Two days ago we attended the In-house Recruitment (IHR) Live industry event in Manchester. As it was our second ever in-person event, we were ecstatic about being given a stand next to some of our industry’s old guard (and some new!).
Rob was also given the opportunity to discuss the growing tech space within our industry, and neatly rounded off our day with a talk titled “Recruiting the perfect tech stack” (we will find some time to put a summary of this online, because it’s full of great advice on how to formulate a tech strategy).
All in all it was everything and more that we could’ve expected the day to be: full of some amazing recruitment visionaries, stocked full of great guests and a wonderful opportunity for us to introduce our (relatively) new product to the in-house recruitment market.
Like many other stand owners on the day, having a few hours to talk shop with such a variety of guests gave us pause for thought. Conversation ebbed and flowed between candidate shortages and modern candidate management to tech, UI/UX, recruitment philosophies and more. It was a veritable melting pot of industry veterans and brilliant recruitment teams.
So we thought we’d summarise our own takeaways from the event, and translate nearly 9 hours of chat into 5 distinct points of industry review:
We are a known unknown!
Rectec is a fast-growing startup. We’re confident we have a product that can deliver a unique ATS comparison service, and we know (from months of rapid uptake from vendors and customers) our platform works smoothly and efficiently.
We were surrounded by some of the most well known and established recruiting, job board and tech brands in our field… but we felt fully at home. This (we like to think) is because we offer something understood and relatable to those who are on a digital journey. Which, on reflection, is pretty much everyone.
Despite many visitors to our stand meeting us for the first time, communicating what we do wasn’t hard – if anything, we operated in a sort of known unknown space – the principle and premise of Rectec was understood, yet many people had yet to try our platform!
Events still matter
Meeting some of our vendors and a lot of interested parties in real time, face to face, was taking a little slice out of the traditional recruitment handbook – putting the personal relationship back in the business, and putting faces to names.
Although Rectec operates in the digital realm, the physical space is (on reflection) just as effective at communicating how unique our ATS and recruitment CRM comparison platform is. Being a plucky startup in that regard has it’s benefits – Rob, as founder, got to take people through the platform, explain his 15 year journey in recruitment and applicant tracking system integration and management, and the birth of Rectec, directly to our new community.
Events will continue to provide an immense, and immersive, amount of value in relationship building for us, long may they continue.
The in-house/agency parallels (especially in regards to candidate management)
Despite differences in workflow and service, the pressures felt in-house are absolutely paralleled in the agency space.
Being a cross-industry platform, Rectec have had countless conversations with every size of recruitment enterprise, from sole recruiter to national resourcing teams. The IHR event only further reinforced the need for services like Rectec and others to provide rapid, easy to use tools that make the entire recruitment process more efficient, more personable and more collaborative.
Candidate is still king…but there is a catch
While the market is almost entirely dominated by discussions around candidate attraction and management, there is a specific, niche catch – how and where to best engage them. There was a lot of meandering back and forth about employer branding and speed of recruitment…but the primary pain point was the place and manner of sourcing.
The conversation around which tech can best be applied to improve the candidate experience was frequent, but underpinning these topics of conversation was which tool works for certain industries, and how those tools work with that specific candidate base.
This only further enmeshed our view that our service is a really helpful channel for recruitment teams trying to find the right applicant tracking system for their candidates and their company. And for the ones who were still shopping for an ATS, they left understanding our ATS comparison service did all the work for them.
Tech may be the industry saviour…but again there is a catch
So while Rectec focuses (currently) on applicant tracking system and recruitment CRM comparison (alongside other consultancy and tender process services), the question on the lips of most stand visitors was “does your platform talk about or highlight integration applicability from your vendors?”
The answer is yes, of course, but the reason we bring this up is that as more and more tech/SaaS/cloud based services are brought into the recruitment environment ( or WorkTech Stack), the onus (especially for internal IT teams) is less on the overall effectiveness of the tool, but on the immediate integration of that tool with a growing roster of other tools, platforms, comms channels and tech. Although not the major pain point, it was very interesting to see again and again integration come up as one of the most important points of interest for ATS and recruitment CRM shoppers.
A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.
At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complimentary tech marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.
You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.