Much of the current talk about technology has to do with automation, and Delle Donne urges staffing executives to tread thoughtfully here. “You need to automate while still being personalized. If you want to run a mass campaign to nurses, you can personalize that if you can segment out the ones who like to travel, or the ones who like to work in a nursing home as opposed to an emergency room. You have a lot of data on these people and you can use that to serve up automated correspondence that still conforms to what they want to know about.”
While this may require some finesse, it’s ultimately worth the effort. “You can use technology to remove friction anywhere across the system,” says Delle Donne. “It’s all about streamlining, making things convenient, and robotically processing things that are mundane and time consuming and repetitive.”
