Talent acquisition operates at the speed of the market, so organizations must continually invest and innovate to ensure strategies and technologies match shifting candidate and business expectations. That’s where tech-enabled RPO comes in.
The newly reimagined Cielo TalentCloud is the RPO industry’s first future-proofed, global cloud-based platform, designed to deliver great experiences, elevate meaningful insights, and accelerate recruiting performance. With Cielo’s proven expertise in talent acquisition and technology, our platform will enhance your existing TA strategy and technology to create actionable results.
To offer you the most flexible and agile approach to achieve your hiring goals, Cielo TalentCloud is powered by SmartRecruiters’ market-leading workflow management, providing client partners with a process centered on creating the best experiences for talent acquisition leaders, candidates and hiring managers.
In celebration of this groundbreaking partnership, Sue Marks, Cielo Founder & CEO, joined Jerome Ternynck, SmartRecruiters Founder & CEO, via LinkedIn Live to answer a few questions about tech-enabled RPO and what this new partnership means for the future of talent acquisition. Watch her interview or read an abbreviated version below.
Why did Cielo & SmartRecruiters decide to partner together?
About two years ago, we spent time asking ourselves, our clients and many other experts in the broad HR & HR tech space what the future could and really should look like. Think about the typical consumer buying process and experience – I can purchase shoes on my mobile in under 60 seconds. Compare that to most recruiting processes, and well, there is no comparison.
That line of thinking led us to reimagine our TA delivery models – and I say “models” plural – because our clients need the flexibility in their technology platform to enable great recruitment. In reality, most organizations use less than half the functionality they buy and turnover in their departments actually degrades the overall experience of that technology platform.
Then I think of Steve Jobs and his very famous product launches. He did not say “this iPod was this many inches by this many inches.” He said, “It is 40,000 songs in your pocket.” So, it is exactly why we are thrilled to partner with SmartRecruiters. They had that same vision – flexible workflows and the marketplace allows us to be just like today’s iPhone or Galaxy, a platform and over 600 apps that we can configure for our clients.
How is this partnership going to help empower TA leaders?
There has been a lot of accelerated change because of the last year. If you are a TA leader or anybody in business, your CEO and boards are talking about needing to be agile, adaptive and resilient. But most organizations have a mess of enterprise point or platform solutions. And of the billion dollars that have been invested in HR & HR tech over the last year or so, two-thirds are going to sales and marketing departments that are telling every TA leader that the next best thing is their “AI-powered [insert product here]” and it is “the most important thing they are going to buy in the next year.”
Working with SmartRecruiters, we actually pull it all together in one neat integrated package that actually delivers what it promises: a seamless experience for candidates, hiring managers, recruiters, and TA & HR leaders. So, between Cielo and SmartRecruiters we really deliver that flexibility, integration, configurability, scalability, ease of use, reliability and speed that our customers are looking for.
What are you most looking forward to in this partnership?
One of Josh Bersin’s recent reports says 32% of HR tech projects go significantly over budget, 53% miss implementation deadlines, and 42% were rated as not fully successful or failed. What we do is hard, and organizational change is hard. We have experienced this and that is the benefit of this partnership for all of our clients: that we have solved for these speed bumps before. SmartRecruiters brings the technology and we bring the global expertise and the execution to our RPO partners.
What is TA’s biggest challenge in today’s dynamic environment?
Recruiting is a team sport. Great organizations know that recruiting is everyone’s job. Everybody talks that talk, but very few really walk the walk. That is why we need internal contracts that hold TA accountable for performance indicators like time to slate and hold hiring managers to response times. The best organizations really have teamwork.
To get to this, you have to have courage, conviction and the ability to have some tough conversations around setting a vision for why this teamwork and alignment is important. You need leadership and sponsorship because today’s market requires speed and flexibility above anything else. Most organizations do not change very quickly, so we have to make sure we have strong business acumen and both internal and external marketing expertise to make the business case. We have to have the organizational support and power to push lasting change through so the organization is truly positioned to attract the talent it needs.
We need to be thinking about more than ever, speed and flexibility – because employee experience, inclusion, engagement and belonging have become so much more important over the last year. We have learned what we have been missing and when we talk about getting “back to normal,” many of us think there was a lot of the “old normal” that we do not want to go back to. So, when I think about challenges, I think about that talent value chain. I am old enough to remember when wellness was an employee benefit. In the new world, the best companies will see well-being as a facilitator and an accelerator of business performance.
What new TA tech or innovation excites you most?
All of these technologies are only effective when they make us better at what we do and allow us that people-to-people exchange that is so important to engagement. Recruiting starts with engaging candidates. You can find everybody nowadays, but you must engage people in your vision for your organization and why they should join the team. There is also a risk of AI and other run-in-the-background algorithms, that they will project negative impact on diversity in the future.
I have always believed we hire a whole person, not a person eight hours a day. This move to create more meaningful work, to support more insightful management practices, to make belonging and well-being not just organizational goals but organizational reality: we can use employee listening to make sure that we get there, that it fits in the HR tech or work tech platform of the future. I think meaningful work in an organization with an aspirational vision is what matters to most people and the best talent. While we are not always going to be in the kind of war on talent that we are in right now, there will always be a war for the best talent. With the partnership between Cielo and SmartRecruiters, we are here to make sure our clients get more than their fair share of that best talent.
Together, Cielo and SmartRecruiters will help you source and retain the top talent that your business needs to be successful. Learn more about Cielo TalentCloud and what tech-enabled RPO can do for your organization.
From market planning and candidate generation to technology adoption and data analytics, we can help you get the most from every aspect of your talent acquisition strategy.
