Founded in 2012, Melbourne headquartered LiveHire is today a global software as a service (SaaS) recruitment provider. While remaining, at present, a medium sized company, they have brought their mission to empower the flow of the world’s talent into international markets, receiving recognition as a market leader in Direct Sourcing shortly after entering the North American Market.
The ongoing global skills shortage has driven the company’s needs to scale its integration marketplace to meet growing demand. They have met these challenges with a collaboration with Boomi, where the latter’s AtomSphereTM platform allowed LiveHire to develop an integration mechanism to support flexibility and choice for its clients’ bespoke recruitment needs, helping mitigate the ongoing global skills shortage
SMEhorizon explores this collaboration, with Nathan Gower, Head of Australia and New Zealand at Boomi, elaborating on the possibilities that Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) and low code solutions bring to SMEs.
Addressing the tech skills shortage
LiveHire’s capabilities, enabling clients to attract and engage both permanent employees and contingent workers, is currently in high demand, with continued growth in enterprise recruitment across the Asia Pacific region, alongside rapid growth in North America.
With this comes the need for greater integrations capabilities, as each of LiveHire’s clients has unique requirements, and that includes the integrations they need to ensure compatibility with the recruitment software they use. “Every customer has their own wish list,” said Will Sheers, Head of Product at LiveHire. “But we’re in the middle of a global skills shortage and there are hundreds of HR applications available that help companies deliver better outcomes.”
“Our team doesn’t have the capacity to build direct integrations for every request, and not every client or technology partner is able to build their own integrations to LiveHire’s Open Application Programming Interfaces (Open APIs),” he shares.
Technology like iPaaS opens an avenue for overcoming these challenges. Gower explains that they can be used to remove manual complexities, bring together legacy and new systems, and create an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop integration mechanism.
“LiveHire used iPaaS to avoid building niche, manual integrations, creating an integration framework capable of connecting bespoke applications, giving the company’s IT team a leg up in efficiency, and giving time back to the team to focus on more important tasks,” he continues.
Bringing IT capabilities to general staff
Besides expanding what a lean IT team can do, platform integration and low-code integration tools make projects far more approachable for non-technical professionals. “Beyond alleviating headaches in the IT department, Boomi’s work with LiveHire extended to turning its general staff into citizen integrators,” explained Gower.
“Professionals outside the IT department can easily develop and repurpose integrations – often as quickly as within 12 hours”.
Gower highlights that this has implications for SMEs, whose resources are typically constrained. “No matter which department they are in, the benefits of low-code functionality extend to giving workers the technology to have an even stronger impact in their role.
“Regardless of whether it’s an insurer creating new services that integrate into their existing offerings, or a warehouse coordinator using software to improve the supply chain in ecommerce operations, low-code technology ultimately helps workers get things done faster.
“Integrating apps and centralising data for useful insights, launching new services, or connecting employers to future employees can now be done in hours or days, as opposed to weeks or months.”
Overcoming hurdles to adoption
While iPaaS and low code solutions holds great promise, some hurdles remain. “It’s not uncommon for SMEs to be unaware of the masses of untapped data hiding in their IT environments,” says Gower.
“More often than not companies have a Jenga tower of different applications and systems, illogically stacked upon each other to meet the varying needs of the business.
“As SMEs came to grips with the pandemic’s disruption, the reality became even more pronounced following the surge in SaaS adoption to help keep the cogs turning. As they iron out the (sometimes frantic) digital initiatives from the past two years, a solution that can connect the digital dots has gone from ‘a nice to have’ to ‘a must have’.
The perceived cost of these new technologies is also an issue. “For many years, the market of full-service vendors and a small selection of providers for individual components scared SMEs away in fear of breaking the bank,” states Gower. “But it doesn’t have to be like that anymore – SMEs can make the most of current investments with one powerful integration engine.”
In seeking out an iPaaS partner, Gower recommends finding one that creates value by removing complexity and allowing the organisation to focus on what it does best.
“With ease to quickly connect applications, automate processes, and build efficient workflows, customers and employees reap the benefits of teaming with a smart, data-led organisation.”
Indeed, it was by leveraging such new cabilities that LiveHire was able to continue its mission to alleviate typical hurdles in finding talent, by allowing its clients to pick and choose their preferred mix of HR systems, and find the right people sooner. With the current challenges faced by companies in acquiring talent across fields, IT shouldn’t be another factor leaving organisations falling short.
