3 Change Management Tactics to Help You Beat the Odds

Change is scary. Even if you’re anxious to ditch your clunky, outdated recruiting software, jumping into a new platform is no small feat. Given that 70% of change initiatives fail (per Harvard Business Review), it can seem overwhelming. 

So what hope do you have to beat the odds and win at change management? 

This article will walk through three change management tactics to put yourself into the 30% by maximizing the value recruiters, operations teams, salespeople, etc. get out of your new platform. 

 

1. Actively manage the implementation stage

Change initiatives only succeed when actively managed. This may seem obvious—we’re talking about change management, after all—but you’d be surprised how often agencies leave key aspects of change, including implementation, to chance. 

Rarely is this an intentional omission. Rather, agency staff are so busy that, amidst the hundreds of other priority items, staying on top of a technology partner slips down the list. This extends the implementation process, delaying access to the new technology’s benefits—sometimes by months or even a year. 

So the first of our three change management tactics: designate a person a project manager for your implementation. This can be an internal team member—someone in operations or management—or a third-party consultant. 

This person’s role will include the following: 

• Communicate regularly with your tech provider
• Establish clear expectations around timing for implementation
• Evaluate each stage of implementation to ensure everything’s set up correctly and aligns with your agency’s needs or processes

 

2. Unify your tech stack

Change sticks when it makes people’s lives easier. Unfortunately, new technology often does the opposite. 

Many agencies end up with an array of integrated point solutions—ATS, marketing automation, analytics, experience management, etc.—each requiring a separate login. Even if you integrate these platforms, you’re still hopping around from portal to portal. 

And since broken integrations are inevitable, one day you’ll lose data and break your workflows. This causes frustration and confusion, and is detrimental to making change stick.  

That’s why it’s important to unify your tech stack. Whether you adopt an all-in-one platform with all the features you need, or use one platform as an orchestration layer to manage your integrations, having one login will make it more likely to be used and adopted. 

 

 

3. Prioritize user adoption and process integration

Stickiness is something you can assess with a simple question: If I took XYZ Platform away from you today, how would you react? 

If you have a riot on your hands, you know it’s sticky. 

The only way to achieve this kind of reaction is by making the technology so integral to your workflows that your people can’t do their jobs without it. But how do you drive such devoted levels of adoption within your staffing firm?

It comes down to three main factors: usefulness, ease of use, and peer adoption. If people find the new technology to be useful, can get started with minimal friction, and see their colleagues using it, they’re more likely to stay the course.  

Here are three tactics we’ve seen drive this level of use: 

• Raise awareness about the need for change. Recruiters won’t change until they feel they have to. The person managing this change must communicate why it’s necessary and urgent, and how your new technology will help solve the problem. 
• Develop a structured plan for addressing problems. Technology adoption invites problems. Having a plan in place for addressing them in real time, before they balloon into bigger issues, is critical. Otherwise, the problems will compound, and adoption rates will fall. 
• Continually advocate and train. Often people don’t use new technology simply because they don’t know how. Continual training and advocacy for its use is critical if people are going to maximize the value they get from it. Only then will it become deeply integrated into your processes. 

 

You should assume recruiters and salespeople will revert to the path of least resistance. If the technology becomes too difficult, adoption rates will plummet. By proactively engaging and educating your team, you can integrate it into your processes, and make it stick.  

Recruitment tech modernization is a big change. To beat the odds with your change management tactics, you need to actively manage your implementation, choose seamless solutions, and embed the technology into your processes so deeply that it sticks. 

With Tracker’s ATS & automation platform, you can do all three. See it in action today.