We recently ended our third monthly meet-up at EB Tech and we’re more than happy to share with you what we’ve discussed, debated, and learned about tools of the trade in talent acquisition and L&D. A big thank you to this edition’s speakers, Adriana and Lavinia!
Tools of the Trade in Talent Acquisition
How do we define talent acquisition (TA)? In simple terms, it’s an organizational framework made up of hiring managers, recruiters, and HR pros. Often placed under the big HR umbrella in the corporate setting, TA involves interviewing, hiring, and ultimately hiring top talent. How is it different from recruiting? While these two are rather similar in nature, the main difference is that talent acquisition is more like an HR and business strategy combined, aimed at factoring a company’s long-term goals. As opposed to filling vacancies, TA is an ongoing, detailed process that identifies candidates for leadership and executive roles and positions.
To get a headstart in today’s highly-competitive IT market, the best strategy is to automate recruitment activities. The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) industry has started to gain tremendous traction across enterprises in the past 5 years. By 2026, the ATS market size is anticipated to reach $1.12 billion, up to $12 million from the $1 billion estimated in 2020. There are quite a few tools of the trade that can be used to secure top talent. The question is, which one to choose?
With over 6 years of experience in talent acquisition, Adriana Hurduc, Strategic Talent Acquisition Manager at Cavalry Ventures, has shed some light on some of the tools she has found to be life-changing.
Workable
Over 20,000 companies have made Workable their go-to ATS. It comes with an insane amount of features, including job descriptions, sample interview questions, and HR hiring email templates, and it easily integrates with over 70 apps and tools. For hiring teams, Workable makes the whole process of talent acquisition more fluid because it enables them to keep track of new candidates a lot easier, at the same time allowing them to perfect their hiring methodology, collaborate better with candidates, and achieve faster time to hire.
Greenhouse
Used by corporations like Pinterest, Booking.com, and Cisco Meraki, the mission of Greenhouse is to “make every company great at hiring”. As one of the fastest-growing ATSs in the market, it pledges to design, streamline, and automate nearly all aspects of the hiring process including managing interviews, sourcing applications, onboarding new hires, setting up post-hiring activities, and a lot more.
“With Greenhouse, the reporting feature is extremely accurate. It helped me improve recruitment processes and figure out numerous bottlenecks, because it’s not always about lack of candidates, but about lack of communication within teams. When I worked at Clue, the time-to-hire was about 8 to 10 weeks. With Greenhouse, we’ve managed to reduce it to 2 to 4 weeks.”
Adriana Hurduc, Strategic Talent Acquisition Manager at Cavalry Ventures.
Bullhorn
Bullhorn is yet another ATS working checking out. Better known as a global leader in CRM & operations software, over 10,000 companies use Bullhorn to manage recruitment workflows, eliminate manual work, and drive teams to hire more efficiently. The cloud-based platform argues to “work the way you work, no matter your role”, promoting agility and fluidity in every step of the recruitment process.
Personio
Founded in 2015, HR software Personio enables companies to automate all processes involving HR, including recruitment, management, payments, and development. Their mission is to “make HR professionals real heroes by giving them more time to focus on what matters most: the employees”. With Personio, HR leaders will be able to digitize time-consuming HR processes and therefore have more time for strategic approaches such as employer branding and talent development.
And that’s a wrap on tools of the trade in talent acquisition. Next up, we will dive deeper into some tools of the trade in learning and development (L&D).
Tools of the trade in L&D
The 2nd part of our meeting covered an in-depth talk on some of the core tools of the trade in learning & development (L&D), a core area of HR management, and a systematic process that demands time, patience, and dedication to visibly boost employee skills, competencies, know-how, and eventually ROI. If you want to read more about L&D, we’ve written a detailed article here.
Going back to the tools of the trade, Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG, has convinced us that automation is truly the key to efficiently managing a company with 5,000+ employees.
“There are different ways to administer learning programs in a company. It all depends on how you are as a human being. For us, at eMAG, retention is as important as development because we want to make sure that our employees are engaged.”
Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG
Nifty Learning
Based in Romania, Nifty Learning is trying to revolutionize the world of learning management systems. It helps manage all training sessions within a company, and as opposed to other tools, the platform has a great user experience, constantly keeping all users engaged.
“With an average of 20 training sessions per month at eMAG, it’s worth knowing which employee goes to which training session. By using Nifty Learning, we managed to find a way to communicate easily with each employee in each stage of the training.”
LAVINIA MEHEDINTU, PEOPLE EXPERIENCE MANAGER AT EMAG
In smaller-sized companies that don’t have a big budget for learning & development, decentralized learning administration systems can be just as good. An example of a tool worth trying out is Learnerbly. It comes with personalized learning resources where employers can set up individual learning budgets for their employees, and then every employee gets to choose how to spend that budget (based on learning needs).
Miro
Miro is an online whiteboard platform that makes collaboration between teams both fun and efficient. Designed for remote and distributed teams, Miro enables companies to run engaging virtual meetings and workshops, at the same time streamlining ideation and brainstorming sessions, workflow, strategy & planning, mapping & diagramming. Additional facilitation tools worth mentioning: Mentimeter, Kahoot, Benji.
Blinkist
Since L&D is not just about training, there are alternative learning methods that companies should check out to keep employees engaged, productive, and more efficient. German-based Blinkist, for example, is an excellent microlearning tool for busy employees who would like to read more but lack the time to do it properly. Their “books-in-blinks” are 15-minute summaries of nearly 4,000 fiction/non-fiction books (or audiobooks) in a wide variety of genres.
Other tools for alternative learning worth checking out: MentorCruise (for remote mentorship), CoachHub (for digital coaching), Campfire (reading books and connecting with teams remotely).
Notion
Learning in the flow of work is a great way to make learning feel less obtrusive and more natural among busy employees. For companies seeking to improve knowledge retention and drive productivity, Notion is the “all-in-one workspace” that makes learning at work even more enjoyable via cheat sheets, checklists, to-do lists, process flows, diagrams, FAQs, and a lot more. Built to empower teams in different departments, Notion enables workflow customization, turning tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.
Conclusion
It’s no secret that IT is quite a competitive field. For your company to have leverage, it needs to offer what others aren’t (or, at the very least, strive to do things a bit differently). It pays to make employees become aware of their career path via career development tools such as Innential and Vectorly. It also pays to help your leaders acknowledge that there’s room to grow, as this is the best chance you’ve got to keep them longer. Know Your Team is an excellent tool for managers looking to become better leaders. Use it to get honest feedback, hold productive 1-on-1 meetings, share progress, get constructive feedback, build rapport with teams, and more.
German 
English