Our latest guest on #HRTechChat is Josh Rock, talent acquisition manager at Nuss Truck Group Inc. With locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the company sells and services various brands of medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks and heavy equipment for construction. Before entering the field of recruiting at organizations of various sizes and in a number of industries, Josh spent the better part of a decade in sales at JobDig Media. He brings an uncommon perspective to the podcast, and following is an elaboration on three of the many areas of interest we covered:

In many key ways, recruiters are your organization's ambassadors. In many instances, they're the first representatives of your organizations that your prospective employees (and, at times, future customers) meet. As part of an effort to maximize their positive impact, it's important to equip your front-line emissaries in talent acquisition with technology that makes them as efficient as possible in their work.

It may be obvious, but it bears underscoring: Small organizations are more apt to adopt new thinking faster, and this is because bureaucracy has yet to set in and become an impediment to innovation when it comes to products and services or procedure, approach and process. Josh witnessed this firsthand in proposing the production of high-quality videos to help recruiters and Nuss Truck Group itself present a unified, rich depiction of the employer brand not only to prospective employees (for whom there is significant competition regionally with others in the organization's same business), but also existing employees. Josh notes that he was pleasantly surprised by the speed with which leadership gave him the go-ahead for this program and leeway to make it happen as he sees fit.

The mix of technology for talent acquisition is really, really important and hinges on factors such as the size, geographic footprint, and industry of the business. At Nuss Truck Group, Josh inherited an applicant tracking system (ATS) from Ceridian Dayforce and recently implemented Emissary.ai, a text recruiting software, to help anyone recruiting for the organization reach prospects via the media where those candidates are most apt to respond. (Service techs tend not to do email, for example.) In our conversation, Josh mentioned that a solution such as iCIMS or other "Cadillacs" of talent acquisition, as good as they are, wouldn't make sense for his employer. For a similar reason, solutions such as Zip Recruiter, which may create an extra step in the recruiting process, may be advantageous for some organizations, but not for his.

As noted, Josh used to work in business development in the HCM space and knows how vendors sell their technology. He brought a fresh, interesting perspective to #HRTechChat, and it was a pleasure to have him as our guest.