Where is the market for talent attraction and acquisition solutions?
The market for recruitment solutions, mainly ATS, is mature but is experiencing 4 changes:
Let's start with maturity. When I say "mature", we must understand that the solutions, by market category (entry-level, mid-range, world class) have functional and commercial offers that are quite close, if not similar. They are all SaaS, on proprietary code and hosted in the Cloud. Beyond 150 to 250 recruitments per year on average, organizations are equipped with ATS at more than 98%.
The cutting-edge solutions, specialists in talent acquisition, have all gained weight to meet the realities of multichannel recruitment (omnichannel). And to escape the trap of "commoditization", ATS tend to become "Talent Acquisition Suites", adding Talent Attraction and Onboarding of new employees at both ends of the recruitment process. For example, some of the assessment grids that I develop for my clients in a talent attraction and acquisition solution selection process can include 500 to 750 functional requirements, of which 100 to 150 may be emerging. A few years ago, autonomous online appointment scheduling was considered an “emerging” capability, therefore rarer and more selective on the ATS market. Today, this requirement is present in 100% of the offering of the Top 20 solutions on the global market.
The market is always adding new solutions with the capabilities offered by “low-code no-code” platforms, or also called “drag and drop”. They stand out for their price, proximity and above all simplicity. These micro-players are perfect for VSEs and SMEs that have low or random recruitment volumes and low maturity in recruitment processes.
And then, some small clients choose productivity and collaboration platforms like Monday or Notion. But it will never replace a professional ATS.
Note: This article was originally published in collaboration with the site Les Talents Narratifs, based on questions from Laurent Brouat. Find the original article here:
We can therefore classify the market for talent attraction and acquisition solutions (TaaS) into 8 segments:
Entry, mid and world-class corporate ATS,
Hourly Employee Recruiting Solution,
CRM-ATS (Candidate Relationship Management),
TAS (Talent Acquisition Suite) adding the Onboarding component here,
Integrated Talent Management Solution (the ATS solution is sometimes sold separately)
Talent Intelligence Platform (some make CRM-ATS and other Talent functionalities to implement a skills-based recruitment approach).
HCM Suite (the ATS solution is rarely sold separately)
ATS VMS (Vendor Management System). This last segment is dedicated to recruitment agencies. These solutions add customer account management, mandate management, invoicing, bonuses and even time capture functionalities for temporarily placed candidates, depending on the rate and the client.
Consult our HR TECH solutions Directory, filter with the segments indicated above to list the solutions analyzed including more than a hundred talent attraction and acquisition solutions in North America mainly:
Now let’s talk about these 4 changes in the talent attraction and acquisition solutions market:
When looking for talent attraction and acquisition solutions, most often a corporate ATS, clients want to add some of these four capabilities to match market realities and improve their recruiting efficiency.
1- Talent attraction: For 10 years, Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) features have promised to be prospect-centric and to attract passive candidates even better with the arsenal of relationship and content marketing (quick application, dynamic career pages, non-candidate capture, newsletter, communication segmentation, etc.). Talent marketing, multichannel recruiting and candidate relationship management now represent an average of 50% of recruiters' activities. If it is below that, the Recruitment team is most certainly too reactive and tactical, in an order-taking and ad model that is no longer adapted to a market of shortage and transformation of sought-after skills.
2- Automation and integrations: Among the most important native capabilities, it is worth noting the integrated communication center that is found in mid-range solutions to send and receive emails and text messages, directly from the solution. This allows for a single place of exchange and a shareable history between members of the recruitment team. In terms of integration, some customers appreciate partner marketplaces to complete the offer and, above all, simplify the ramp-up of the recruitment ecosystem with pre-programmed connectors maintained by publishers. This helps to build an architecture quickly, at a lower cost and, above all, without putting too much strain on IT teams who are mobilized on projects with a greater economic impact for the organization. This removes IT programmers from the equation and avoids undue delays. Partner solutions such as specific sourcing, online assessment and testing tools, asynchronous video interviews for mass recruitment and background check tools significantly reduce administrative and recruitment coordination tasks, in favor of interactions with clients and talents.
3- Sector expertise: This is especially true for decentralized, multi-site, geolocalized and multi-brand recruitment. These needs are found in distribution networks, franchises, multi-brand companies with a desire to offer inter-company mobility (hotels, restaurants, retail, transport, customer contact centers, rental agencies, etc.). In addition to this sector expertise, we must add the emergence of hourly employee recruitment solutions (Hourly Employee Recruiting). These solutions are based on mobile applications and are highly automated. They can reduce the cycle time for recruiting a handling agent to a few hours instead of a few days. This is a very specific need but corresponds to 45% to 50% of assets in Western countries, with a high turnover rate... It is to be considered in terms of volume and efficiency. I have clients who combine a corporate ATS and an Hourly Employee Recruiting solution.
4- Artificial Intelligence: AI Machine Learning or ML (such as Natural Language Processing, known as NLP) has existed for a long time in Resume Parsing, Scoring and Matching tools. In recent months, these features have made meteoric rises in quality. Generative AI emerged worldwide in November 2022. They are mainly found in the writing capabilities of ATS: generation of hooks to capture the attention of potential candidates in sourcing, generation of job descriptions optimized for the target audience, generation of job advertisements (Job Posting), conversational agent to convert visitors into prospects or even candidates and introduce them to jobs, generation of follow-up messages and personalized communications.
If you want to know all the use cases of AI in recruitment and Onboarding, I invite you to consult our article on the 115 use cases of AI in HR.
How to choose a talent attraction and acquisition solution today?
When choosing a recruitment solution, the first question to ask is the one that will allow you to understand the recruitment philosophy behind the technology.
Is the solution designed to be transactional (job posting / applicants) or designed to be also relational (lead generation / talent pool)?
The second is to validate whether the solution is more suited to your organization depending on whether you mainly recruit for single positions or for mass recruitment.
Then, it is a series of criteria of adequacy between organizational needs and solutions:
The organization’s industry and culture (industrial and government environments prioritize compliance, retail environments prioritize volumes and speed),
The size and populations to be recruited (white collar, blue collar),
The operational model in Talent Attraction and Acquisition,
The structure of the department and recruitment operations:
- Centralized / Decentralized,
- Local, National, International,
- Outsourcing of recruitment with agencies and RPO that may require an agency portal in the ATS to avoid reconciliations and endless invoice verifications.
Recruitment volumes by advertisement, by direct approach, by attraction channels, by internal recruitment.
The maturity of the budget management, hiring request and approval, Talent Nurturing, omnichannel recruitment, pre-screening, selection, candidate review, communication, employment contract and pre-boarding (administrative pre-boarding) processes.
The maturity and complexity of internal recruitment practices (eligibility for positions, agreed seniority rules, Talent Pool).
The maturity and complexity of recruitment budget management practices.
The maturity and complexity of advanced analytical practices to manage event budgets (trade fairs, webinars, open houses, campus management), campaigns (programmatic advertising, job site postings), recruitment quality surveys and predictive analysis of behavioral factors of job performance and suitability.
Security and compliance with personal information protection rules: Bill 25 in Quebec, CCPA (California Act) and GDPR in Europe (consent, transparency and adjusted use, anonymization, etc.).
The strategy for converting historical candidate data stored in your current solution to the new solution. What do you want to keep without complicating and delaying the project to put the new solution into production?
This is a good grid for sizing your needs.
What are the important elements to consider for a Recruitment solution?
For me, the essential elements in choosing a modern recruitment solution are as follows:
A recruitment design adapted to your organizational context. A start-up seeks innovation and fluidity without dwelling on regulatory formalism and internal compliance monitoring capabilities. A multinational company seeks a regionally configurable solution for its decentralized international teams.
An excellent UX (depending on the complexity of the solution). As such, I always prepare my clients to measure the number of clicks to complete a key process (high frequency) to distinguish a good design from a slower design. Ultimately, this means dozens of hours saved per year, per recruiter.
Excellent automation models starting with the automated processing of profiles and CVs and semantic search. This is the basis! This changes everything in terms of information extraction and classification in a database to find candidates and skills. The ATS was too often seen to manage "Job Req. » when it became a solution to capitalize on the Talent information asset. Each declared and pre-selected candidate has a monetary value of acquisition, candidate processing and potential income. It’s up to you to exploit it.
What are the trends in talent attraction and acquisition solutions?
If your readers are already on top of talent marketing, I see three technological trends that are added and a macro-trend that is a paradigm shift. I think it is already challenging recruiters.
1. The capabilities of Career Pages are growing in power. They adopt the highest standards of online commerce and relationship marketing. When the market tightens, marketing and referral program channels (co-optation), Campus Management, Alumni, Referral Program, these pages become critical to convince and convert. Too often delegated to communications, they remain fallow and do not reflect the dynamism of the employer.
2. Recruitment without resumes for hourly employees. Even with little information, AI “matches” faster than the recruiter’s shadow. It’s a fact. This trend is very strong and is taking hold in North America. Recruiters attached to degrees and job or company titles to clone will have to adapt.
3. Internal recruitment. Beyond promotion by seniority, it is the search for skills and potential for new jobs that drives the growth of organizations. The mandate is to offer real internal paths for skills development and opportunities. Social elevators must be activated in the company. Diplomas quickly lose value in the information and intelligence economy. There are many ATSs that offer job opportunity marketplaces (Talent Market Place), but organizations that say they are ready to implement them remain cautious. They fear the acceleration of internal movements, sometimes preferring the voluntary departures of those who could not wait.
4. Recruitment by skills is therefore the next wave that will occupy us in the coming years, well beyond all these technological capabilities that evolve quickly and which are ultimately only technicalities. Recruitment by skills is a deeper paradigm shift that clashes with the existing model. It must make it possible to have more candidates for skills whose diplomas do not yet exist. In a context of demographic shift combined with a rapid renewal of skills, we are swimming in the middle of a "Skills Crisis". The recruitment department must therefore broaden its criteria not to diplomas but to skills, both externally and internally. It is imperative to target skills linked to experience and aptitudes or potential for more distant profiles by focusing on adjacent and transferable skills. Recruitment by skill is more open and the support of AI makes it possible to scale its processing, continuously.
What is the place of AI in recruitment solutions and ATS in particular?
We are moving from the era of automation to that of augmentation.
I often observe that clients have a lot of data in recruitment but still too few indicators and insights and still too little automation.
AI brings efficiency and decision support at two levels:
AI Machine Learning (ML) allows the publisher to train algorithms on batches of data to dynamically extract and classify skills from CVs and profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Indeed, others). Machine Learning calculates a level of adequacy and suggests candidates and positions. In the most advanced cases, the publisher's algorithmic model can predict performance in the position with specific evaluation factors.
Generative AI (GEN AI) allows, as its name suggests, the generation of content and communications (career pages, ads, posts and stories on social media, email or SMS communication, interview questionnaire, conversational agent for candidates, etc.). Generative AI also allows the inference of skills for your internal and external candidates. If a profile is partially completed (as is often the case), the solution can suggest relevant skills not mentioned but obvious from the millions of profiles analyzed.
In the very short term, Agentive AI (from the English Agency, “which takes action”) will offer the “Next Best Things to Do” to orchestrate and automate actions between HR modules and third-party ATS solutions.
We haven’t seen anything yet.
To move forward with Gen AI in HR, read our Guide:
Is ATS still the unloved of recruiters?
In fact, the most mature and advanced organizations in recruitment combine a central CRM-ATS type solution and an average of 12 other technological solutions.
This is my observation in the field. It is therefore wrong to believe that one solution answers everything.
It is also difficult to find full satisfaction for a certain period because recruitment evolves very quickly. It is a cyclical field, certainly the most exposed to social, societal and organizational changes of all HR fields. The presence of candidates online, job search methods and recruitment methods have radically changed.
ATS focused solely on transactional application management only satisfy a quarter of recruiters, especially VSEs and SMEs.
Then, if the recruitment solutions market is so fragmented, it is also because it reflects the extent of recruitment concepts, practices and users by size and type of industry.
By nature, recruitment is a linear process composed of more and more actions and decisions. And there is a constant in this field that is to add recruitment channels without removing them. If the organization is relatively centralized and simple, choosing a world-class solution can reassure with many robust features but it can also prove costly, slow to innovate and heavy to maintain for an organization. Especially if it does not have the scale or if it has not provided a resource dedicated to piloting the solution and its updates. The assessment of your essential, transformational and optional needs is therefore essential before soliciting the market.
Finally, too often, solutions have been chosen to respond to the candidate experience and recruiters when we must increasingly include sourcers, marketers, hiring managers and HR data analysts. The most modern and more niche solutions have often taken better account of the needs of the latter. They also give a much better satisfaction rate. I therefore advise you to think carefully about all uses and all users to specify your needs and select the best compromise. Technology is one thing, its maximized use is a daily discipline.
I also often see that all the features required at the beginning of the selection process take 18 to 36 months before being fully deployed, when they are not simply forgotten.
The range of talent attraction and acquisition solutions is vast enough to modernize and transform recruitment continuously.
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