Consolidate your recruiting tech stack to eliminate Franken-stack headaches

When assembling a recruiting tech stack from disjointed point solutions, you risk creating a Franken-stack—a complex, costly, and resource-intensive system. Discover why consolidating your recruiting tools is essential for efficiency and effectiveness.

Here are a few reasons why it’s time to say goodbye to the Franken-stack and start consolidating your tools.

The Franken-stack is a nightmare for everyone

The Franken-stack significantly burdens your IT team. Each system integration introduces potential points for data errors, system breakdowns, and downtime, stalling your recruitment process. Often, additional IT admins are needed to manage these complex integrations efficiently.

But it’s not only the IT team that suffers. The Franken-stack also creates substantial additional work for members of the TA team, who still need to do a lot of manual data entry for any of those solutions that don’t play nicely with each other. This also means that recruiters don’t always have visibility into what their coworkers are doing, which can potentially lead to duplicated efforts and wasted time. 

Centralized data improves decision-making

Centralizing recruitment data enhances reporting accuracy and optimizes AI tool performance. A unified system ensures consistent, accessible data throughout the recruitment process, leading to more informed decision-making.

Having centralized and trustworthy data is also a prerequisite for using AI and analytics tools to their full capacity. You can really only trust the insights from these tools when you know they’re based on clean data.

Several TA leaders have shared stories of how centralized data from Gem has improved their decision-making and ability to share insights with executive leaders. For example, Erica Kanka, Director of Talent Attraction COE at Realtor.com says, “Leveraging the dashboards feature of Gem has allowed us to create impactful insights for executive leadership summaries we otherwise wouldn't be able to share!” 

Similarly, Oscar Ramirez, Senior Sourcer at Snap Inc. says, “Using Gem's Pipeline Analytics has allowed our teams to be much more data driven in our sourcing techniques. We are able to tell better stories about candidate pass through rates for all of our passive and active candidates using Gem's filters that integrate seamlessly with our ATS.” 

Eliminate the need for business intelligence tools with self-service reporting

Integrated systems provide self-service dashboards and reporting tools, empowering recruiters and HR professionals to independently access and analyze data. This reduces dependence on other teams and external tools, streamlining reporting and eliminating bottlenecks.

Dana Schafer, Recruiting Operations Manager at Grammarly, describes how easy it is in Gem for her to tailor reports to specific audiences: “In Gem, it’s just a matter of adding and removing widgets. I can also make audience-specific dashboards, because the data that’s critical and actionable for recruiting leadership isn’t the same data that’s critical and actionable for our business leaders or hiring partners. So I add and remove widgets. It’s really that simple.”

Future-proof your recruiting team with a scalable tech stack

Choosing platforms that are adaptable, innovative, and scalable ensures that your tech stack can grow and change with your needs without requiring a complete overhaul. When making purchasing decisions, be sure to select platforms that can seamlessly integrate new functionalities as they become necessary.

What are some of the changes on the horizon in TA tech? Industry analysts have shared insights that you might want to take into account. 

For example, Head of Strategy & Principal Analyst Kyle Lagunas of Aptitude Research emphasizes the importance of data in steering the recruitment process, highlighting the importance of tools that offer strong data-backed insights. With robust data analytics, recruitment decisions become less about guesswork and more about strategic actions backed by solid evidence. When recruiters become data-driven, they also build respect and trust among their coworkers. As Kyle puts it, “Suddenly you're speaking like a business colleague instead of an administrator. Data does more than transform the way we recruit—it transforms the way recruiters are viewed within the organization.” Brie Bastidas, who we mentioned earlier, describes how Gem has had this impact at Scale: “Gem gives visibility not only to higher-up stakeholders like your executives but also your hiring managers, front-line managers, recruiters, and recruiting managers.”

Sarah White, CEO and founder of product marketing and research firm Aspect 43, says that integrations are the #1 frustration with HR tech, so when evaluating vendors, you’ll want to consider how well they serve your current and anticipated future needs as well as their ability to integrate with other solutions.

Of course, we can’t talk about the future of technology without discussing AI. Hung Lee, editor of Recruiting Brainfood, recently shared his thoughts with Betterworks, encouraging TA leaders who might be feeling cautious to simply find a small pilot use case and dive in: “You’ll emerge, after that short period, with a much clearer idea as to how you want to implement it as a policy in your business,” he says. Once you’ve run some small experiments, you can build structure around the types of data you feed into AI tools and how those tools fit into your overall workflow. Learn more about Gem’s approach to AI and our AI recruiting suite.

Ready to future-proof your HR tech stack and eliminate headaches? Request a demo or connect with our sales team to explore how our integrated solutions can transform your recruiting process!