The Atlassian Talent (HR) Team recently started using a web based recruitment system called Taleo. The system helps manage the increasing flow of candidate applications following our recent recruitment efforts. If you work in HR or recruitment, than you have probably heard of Taleo. Although I think it is better designed for external recruiters rather than internal HR professionals and recruiters, the system has some handy functionality that helps manage the recruitment and selection process.
Increasing Visibility & Accountability
We found that Taleo didn’t have quite the flexibility to produce the reports we needed. Although you can easily generate reports via Taleo, it is not the most attractive nor the most useful system to display information openly.
What I did like about Taleo is its API (Application Programming Interface). It allowed us to create a program that regularly downloads information via Taleo into our own database. We use our corporate Confluence wiki to generate reports on the data, such as high-level job summaries that drill down to show candidate status. The dashboard we created includes the following information:
- Open positions and where applicants sit in the selection process.
- An “alarm” function that comes up when candidates haven’t been contacted in time according to our internal response time KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
- An overview of how far candidates get in our selection process and why.
- Overview and charts of sources and countries.
- Information on our time to hire, costs per hire and other information related to successful candidates.
- Overview of external and internal referrers.
We found the use of a dashboard is great if you want to show your organisation how things are progressing with any recruitment efforts. Besides, transparency helps keep your HR team on their toes!
