Saba Goes Deeper Into Recruiting: The Sound Of A Changing Market

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Author: David Mario Smith
Topic: Collaboration
Issue: Who are the collaboration providers and how will they compete?

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Summary: Saba’s announcement of its new Recruiting@Work offering is another signal of consolidation in the recruiting software market. This will impact video recruiting as well as overall talent management.

Event: On December 12 2013, Saba announced its new recruiting offering, Recruiting@Work, as part of Saba Cloud. Recruiting@Work will have capabilities for predictive recruiting, collaborative hiring, including video interviewing, and accelerated screening and onboarding.

Analysis

The new Recruiting@Work product from Saba shows that the market is heading towards larger vendors adding adjacent capabilities to complete their portfolios. It also shows that Saba recognizes these adjacencies have to be converged in a strategic solution.

The Impact of Ongoing Consolidation

This consolidation and technical convergence will impact smaller standalone players with point solutions. Smaller players who have emerged with innovative solutions in video recruiting will have to focus on integrating with enterprise talent suites.

Typically when a market goes through consolidation, what was innovative to birth standalone players becomes a feature as larger technology providers either buy it or build it to add to their own portfolios. Video recruiting is an emerging area with many players offering specialized point solutions.

Key Recruiting@Work Features

Enabling a modular set of features as an entire suite will allow Saba to upsell existing customers and become a strategic technology partner for enterprises. The Saba Recruiting@Work suite has the following three main feature categories:

• Predictive Hiring: Saba uses its own machine learning technology, which it calls The Intelligent Mentor (TIM). TIM analyzes candidates based on factors such as skill-sets, and makes recommendations to recruiters and hiring managers. It also makes recommendations to employees about the skills and training needed for potential positions.
• Collaborative Hiring and Video Interviewing: This enables team collaboration so that all involved in the recruiting process can provide input on potential candidates. It can also use Saba’s video conferencing technology for video interviews.
• Accelerated Screening and Onboarding: Saba’s online screening and onboarding capabilities are enabled for assessing candidates and bringing them up to speed quickly once hired.

Enterprise Talent Acquisition Needs

We speak to many enterprise clients, and one of their most frequent requests is for a faster, more efficient talent acquisition process. Enterprises want to increase the talent pool while at the same time prioritize candidates and hire them sooner.

Using real-time collaboration capabilities such as video in the recruiting process gives hiring managers similar visual cues to face-to-face interviews without the travel cost of bringing candidates in person. Adding the necessary analytics at all stages will bring efficiencies throughout the lifecycle of the talent acquisition process.

Challenges and Opportunities

This is a good move by Saba, but it brings both challenges and opportunities. The upsell to current customers is a huge opportunity. Penetrating new customers will be challenging but doable, if Saba parses out and clearly messages the business benefits of each component of the Recruiting@Work suite.

Each component must be tied to enterprise use cases, with referenceable customers to back them up. Saba has to highlight individual problems with their solutions and the business benefit of having it all in one suite.

Aragon Advisory

• Current Saba customers should evaluate the internal uses Recruiting@Work will support before deciding on it.
• Non-Saba customers should review and evaluate their talent acquisition planning and processes to see if there are gaps the components of Recruiting@Work can fill.

Bottom Line

The recruiting software and talent acquisition market is undergoing change that threatens both smaller focused and larger strategic technology providers. Smaller specialty providers have to ensure integration into larger suites. Larger providers have to keep up with the pace of innovation or be left behind the curve of enterprise penetration.