The supply of recruitment technology is sometimes mind blowing. Developments follow each other in an ever-accelerating speed bringing you more and more opportunities to shape a recruitment process that can help deliver you the best candidates in the most efficient way. Imagine being a recruiter today with the opportunity to start from scratch. The choice of apps, software, plug-ins, tools and add-ons is enormous. The reality today is that most recruiters cannot start from scratch but may sometimes be caught in a self-made recruitment technology prison filled with obsolete tools in an outdated process. So how do you recognize if your recruitment technology and process is in dire need for a thorough overhaul? Here are 5 identifiers:
Your applicants arrive daily in your inbox after they have completed an application form on your career site or after applying through a job board. You will have to manually register candidates in a system, or even worse, in Excel. Your hiring managers receive pre-selected candidates… in their inbox again. It’s time to embrace some automation and at the very least stop retyping input your candidates already provided when applying. Get yourself an applicant tracking system please! They come in all sorts and flavors and since you have nothing to begin with, there can be no wrong choice here. Go for it!
When you look back at the past couple of months on the job and think of the activities you have spend most of your time on, calling candidates is at the top of the list. You have left endless voicemails, tried to schedule, reschedule and in the end were still wondering if this was the right candidate for the job. You have invited many of them nevertheless. It seems about time to start replacing calls with video. No more scheduling, but let your candidates pick a timeslot or just give them a deadline to complete their interview. You will be left with extra time on your hands and better visibility on all candidates.
You have applications coming in. That’s great! But you are not tracking or measuring anything. Where did they find you? How did they find you? What was their application journey? Simple questions to ask yourself if you want to make sure you can subscribe to more of the best applicants and less of the lower quality category. If you only knew where the candidates originated, you would be able to spend your budget more effectively. No more post and prey, but targeting and marketing your job posts to the right audience. Just add Google Analytics to your career site and/or ask the candidates where they found your job. Using a multi-posting platform (like Broadbean for example) to post your jobs on job-boards, will also allow you to track the candidate source.
I still come across companies that have a clear cut between their recruiting software and their HR software. The hire is the end of the process and the beginning of another one, rather then tracking the applicant until he or she leaves the company again. Imagine a clear overview of where your best performers came from and recognize patterns in your recruiting that will tell you how to avoid bad hires. Now you can start predicting performance, based on the connected information between recruiting and HR. It’s simple really and all too possible. Your hiring managers will love you for it once you have the picture complete. An acquisition wave in HR Technology a few years ago created a number of integrated platforms where recruitment and HR are connected. You may also use the available API interfaces from your platforms to connect the dots. With a few days of development work, you will have created a treasure chest of hiring insights.
In recruiting, speed is of the essence. Candidates who are in multiple application processes simultaneously, will often accept the job offer from the employer that offers the fastest process. Too often a paper-based process with no automation results in a lengthy process where CVs take a break on the desk of the hiring manager and great candidates have to wait too long to get a job interview. If you recognize a great application, start interacting with the candidates immediately through video interviews, but also offer candidates transparency of the process indicating where they are in the process, what the next steps are and maybe even what their competition looks like.
If one or more of the above apply to your recruiting process, you may want to start rethinking your recruitment technology stack and process. Your competitors on the job market will likely be ahead of you and signing the candidates you should be signing, leaving you with second choice options. If you want to be on top of the hiring food chain, stop offering a second choice recruitment process. Get an applicant tracking system, connect it to your HR system and offer an automated process with video interviews. Start recruiting like its 2017! Happy Hiring!
