The relationship between the Human Resources department and technology has always been pretty rocky.

From HR’s frustratingly slow adoption of tech to clunky, verging on totally unusable applicant tracking systems, the couple has long standing history of getting on each others nerves.

Jobcast’s founders, Johnny Oshika and Ryan St. Germaine have been working in the field of human resources/recruitment technology for about 14 years now, so they’ve seen it all.

Their first company, BCjobs.ca, began as a simple online job-board focused on connecting British Columbia’s jobseekers with employers.

Not exactly revolutionary... except back then it actually was!

When BCjobs.ca started they were met with disbelief and criticism.

No one believed them when they said that the Internet would shortly become jobseeker’s primary tool for finding work.

In fact, in the early 2000s BCjobs.ca’s biggest competition was the help-wanted section of the newspaper!

Oh, how things have changed.

BCjobs Inc runs Western Canada’s largest job board. It receives well over 1 million page views per month, and now offers employers résumé searching technology and social recruitment.

Speaking of social recruiting…

When Ryan and Johnny launched the Jobcast Social Recruitment App they were met with familiar feedback.

The team was told by the tech savvy that there was no way anyone in HR would ever use social media for recruiting and that the human resources department was so stuck in the dark ages that they would never come around.

And for their part, HR seemed to live up to this stereotype by meeting the suggested adoption of social recruiting with skepticism and disbelief.

But the proclamations that no jobseeker would ever use social networks were so highly reminiscent of HR’s previous attitude towards job-boards, that they did not deter Ryan and Johnny from launching Jobcast.

Today social recruiting is an essential part of most company's hiring strategies and Jobcast has over 18, 000 active users. Jobcast is used by all kinds of amazing organizations from Logitech to Canada Post to Bumbershoot Magazine.

In 2014, I can comfortably say that Human Resources and Technology are finally giving their union the respect it deserves.

According to a recruitment technology survey performed by SoftwareAdvice.com, in 2014, 91% of recruiters use recruiting technology, and 95% of them find HR Technology easy to use, and most recruiters agree that recruitment technology improves key performance.

(SoftwareAdvice has a bunch of HR software reviews up on their site in case you're curious about ATS options.)

When it comes to social recruiting statistics according to Jobvite 14.4 million American job seekers would credit online social networks for their current/most recent job, 73% of companies successfully hired a candidate with social media, and 94% of companies are using social to recruit.

According to the Information Service Group, things are just going to get better.

Their 2014 survey on HR Tech trends paints a bright future for the happy couple.

The survey predicts:

• Improved User Experience

• Advancements in cloud technology

• Social and mobile experience for user and candidate

We're very much looking forward to all the cool new advancements going on with recruiting technologies. Jobcast's roadmap gets more and more exciting as we continue to roll out new features and make improvements to our app's user experience thanks to suggestions from our awesome users.

Jobcast users can look forward to some exciting updates for 2015!

As for HR & Tech...Will they still argue about the value of Facebook, or time to adopt, of course, but it looks like human resources and tech have finally recognized that they make a pretty fantastic team!

Will they still argue about the value of Facebook, or time to adopt? of course, but it looks like human resources and tech have finally recognized that they make a pretty fantastic team!

Of course! But it looks like human resources and tech have finally recognized that they make a pretty fantastic team.