The Buyer's Checklist to Talent Acquisition Platforms

Talent acquisition platforms are beneficial in helping businesses streamline and improve their recruitment process. But there are so many choices in the market and not all of them are made the same. It’s important that you find a talent acquisition platform that’s right for you and your business — i.e. has features that suit your needs and preferences. 

When investing in a talent acquisition platform for your business, you need to take a couple of things into consideration. We lay them all down in this article. 

Define Core Capabilities 

Ask yourself what capacities your talent acquisition platform should have to meet your business needs and find candidates that are suitable for your company. Different businesses spanning different industries will have unique needs when it comes to hiring and prefer unique processes to yield the best and most suitable candidate. Your talent acquisition platform should be able to reflect and provide these needs. 

Make sure that the talent acquisition platform you are considering to use have the following features: 

• Sourcing candidates 

• Filtering 

• Confidential profile capabilities

• Pipelining and tracking 

• Talent pooling, grouping 

• Tags 

• Identification and matching of candidates profiles 

• Data cleansing, standardization, enrichment, analysis 

• Advanced analysis 

• Integrations 

• Career site functionalities 

• Events 

• Conversion

• Email Campaigns

• Recruiting activities and reporting

Look for Enhancing Features 

Aside from the core features above, your business may need a couple more functionalities from your talent acquisition platforms to suit your needs. The platforms available in the market would offer advanced enhancements, but before you get blinded by shiny new features, make sure to ask yourself what you really need. These questions are critical to answer: 

• Why is this enhancing feature valuable for me and the recruitment team? 

• What do these features do and what do their outputs look like? 

• Do these features require additional technical setup or data quality before I can use them? 

Some enhancing features that talent acquisition platforms would have include: 

• Productivity and speed, i.e. browser extensions, bulk actions, customs fields, automated workflows, triggered workflows 

• Data quality and accessibility, i.e. performing searches, data enrichment, record deduplication

• Decision assistance, i.e. A/B testing, AI suggestions, scoring

• Mobile enablement 

Ascertain the Tech Reliability 

Software platforms are technical in nature, and when investing in one for your business, you need to make sure that you can handle the technicalities that come with it. Ideally, you should identify how reliable the platform is and whether it is quick, modern, and secure. Take these factors into consideration: 

• Security and confidentiality 

• Permission levels 

• Industry security compliance

• Global data protection compliance 

• International data compliance 

• Architecture 

• Scalability 

Study the Business Behind the Platform 

It’s not only the platform itself that you should be paying a close eye to. You should also consider the business behind it. This will help you identify how effective your relationship with them will be, predict future innovations, assess their capacities and practices, etc. When investigating the company behind your talent acquisition platform, take these things into consideration: 

• Talent acquisition strategy 

• Consulting services 

• Campaign development and design

• Industry data and insights 

• Partnerships with providers

• Visibility and communication

• Customer references

• Case studies

• Other services

When choosing a talent acquisition platform for your business’ recruitment process, make sure that you are making a smart and informed decision. Do your diligence by investigating the platform and the company behind it and use our checklist to identify the important features a talent acquisition platform should have. 

With these, you’ll be able to select the software that meets your business needs and helps you thrive in your journey towards finding the most suitable candidate to fill your open positions and help your business grow.