80% of employers say they anticipate the ongoing talent shortage to continue throughout 2023. Up against factors like the skills gap, the Great Resignation, and increasing demand for remote and hybrid work arrangements, many of today’s recruiters have their work cut out for them.
What can help recruiters navigate some of these obstacles? Recruiting software and tools.
Designed to complement best practices for recruitment methods while making it easier for recruiting teams to efficiently and effectively fill vacant positions, these tools offer invaluable support in helping companies build high-performing teams.
Read on for a closer look at eight of the best recruiting tools for automating and streamlining the recruitment process.
What Are Recruiting Tools?
Recruitment tools are software or other digital tools recruiters can use to perform their jobs better and find higher-quality candidates.
Offering solutions to specific recruitment challenges, recruitment tools support a breadth and depth of hiring functions, such as:
- Organizing applicants and applicant information
- Posting and advertising job vacancies
- Tracking candidates through the application process
- Candidate communications and messaging
- New employee onboarding
- Measuring recruiting performance and outcomes (analytics)
Manually keeping up with these duties can overwhelm recruiting teams and impede the hiring process. Conversely, leveraging recruitment tools to simplify the hiring process can have a powerful impact on everything from hiring speed to the overall candidate experience.
Benefits of Recruiting Tools
When you incorporate recruiting tools into your hiring processes, you position your business to reap the following benefits:
More Efficient Hiring Process
A single job posting can receive hundreds of applications. Amplified across all job vacancies and across several sourcing channels, the result can be massive volumes of applications that take way too long to review.
While sorting through these manually can be majorly inefficient, you can use recruiting tools to automate the sorting and screening process. For example, a recruiting tool may review qualifications against pre-set requirements, and automatically sort applicants who don’t meet them.
Prevent Recruiter Burnout
More efficient recruiting, hiring, and onboarding means fewer resources are wasted throughout the hiring process. This saves time while helping prevent the burnout associated with performing menial tasks. This is another area where recruiting tools can help — reducing repetitive manual work.
Recruiting can be a highly competitive field, so it’s also important to emphasize the importance of rest and work-life balance. Research shows that employees who are burnt out are 63% more likely to take sick days, and almost three times more likely to look for a new job. Encouraging recruiters to take time away from work to decompress and disconnect can go a long way toward keeping them on board.
Improved Quality of Hire
Quality of hire is the value a new hire contributes to the success of the organization at large. Sometimes, this isn’t a reflection of a candidate, but a reflection of the recruitment process itself.
Recruiting tools have the potential to directly impact quality of hire for the better. They can screen for everything from hard skills to cultural fit, increase hiring speed, improve candidate communications, and streamline onboarding.
Many of today’s recruiting tools also provide metrics for measuring quality of hire, along with many other hiring aspects. This allows organizations to continuously assess and improve upon their processes.
Improved Candidate Experience
The recruitment process isn’t just about the employer; it’s also about the candidate — and more specifically, about the candidate experience.
A good candidate experience matters a lot. For example, 49% of job seekers report declining a job offer due to a poor candidate experience. If your interview process is lacking (e.g., poor communication with candidates, disorganized interviews, or mediocre assessments), you may lose the perfect candidate.
Also consider that close to 20% of job candidates cite the long application process as a major challenge in their job searches, while many also express concerns about “ghosting” during hiring. Recruiting tools have the potential to eliminate both of these issues by accelerating the hiring process while also providing infrastructure for adequate communication and follow-up with job seekers.
8 Recruiting Tools to Strengthen the Hiring Process
Now that we’ve covered some of the main benefits, here are the top eight recruiting software and tools you should try to optimize your hiring process.
1. Talent Relationship Management Platforms
Talent relationship management (TRM) is attracting and retaining top talent. Research shows a profound link between talent management and competitor outperformance. At the same time, however, just 5% of employees report that their companies are “very effective” with their talent management strategies.
As a kind of recruitment CRM, talent relationship management platforms can help bridge this gap. TRM software automates many aspects of the digital recruiting process and serves as a centralized repository for collecting, organizing, and storing candidate data. In addition to helping organizations find high-quality candidates for current openings, it also helps to create a high-quality talent pool for future openings.
With a database of 8 million qualified candidates, Hunt Club’s Search Platform is an excellent example of the benefits of TRM management platforms. Automating candidate sourcing, funnel management, communications, and scheduling, Hunt Club’s innovative Search Platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced social graphing, and other technologies to reduce the time it takes to fill critical roles with the right candidates.
This makes recruiters’ lives easier and frees them up to focus on building the personalized relationships today’s candidates prefer.
2. Application Tracking Systems (ATS)
Application tracking systems are computer software programs that recruiters can use to sort applications, screen candidates, and track their progress through the hiring cycle.
Less complex and granular than TRM platforms, ATS software uses the information contained in job requisitions to create profiles of ideal candidates. It then parses candidate resumes for matches, allowing hiring managers to identify and advance the best candidates.
Another key difference between TRM and ATS platforms is that while the former targets potential candidates, the latter only tracks current applicants.
Furthermore, TRM platforms also comprise recruitment marketing, scheduling, and communication functionalities. Finally, while ATS databases only include candidate-input information, TRMs also incorporate information input from other sources.
One final takeaway about ATS software: While it does have the potential to streamline recruitment, it’s not foolproof. These programs often exclude qualified candidates whose resumes may not perfectly match the chosen criteria, but could perform the job with some training. This issue is well known, with 88% of recruiters agreeing that ATS programs overlook qualified job seekers.
Popular ATS software: Freshteam, JazzHR, BreezyHR, Rippling, Greenhouse, Zoho Recruit, BambooHR, Workable, Bullhorn, and Recruitee
3. Job Boards
While job boards aren’t exactly new, they’ve become indispensable recruiting tools in the digital age for job searchers and employers alike.
Not only do job boards help recruiters get their job postings before massive amounts of potential candidates, but many job boards have pre-screening capabilities that assess the quality of candidates based on their uploaded resumes.
Popular job boards: Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Google for Jobs, Monster, ZipRecruiter, Simply Hired, and Career Builder
4. Pre-Hire Skill Assessments
Also called pre-made assessments, this recruiting tool does exactly as described: evaluates the skills of candidates prior to hiring. In fact, they’re often administered before a candidate is even considered.
Available in both pre-made and customizable forms, this software tool asks candidates to complete assessments to determine their proficiency levels for required skills, as well as to assess factors like personality and culture fit.
While most common in tech fields, many organizations also use these candidate assessment tools to test other soft and hard skills, ranging from language fluency to problem-solving.
Popular pre-hire skill assessment tools: Harver, iMocha, eSkill, Vorvoe, ThriveMap, SkillSurvey, and Test Invite
5. Video Interviewing Software
As more companies shift to remote work, video interviewing software has emerged as a popular recruiting tool and time-saving screening solution.
While some video interviews are conducted in real time, asynchronous video interviews (AVIs), also known as one-way interviews, are uniquely beneficial as both parties can perform their parts at their convenience.
With asynchronous video interviewing software, candidates respond to a series of questions and then submit their answers virtually. (These interviews can be conducted in several formats, including video, voice, and even text.)
Recruiters then evaluate these responses in order to determine who should move forward in the search.
Many of these video interviewing tools offer both live and pre-recorded interviews. Some have additional functionality, such as the ability to schedule interviews and virtual event hosting.
Popular video interviewing platforms: Willow, VidCruiter, SparkHire, MyInterview, Hireflix, HireVue, interviewstream, Avature, and Recright
6. Social Media
LinkedIn is a popular social media platform for connecting with active and passive candidates. But to make the most of it, employers should also adopt best practices for social media recruitment, including optimizing their social media presence, encouraging employee engagement, hosting online events, and building rapport through candidate outreach.
Many of these tools can offer support with everything from automating job postings to learning more about a candidate’s background.
Popular social media recruitment tools: Manatal, Zoho Recruit, and myStaffingPro
7. Augmented Writing Software
Job ads are much more than ads; they’re also powerful marketing tools for conveying your employer brand and attracting candidates that align with it.
Augmented writing software helps optimize your job descriptions. For example, some have the functionality to remove bias as well as optimize for SEO.
Popular augmented writing tools: Textio, Datapeople, TalVista, BeApplied, and JobWriter.io
8. Onboarding Software
A technology created to help employers create seamless transitions for new hires, onboarding software comprises a digital dashboard that recruiters and employees can use to communicate, assign and complete key tasks, and track progress.
The result? You proactively meet new hires’ needs without bogging down your HR team with a ton of administrative tasks.
From conducting timely background checks to communicating essential information (and ensuring that it’s accessed), onboarding software is also an excellent way to standardize the onboarding process to ensure consistency and compliance.
Popular onboarding software: Workday, ADP Workforce Now, Paycor, Namely HR, Freshteam, Zenefits, and BambooHR
Fine-Tune Your Hiring Process With Hunt Club
While HR teams are facing more than their fair share of challenges in 2023, they’ve also got access to more help than ever in the form of these useful hiring tools.
Hunt Club is at the top of the list.
If your traditional recruiting methods are falling short, our full-service recruiting and executive recruiting services can help you connect with the game-changing talent you need to grow your business.
Hunt Club is powered by innovative screening technology and sophisticated automation. With access to an extraordinary network of more than 8 million uniquely qualified and hard-to-reach candidates, Hunt Club can significantly impact your recruitment processes and hiring decisions.
