By Peter Weddle, Founder TAtech
(without AI assistance; any mistakes are all mine)
There’s a new revenue opportunity for TA solution providers – from job boards to talent technology companies – that’s hiding in plain sight. It’s a relatively easy-to-implement expansion of what constitutes Customer Success.
As I’ve previously written, the Customer Success Teams deployed by TA solution providers have historically been judged by a single metric: Efficacy. Does a product deliver the expected ROI, which in most cases, at least for now, is defined as saving time, money or both? Yes, recruiters increasingly talk about candidate quality, but that’s hard for them to verify internally, so for many employers, success remains a product’s ability to make recruiters more efficient.
The arrival of AI and especially agentic AI is changing all that. The technology-human partnership in recruiting is now all about “enabling recruiters to do what they do best.” There is, as a result, a new metric for judging a product’s success: recruiter optimization. Does a product remove the daily grind of talent acquisition so recruiters can complete those tasks where they provide the greatest value to an employer and perform at their peak.
But what is it that recruiters do best? Interestingly, there’s little consensus on the answer. A quick browser search will list a raft of articles citing the 9 or 10 or 12 or 16 traits that great recruiters must demonstrate. Ask an agent the same question, and it’ll also cite a laundry list of necessary skills. There’s some agreement on the need for competence in communications, relationship-building, sales, and research, but little more after that.
What seems clear is that in order for recruiters to perform at their peak they must have and competently use an array of skills that will enable them to accomplish two human-to-human tasks:
• quickly build a genuine connection with a candidate in order to assess their fit for an opening, a team and an organization; and
• if that fit exists, convince them to move from the devil they know (their current job, boss and commute) to the devil they don’t know (a new job, boss and commute).
But, here’s the rub. Freeing recruiters up to do what they do best doesn’t mean they actually can. Indeed, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that the skill profile among today’s recruiters follows a normal distribution. Some will excel at all of those skills, some will perform satisfactorily (but could improve) and others will be substandard performers. In other words, not every recruiter does what a recruiter does best, at least not without some support. That reality creates an opportunity for TA solution providers’ Customer Success teams.
The fact of the matter is that all recruiters could benefit from training. Superior performers could hone their game with refresher training, while satisfactory performers would gain important new skills and substandard performers could get needed remediation. Of course, some employers already provide such support as do legions of consulting firms. However, only TA solution providers are positioned at the right time and in the right place to offer it effectively: when change is being introduced through the introduction of technology.
In fact, job boards and talent technology companies have two training opportunities:
First, Continuous Product Support. This involves training and consultation to ensure recruiters can use their solution effectively. Any provider worth its salt already does this. What many don’t offer, however, is follow-on training. In today’s environment, there is constant turnover among recruiters, so much of the initial solution competence (whether it’s how to write effective job postings to how best to use an AI-powered candidate assessment solution) goes out the door. Providing re-training or refresher training may be a lucrative upsell.
Second, Recruiter Training. This will likely require gaining additional expertise on staff, but TA solution providers are perfectly positioned to offer skills training for recruiters in conjunction with their product support training. If the goal of employers’ technology acquisition is now recruiter optimization, then the definition of “solution” can (and should) be expanded to include both the recruiter’s use of a product and their execution of those tasks they do best and now can, thanks to their emancipation by the product.
While there’s likely to be some pushback on the second kind of training, especially by long-embedded consulting firms, offering more robust training capabilities in the Customer Success team has at least two advantages:
• It reduces the contracting load on the employer. In today’s slimmed down purchasing team, one contract for two kinds of support has great appeal.
• It tightens the relationship between the solution provider and the recruiting team, making the notion of their partnership more real and enduring.
TA solution providers have long focused their Customer Success teams’ work on optimizing recruiter use of their product. As products get more powerful, however, and free recruiters up to do what they do best, those teams can advance their customers’ success even further by helping recruiters optimize their native skills.
Food for Thought,
Peter
Peter Weddle is the Founder & CEO of TAtech: The Network for Talent Technology Solutions. The author or editor of over two dozen books, he has also been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and chaired major human-machine and leadership studies for select Federal Science Boards.
