Jeff Dickey-Chasins aka “The Job Board Doctor”, HRExaminer.com Editorial Advisory Board contributor discusses the current market for recruitment marketing platforms.
About four or five years ago, the term ‘recruitment marketing platform’ first made its appearance. Companies like Smashfly, Jobs2Web, Ongig, and Entelo promoted their products as a ‘platform’ that would weave together the disparate elements of a typical online recruiting campaign. Existing ATSs and others in the HR tech world quickly latched on to the terminology, and now it’s almost impossible to find a major vendor that doesn’t have a recruitment marketing platform
But what exactly is a recruitment marketing platform? Let’s turn to Smashfly, one of the pioneers in the sector, for a definition:
- Job posting distribution
- Recruitment CRM
- Recruiting analytics and metrics reporting
- Career site management
- Social recruiting
- Mobile recruiting
Quite a laundry list, eh? The lure, of course, is that the typical HR or recruitment professional can manage recruiting campaigns via one piece of software (now typically cloud-based), without having to jump from one vendor/software package to another. In other words, the classic benefit promise of saving time and money.
I will leave to others the discussion of whether or not this promise has been met. Instead, let’s consider these companies from a business perspective: are individual vendors gaining market share? Have new vendors entered the market? Are recruiters adopting these platforms?
The answers have to be yes, yes, and yes. In addition to the early entrants listed above, more recent vendors include Jobvite, Jibe, SmartRecruiter, KarmaHire, Recruitics, and many more. As mentioned above, major ATSs such as iCIMS are integrating similar products into their existing lineups.
From a different corner of the recruiting industry, we also see job boards like CareerBuilder and Dice rolling similar products into their services. I would not be surprised to see job boards acquiring some of the recruitment marketing platforms, or vice versa. In fact, it may be that most job boards will be calling themselves recruitment marketing platforms in five years or so.
Behind the term, however, lies an ever elusive desire that has driven the HR tech market for years: unification. HR and recruitment professionals want a unified platform that can handle everything they do in recruiting from soup to nuts. Will recruitment marketing platforms finally grant their wish?
Probably not. But it will be fun to see how things develop anyway!
