Will Tech Rise to Today’s Challenges?: New Expectations for Recruiting Technology Amidst Competitive Talent Pools

Recruiting technology has come a long way from Excel spreadsheets and fax machines, but practitioners still describe it as a mixed bag. A conversation among talent acquisition leaders from a major university health system and an athletics tech company covers what's actually working in hiring tools right now, and where the gaps remain.

Key points covered include:

• Mobile capability has become table stakes rather than a differentiator, letting recruiters send offers, review feedback, and schedule candidates from a phone in transit.
• Managing candidate volume remains a persistent challenge, less about filtering people out than about quickly assessing and redistributing talent across current and future openings.
• Diversity and inclusion features, such as the ability to record preferred pronouns, are treated as a baseline expectation. A vendor who dismisses that request as unimportant during a sales call signals a broader problem with how they operate.
• Evaluating a technology vendor as an employer matters as much as evaluating the product. That means looking at how the salesperson, account manager, and help desk staff represent the company, and whether they listen rather than recite features off a spec sheet.
• A vendor that researches a company's values and hiring priorities before a pitch, and connects its product roadmap to what a client actually needs, stands out from one that treats every client the same.
• Budget decisions should start with clearly defined needs rather than a headline price tag. Free or low-cost platforms can cover core recruiting functions like posting, automated candidate messaging, and video interviews, while any additional spend should go toward features that measurably improve the experience for candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters.
• Implementation matters as much as the purchase decision. One example describes a new applicant tracking system that actually slowed hiring from two weeks to three because it was rolled out without proper solutions expertise, requiring teams to remap their own processes to recover lost time.

Throughout, the emphasis lands on treating technology vendors as long-term partners rather than transactional suppliers, and on matching investment to an organization's actual hiring needs rather than chasing the most expensive or feature-heavy option available.