E-recruitment today and ten years ago
How was the situation ten years before today?
From the year 2005 on a formerly very fragmented market in the hand of specialists came into the focus of the major ERP makers as a new field of business: the HR software market. Web-based ATS were not very popular yet, most of the installations were „on premise“, i.e. hosted on the customers’ servers. Soon the first manufacturers realized how to read the signs of the times and started switching to SaaS. They integrated the first HR or ATS modules into their systems or acquired directly some specialized providers. Nowadays companies of all sizes have access to e-recruitment software to cover their application processes digitally and to become more efficient. But what happened in the meantime?
Major changes in e-recruitment
Naturally during the past decade there has happened a lot within the HR sector. The „online application“ via email existed already before. But the internet usage has become ubiquitous due to today’s high smartphone penetration and the related infrastructures. Topics like social and mobile recruitment are common for nowadays’ graduates from the generation of „digital natives“. Therefore these aspects preoccupy many companies who feel the „war of talents“ and strive to reach their candidates. The rising relevance of the „candidate experience“ means among other things that they have to present themselves on many channels in order to increase their reach and that they need to offer more interaction and dialogue to their applicants, e.g. via social media. Almost no company can afford anymore to lean back and wait for applications. Also the HR managers are nowadays technically much more experienced than a few years ago.
How do the manufacturers react?
In order to react at these developments e.g. SAP recently acquired the French supplier Multiposting, a specialist in multi-channel-posting of job advertisements. The question hereby arising is whether in this kind of merger the acquired specialist will become better or if it rather will adapt itself to the complex processes of the corporate group?
The specialists within the market for HR software, e.g. Unatrix, will continue to develop their solutions. This means they do what they can do best: refine the performance of their solutions in order to hit the needs of their target groups even better.
Megatrend SaaS
A major change in the market was initiated by the shift towards SaaS solutions. This development has remarkably accelerated the possibilities for the manufacturers to offer their clients a running solution. The rising interconnection and shift to web-based services enables and demands at the same time from the suppliers more networking among each other, e.g. within the creation of interfaces for strategic partnerships. In that matter, Unatrix is fostering the creation of such ecosystems: for instance, an XML interface with the Dutch specialist Textkernel has been built in order to integrate their CV parsing.
What does the future hold?
The job searchers from today will be among the HR experts of tomorrow
With the major manufacturers, we will have to see how they position themselves considering their thematic focus and acquisitions. The specialists will concentrate on further evolving their products and possibly capture trends as early as possible in order to continuously supply innovation. At the end of the day the job searchers from today will be among the HR experts of tomorrow. What will they expect from e-recruitment and HR systems one day?
Summary
In order to sum up: within the last decade there were many changes that were hard to preview. The big ERP suppliers have not considerably changed the market; the number of specialists keeps growing. The magic word for the smaller manufacturers is further networking in strategic partnerships in order to enhance their offer.