Recently, Lorien’s Director of Solutions & Insight Darren Topping held a round-table with a focus on how HR and talent acquisition can harness the power of technology platforms to enhance their operations. Darren was joined by experts from across industry, including Spencer Hurley, Resourcing Leader from Nationwide Building Society, Adam Gordon, Founder and VP of CandidateID, Hayley Bakker Co-Founder of Diversely, Jason Kennedy, Director of Digital Commerce and Innovation from Impellam Group and Toby Heales, Sales Manager from Adway.

Below are our top five takeaways from what was an excellent discussion, and you can watch the roundtable full here.

1. Leveraging technology without losing the human touch

Many people feel that technology can sometimes blunt the human element of hiring and people operations, but, in reality, they go hand-in-hand. Technology makes it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to do the right thing for candidates and enhance the candidate experience through making it easier to communicate, keep candidates and hiring managers in the loop and remove bias from the process. Tech and AI should not be used to replace decisions but should be used to support TA teams in improving the candidate experience. The use of tech allows TA to have more quality time with candidates.

2. What should you ask a prospective technology partner?

Firstly, you need to know what you’re trying to solve by looking for a technology partner. Once you understand what you need to solve you can then focus your assessment of your prospective partners on how they can help you tackle your specific needs.

You should also ensure that you know how the partner will help you to demonstrate the business value and the benefits of adopting their solution. How does any solution that you implement help you to demonstrate that it is actually achieving your initial objectives? Data, analytics, and reporting set out from the beginning of your agreement will help ensure the solution remains measurable.

Another key question for potential tech partners is regarding their own team retention, performance, and diversity. This will provide you with a useful barometer of whether the organisation you could be working with is one that co-ordinates with your values and ethics. For example, if a potential tech partner does not prioritise or have regard for diversity and inclusion, then they are likely not a partner that you would choose to work alongside.

3. Larger organisations can successfully work with smaller start-ups – and vice versa

Being in a true partnership with a tech provider may mean that you have influence in how the tech product develops and help shape how the product solves some of the more technical requirements that organisations can have. Organisations who choose to work with newer tech providers often do so as they like to work with providers who can add value quickly through additional agility. If you’re an early adopter of a new technology and working with a start or scale-up, ensure that you know exactly what you want to achieve – why this partner is the right one for you, what value the partner can provide and ensure that they can truly support you in driving the outcomes you are looking for.

The ideal partnership is based around clarity and on HR & TA articulating what they specifically want to achieve with a particular technology adoption. Working closely with a tech partner to define what you want to build on and improve at an early stage allows it to become measurable so you can have a feedback loop and demonstrate the value generated for both parties.

4. Is there such a thing as too much integration?

Where you are an organisation with a large tech stack in HR / TA, it’s good to look at what you are trying to achieve. Which systems and endpoints are relevant? Who are the key users and what do they need to be able to action? From there, you can customise and make decisions on integrations based on users’ specific needs rather than integrating everything for everyone.

There should also be a focus on effort versus reward. For example, if you’re going to achieve a minor improvement in performance by integrating systems, but it is costly or involves lengthy timescales that ties up resource, then it’s not particularly worthwhile. There are a lot of different ways of utilising other tech, tools, and workarounds – sometimes integration is overemphasised.

5. The future of tech and the recruitment process

All of our industry experts came to the same conclusion here – That technology platforms and tools can and should be an essential part of HR & TA, but only where solution benefits and needs can be fully scoped. As the space continues to grow and create new solutions, the human-touch in hiring has never been more essential and technology should help enhance and provide more time for human interaction rather than replace it. Our panellists agreed that there is space for candidate assessment platforms to continue to focus on inclusivity, and also much more space for technology to offer a personalised experience of candidates through focussing on each individuals needs and sentiment around the hiring process.

If you would like to find out more about how Lorien can help you define your recruitment technology needs, or if you would like to understand how our managed solutions offer technology as part of an overall hiring solution, please contact solutions@lorienglobal.com. We value your feedback as always, so please do let us know what you thought of our roundtable.