The Apply Chain

At the ERE Innovation Summit held in October of 2011, Doug Berg, Chief Recruiting Geek of SuccessFactors (formerly Jobs2web) gave a talk about Measuring Your Apply Chain.  In a world full of people chasing the next “shiny object”, this talk disrupted how Talent Acquisition leaders think about recruiting.  Doug will be digging into this topic into great detail in a webinar on January 31 – Click here to be a part of it!

What is the Apply Chain?

The Apply Chain is a system of technology, activities, people and metrics that move a candidate to become an applicant.  This can range from a candidate looking at your career site, to social media, to mobile recruiting, to email campaigns and job postings to name a few.  There are a lot of moving parts to the apply chain and being efficient is important.  In addition, the evolution of the recruiting marketplace moved from being Print based, to Requisition/Resume (aka Job Boards), to Search (think Google or a job aggregator like Indeed). Next, it’s going to a more Social/Relationship focus (Social Networks).

What’s wrong today?

Since there are many moving parts to the Apply Chain, it is very hard to measure what’s working and not working.  In addition, there are so many new tools and websites popping up today.  As a leader in Talent Acquisition, the challenge is how to take advantage and make them part of a cohesive strategy.  Too many companies are buying tools that focus only on one thing and are not integrated into the other parts of their apply chain.  Also, if your Apply Chain breaks down, what is your back-up plan? 

How do we fix the Apply Chain?

First of all, you need a system in place that measures all areas of the Apply Chain real time so you know exactly where it breaks down.  This system is known today as a Recruitment Marketing Platform.  The goal here is to get to the next level of data which is not being provided by your Applicant Tracking System.  Organizing data into intelligent Silos will allow an organization to better look at the effectiveness of each part of the Apply Chain.  There should be a Cross Silo Tracking Platform in place so you can add Business Intelligence tools behind the scenes to interpret the data to make future strategy decisions. As we move forward, there will be a number of new Recruiting Metrics we will need to track in order to keep up with the war for talent. 

On Tuesday, January 31, we will cover this and the Apply Chain and more - click here to join us!