Tech adoption: Why you still need to put people first

Investing in technology is crucial for the survival of a business. However, this should not come between the needs of employees, as they’re the backbone of any organisation.

Rich Lewis-Jones, SmartRecruiters’ Asia-Pacific vice-president, joined The HR Leader to discuss the importance of a people process technology strategy. He also touched on how often processes should be reviewed and why tech evolution should be embraced, not feared.

HR Leader: “People process technology strategy. Why is it important?”

Mr Lewis-Jones: “Businesses need to focus on people first. Do they have the right people in their team and the right structure in place to be able to support effective hiring? Then they need to look at their processes.”

“I genuinely believe that I think if you are taking the people process technology approach to it, you’ll see a successful rollout of some tech stack. If you go technology first, and then you look at everything around it, it’s seeing people make big mistakes around it.”

HR Leader: “How often should businesses review their processes?”

Mr Lewis-Jones: “To be honest, the way that the market is moving, I’d be looking at it every year. Or as much as possible and get feedback from the business. As talent acquisition professionals, we can sometimes think we run a very good process, but they’ve not really asked candidates.”

He continued: “The great way of assessing it is, even just with a candidate application experience, ask yourself, ‘What would your CEO say if they went and applied for a job at your company today, and what would they think about the hiring process?’ You soon start seeing people switching gear.”

HR Leader: “So I guess the key message here is embrace it. Don’t fear it. It’s not a replacer. It’s something that we all need to come to grips with. It’s here, right?”

Mr Lewis-Jones: “Absolutely, and I’m not here to fearmonger, but the reality is that the competition for talent is fierce. In Australia and New Zealand, even in Asia, businesses have got very tough competition with their next-door neighbour.”

“So, using things like chatbots on a career page to engage talent as they land on that from a recruitment marketing campaign that you’ve done, they’re not just a nice-to-have anymore. They are a strategic competitive advantage. And businesses that are investing in those are working with great vendors and seeing return in investment,” explained Mr Lewis-Jones.

“Naturally, we always think a candidate is naturally going to do a job search sitting on their laptop at home. People are on the bus on their way home, so if you’re doing social media campaigns, which you can run programmatic recruitment advertising through automation, and you engage that talent.”

He concluded: “Let’s just say it’s a nurse on the way back from a night shift on the bus home, they see an advert through social media that leads them through to careers page, [and] a chatbot jumps out and starts immediately engaging them. Otherwise, if you don’t have that there, you do risk losing that person. So, it’s all about creating the path of least resistance and moving the candidate through the funnel as quickly and easily as possible.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Rich Lewis-Jones, click below: