Mark J Stephens
CEO, Smart Recruit Online
In an ever-evolving job market, recruitment is a continually moving beast. Both recruitment companies and HR departments are always on the lookout for the best new talent.
With recruitment software on board, your company can automate many hiring processes and thus spend time handling more challenging tasks. In this article of leader stories, we have Mark Stephens CEO at Smart Recruit Online sharing his thoughts on recruitment and talent acquisition via evidence-based approach.
When questioned, how he was attracted to this business,Marks says, It was a natural evolution for him. Over a 20 year period he moved from the traditional agency, executive search environment into a fixed price recruitment model and then into recruitment technology development. The technology environment gives him the opportunity to develop real life solutions to everyday recruitment problems. Mark states that, They use an evidence-based approach to help businesses to hire staff more efficiently, more effectively and always at the lowest possible cost to the recruiter.
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The Funding Challenge
The biggest challenge facing any technology entrepreneur at the start is probably funding and it was the same for Mark also. He states that, unless you’re remarkably lucky and the cash flows in straight away, either from sales or investors, then the money is going to be an issue sooner rather than later.
He agrees, that when cash flow issues hit a start-up, they can hit hard, delaying important progress like rolling out new products, hiring key staff, or fitting new offices. You’ll need capital to fund software or product development, office space, marketing, and more. Most of your success will flow from that initial investment.
So even though it might seem counter-intuitive when you’re trying to minimize financial risk at the beginning, the last thing a start-up needs is to trim back costs (and shed staff) in its early days, just when it needs to be focusing its energies elsewhere.He concludes that the funding challenge is ever-present as you look to continually scale up.
Evidence Based Approach
Mark says, He sees many companies making poor or uneducated decisions about the tools and processes that they deploy. The recruitment lifecycle consists of multiple touchpoints between the recruiter and prospective employee, where both parties can either gain or lose interest. An evidence-based approach to recruitment increases the probability of a positive outcome at each stage. The vast majority of recruitment does not adopt this approach to staffing, thus impacting the quality of the talent pool available to the recruiter in each campaign.
Birth of SRO
A customer that Mark worked with as a recruitment consultant wanted to bring their recruitment in-house to save money but found that the time-consuming aspect of recruitment, sourcing, screening and selection added considerably to their workload, so he offered to change the commercial model and run their recruitment on a fixed price basis. This worked very well for both the parties and SRO was born.
Predictive Matching
Mark believe’s that in the future a candidate will go to one place, enter their details and the system will be clever enough to drive a constant flow of suitable opportunities from all channels that it is integrated with (job boards, media, social media, referrals, careers pages, ATS systems etc). AI will ultimately enhance this process and enable more intelligent predictive matching. It will be exactly the same for the recruiter, who will enter the relevant details about the opportunity into a single system and suitable applicants will be matched automatically based on a holistic range of criteria.
Features for the recruitment market
There are multiple features at every stage of the recruitment lifecycle within SRO. This is in addition to their unique evidence-based approach, extensive research into recruitment statistics and data and their deep understanding of human behavioral science. The SRO system centralizes all recruitment activities and connects all elements of the talent acquisition process from hi to hired, optimizing outcomes at every stage.