Guest Post by Victor Osadchiy
In the fast-paced job market, recruitment is a continuous task with both HR departments and recruitment companies always looking for new talent. However, getting the right candidates is a painstaking and daunting task. Fortunately, recruitment software provides a solution.
What is a recruitment software?
These are tools utilized by talent acquisition professionals such as hiring managers and recruiters to automate and streamline recruitment functions such as sourcing, selecting, screening, and interviewing applicants.
Recruitment software gained popularity in the 90s when job search and hiring went online. Thus, rather than having to process paper resumes, recruitment software allows you to analyze large quantities of electronic applications and resumes efficiently. This enables you to save money and hours of work while reaching more candidates to find the right employee.
What are the main problems that recruiters face?
Competing for talent
If your recruitment process usually takes a lot of time, you stand to lose the perfect candidate for your competitors, especially when hiring specialist professionals in fields such as IT or engineering. Performing your operations manually reduces the effectiveness of the recruitment, which might frustrate you while having a negative impact on the candidate’s experience.
Lack of collaboration
When your recruiters are not in sync throughout the entire process, you will often find them handling the same task which leads to waste of time and money. As such, during the hiring process, recruiters must be on the same page so they can coordinate effectively.
Too Much Paperwork
Conventional hiring methods involve sieving through piles of paperwork such as applications and resumes to find the perfect candidate. Regardless of the structure in place, it is nearly impossible to account for every resume that the company receives manually. This might lead to a violation of some hiring laws such as how long you can keep an applicant’s records in addition to raising your chances of making a bad hire.
How recruitment software solves these problems
By utilizing the various types of recruitment software, you should be able to:
Speed up the recruitment processes
Using recruitment software, you will have access to the necessary information about the candidates regardless of where you are or the time of day. Moreover, it sends you updates about any changes made to the system. This effectively reduces the time taken to identify and recruit the right individuals.
Get a systematic database
Recruitment software removes the need to filter through paperwork by storing all the electronic applications in a place they can be easily retrieved and managed using a systematic arrangement. Moreover, you can also allow candidates a platform where they can log in and upload their resumes to enable an even broader reach for you.
Reduce administrative work
Instead of spending hours posting jobs on the various job sites, recruitment software can do this for you with a single click.
Increase the quality of hires
This tool allows you to classify the applicants’ resume into various categories which will enable you to find the specific skills that you are looking for quickly. This helps in ensuring that you hire a person that is best suited for the job.
Improve communication
Recruitment software facilitates smoother communication among the HR team throughout the process. By taking advantage of this software, they will be able to update any information about the candidate during all stages of the operation. This allows them to make better hiring decisions as they will have updated notes on each candidate that they will use to compare them against each other.
Keep track of the applicants
When using the manual system, paperwork often gets mixed up, which might likely result in an applicant’s resume not getting reviewed. It could be a costly decision especially if they turn out to be what you were looking for. However, by using automated hiring systems, every applicant can be accounted for, which further denotes the objectivity of your hiring process.
Secure sensitive data
Resumes are full of personal data, and it is your responsibility to ensure that anyone other than the recruiters does not access this information. Manual systems use paperwork which is more likely to be accessed by third parties than in software solutions where the applicants’ data is encrypted and secured from unauthorized access.
Types of recruitment software
It is important to note that no software can efficiently support all the recruitment functions. As such, you might have to use various recruitment software solutions, which include:
Applicant tracking system (ATS)
This tool provides a platform for processing candidates, starting from organizing job postings, processing their resumes, to tracking interviews. ATS has become the preferred recruiting solution due to the sheer volume of resumes it can generate from one job posting. One of the reasons it is preferred is because it engages in automatic resume screening through knockout questions or keyword filters.
Candidate relationship management (CRM)
CRM software is designed to help HR to actively source applicants by creating talent pools and nurturing them via recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing involves the application of marketing practices such as analytics, targeted messaging, and multi-channel use to attract, engage, and nurture applicants to create interest in or awareness of your brand and its job openings.
The difference between ATS and CRM is that ATS’s primary focus is the applicant whereas CRM’s focus is the full potential candidate pool. Thus, a CRM nurtures both passive and active candidates who might not have applied for the job yet but have portrayed interest in your company or could be a good fit based on their qualifications.
Interviewing Software
Interviewing online has gained immense popularity due to its convenience. This software allows you to conduct interviews in real-time online or watch pre-recorded interviews at your own time.
Moreover, interviewing software today can give you additional data about the candidate as it can assess things such as their speech patterns, word choices, or facial expressions to help you determine whether they are a good fit for the position.
Examples of Interviewing Software Include “Take the Interview” and “Spark Hire.”
As with almost all technological advances, recruitment software makes your hiring process to be more effective, efficient, and less costly. Thus, you will be more likely to make a better hire using half the efforts involved in manual recruitment. Have you used recruitment software before? What was your experience? And if you have not utilized these tools yet, it is about time you did.
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Victor Osadchiy
Victor Osadchiy is a creative writer who formerly worked in the Education Technology industry. By day, he writes about app development for business. By night, he is an online gamer and a big fan of Esports. You can find more posts by Victor on the Yalantis Blog. Connect with Victor on LinkedIn.
