The candidate is the indisputable King in today’s labor market. With the skilled and qualified talent leaving during the Great Resignation, companies are struggling to source good candidates for their key roles. To add further to the recruitment woes, there has been a drastic shift in focus and priorities for talent, with flexibility & purpose taking precedence over recognition & growth. Top talent of today show a clear preference for companies that are committed to building socially conscious, diverse, equitable & inclusive workplaces.
To gain a competitive edge in this inordinately skewed market, it is important for companies to optimize their recruitment practices by leveraging the 2022 core hiring trends per Forbes of proactive engagement with candidates, offering remote work, building D&I, leveraging advanced data screening tools and data-centric recruiting.
Towards that, a dynamic Talent Acquisition strategy, reinforced by leading and best recruiting tools and software, is critical to business success, enabling companies to streamline their recruitment process, maintain diverse talent communities with data analysis and deep insights into prospective candidates and curate a truly delightful candidate experience.
What are recruitment tools?
Recruitment software and tools focus on simplifying the recruitment process, thereby optimizing the recruiter workload and enhancing the candidate experience. They manage the recruitment activities centrally and more efficiently, from crafting clear job descriptions up until offering and onboarding the candidates.
89% HR professionals say that candidate experience has a direct impact on the organization’s success.According to a survey conducted by SHRM, a significant majority (79%) of employers utilize AI and automation for recruitment and hiring. According to LinkedIn, 68% of recruiting professionals believe that adopting new recruiting technology is the most effective way to enhance performance. Companies that prioritize a strong candidate experience see a 70% improvement in the quality of their hires.
The recruitment tools automate recurring and non-value adding tasks in the various stages of the recruitment life cycle, allowing the recruiters to focus on improving the quality of candidate interactions.
10 Types of Recruitment Tools
There exist a plethora of recruitment software and tools in the market, aimed at making the lives of recruiters and candidates easier. They augment the conventional recruitment process as well as integrate with other recruitment tools to enhance the efficacy of the hiring process.
They also help recruiters create compelling brand stories on career landing pages, appealing job applications and postings, sharing them on social media, career sites and company websites, helping attract and engage top talent.
Some of the tools enable the sorting and ranking of the applications based on specific skills, expertise and qualifications, shortlisting the best-suited candidates for each of the open positions. These tools and platforms help recruiters engage meaningfully with candidates and provide a comprehensive view of the entire candidate journey, with real-time hiring stats and reports, improving the candidate experience and brand image.
Let’s look at the Top 10 recruitment tools that are used extensively by companies to attract and hire stellar talent
#1 Augmented writing tools
JD being the first opportunity for the company to create a positive brand image, it is important for it to be crisp, well-crafted and impressive. The JD writing tools improve the quality of your JDs, keeping them bias-free, gender-agnostic, appealing to the target audience. The augmented writing tools help create impactful job posts, helping attract stellar candidates to apply.
#2 Social Media Management Tools
These tools boost the performance of the social media recruitment campaigns via comprehensive campaigns and meaningful insights. These help promote brand awareness on social media by publishing content, monitoring social conversations, tracking and reporting and engaging with the target candidate audience.
#3 Networking tools
Finding and connecting with the right talent is rather tough yet incredibly rewarding for companies and candidates alike. Networking with potential candidates, thought leaders & passive candidates, sharing relevant business and cultural information helps influence prospective candidates and create brand ambassadors. These platforms also serve to bring together businesses and people with mutual interests, to share experiences, learn from each other, expand their network as well as crowdsource.
#4 Applicant Tracking Systems
ATS helps companies collect and manage their applications centrally, screening and sorting through thousands of profiles to shortlist potential candidates with specific skills, expertise and qualifications. It serves as an applicant repository, workflow automation and compliance tool, helping streamline the recruitment process and enabling companies hire to scale.
With the different stakeholders (recruiters, hiring managers & leaders) involved in the various recruitment life cycle stages, it is important to have a single platform for them to collaborate, communicate and engage effectively with each other and the candidates. This enables them to forge strong candidate relationships as well as hire talent objectively and efficiently. These platforms help with touch-points, follow-ups and tracking progress of the candidate through the hiring process.
#6 Assessment tools
Behavioral and skills assessment tools enable recruiters to screen their candidate pool further based on their personality, aptitude and skills. This reduces the time-to-hire and improves the quality-of-hire, enabling companies to hire the most skilled and culturally aligned talent as well as saves significant recruiter and hiring manager time and effort.
#7 Video interview tools
A luxury prior to the pandemic, this category of tools was upgraded to a must-have status soon after. It brings together candidates, recruiters and hiring managers in an efficient and productive way, enabling live or pre-recorded interviews based on their convenience. These tools also integrate easily with other ATS, assessment and productivity tools. SHRM data shows a surge in video interview preference. In 2021, 21% of respondents considered it the most effective method, compared to just 11% in 2020.
#8 Chatbot tools
Chatbots are integral to the recruitment process, helping improve engagement with candidates and influence the passive talent to take the next step. Easily integratable with company websites & other recruitment tools, they provide crisp and relevant automated information and help resolve candidate queries real-time, improving the candidate’s perception of the company brand.
A key criterion for hiring talent, these tools verify and validate education, identity, employment, criminal and civil cases, run drug checks as well as personal background checks.
#10 Onboarding tools
Cumbersome and labor-intensive, with a colossal number of forms, mandatory training with legal implications, an alignment to organizational structure & culture, onboarding can be a daunting task for recruiters. The onboarding tools provide a welcome relief to the recruiters in terms of online checklists, pre-onboarding forms, background checks, payroll, compensation & benefits.
4 Benefits of using employee recruitment software
The recruiting software and tools empower organizations to attract and hire the most qualified talent who are well-aligned with the organizational vision and values, helping drive exponential business growth.
The 4 top benefits of leveraging these tools are detailed below:
Recruiter efficacy
Recruitment tools automate and streamline administrative recruiter tasks, freeing their time to have meaningful conversations with prospective candidates. Augmented writing of JDs, automated screening of profiles, interview scheduling for candidates, query resolution, alerts and communication enhance candidate experience, helping drive higher conversions.
Strong company branding
A socially conscious, diverse, inclusive and bias-free workplace being a preferred choice of Top Talent of today, it is important to run social media recruitment campaigns aligning with that brand perception as well as invest in building diverse, inclusive, bias-free practices early in the recruitment cycle.
The recruitment tools, right from the JD writing ones to assessments, social media & networking help further the DE&I cause, building a strong brand image, prompting potential and passive candidates to apply for positions.
Attract Top Talent
A strong social brand with social media & networking tools amplifies talent reach, helping nudge passive and potential candidates to consider job opportunities with companies. The augmented writing tools boost the appeal and impact of brand content, helping attract exceptional talent.
The automation and streamlining of the recruitment life cycle using the various features of the recruitment tools drives efficiency into the recruitment process while significantly improving the candidate experience.
Candidate Experience
The ATS, CRM, Video interview & Chatbots tools rationalize the application process, screening, interview and further engagement with potential candidates, enhancing their experience.
The automated touchpoints, query resolution, alerts and reminders simplify and enliven the entire candidate journey, helping create a positive brand perception. This enables the creation of a talent community of passive and potential candidates, nurturing and engaging with them continuously, helping deliver targeted messaging and activate for any future opportunities.
10 Best Software or Tools for Recruitment
The stakes are high in the recruitment game and it’s time to roll up your sleeves. Before that, however, it is important to have your tool-kit ready.
The top 10 recruiting tools and software to up your recruitment game in 2022 are enumerated below:
#1 Hyreo
Hyreo is one of the best Recruitment CRM for enterprises and SMBs alike with deep conversational AI and virtual hiring capabilities. It is an award winning CRM platform with more than 4000 customers in the technology space across multiple geographies.
A feature-rich Recruitment CRM, it helps optimize recruitment effort and provides a clear and comprehensive view of the candidate journey all through the recruitment life cycle, helping forge long-term relationships with candidates. With its advanced reporting and data analytics, valuable insights can be drawn and key interventions made to promote a strong brand image.
Hyreo’s conversational AI chatbot system enables prediction of candidate intent to join with upto 80% accuracy. With the synergies achieved by an in-built nudge engine, a robust ticketing system, a powerful conversational AI chatbot system, and an automated content push engine, Hyreo can also automate up to 60% of recruiter tasks, significantly enhancing the candidate experience and thereby the company brand image.
#2 Lever
One of the top-rated ATS & CRM tools, it focuses on diversity and metric-based recruiting. It provides a complete applicant tracking system (ATS) and robust candidate relationship management (LeverCRM) platform in a single solution, with deep analytics on candidate journey and diversity.
It fast-tracks the DE&I strategies through simple and thorough data collection and reporting, facilitating the objective assessment of past and current candidate pools’ diversity and overcoming unconscious bias in hiring.
#3 BreezyHR
Breezy HR is an end-to-end recruitment software package for attracting and hiring great talent. Highly rated for its ATS, their services span from attractive job advertisements to making offers to candidates. It includes sourcing and managing candidates, scheduling emails and SMS messages, posting jobs, analyzing metrics and team collaboration. They enable better recruiter productivity and enhanced candidate experience by automating tedious tasks like pre-screening candidates, sending emails, scheduling interviews, and collecting feedback.
#4 SmartRecruiters
SmartRecruiters is highly rated for its Applicant Tracking System and Recruitment Marketing. It focuses on both candidate and recruiter experience, helping recruiters source, market, convert, track, collaborate, evaluate, offer and hire candidates. It attracts and sources exemplary candidates through appealing brand content on career sites and all social media channels.
It makes the recruiters’ life easy by making the application, interview and overall hiring processes transparent and simple to manage. It also enables companies to refine their hiring process by building a custom recruitment platform, integrating with HR systems to hire and onboard candidates efficiently.
#5 Greenhouse
Greenhouse is a top rated recruiting software and ATS, well known for its structured hiring and interviewing approach. Their products support companies throughout the process from recruiting, inclusion, onboarding, CRM and even hosting events.
Their top features are job posting, hiring process tracking, and candidate evaluations, with well-designed candidate interactions at every touchpoint. They optimize every aspect of hiring, amplifying recruitment team’s efficiency through automation and collaboration with a strong focus on reducing bias and improving diversity.
#6 AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is an all-inclusive social media management tool, enabling companies to stay organized & save time with publishing, reporting, monitoring and team collaboration tools. It is an easy to use Social Media Management Software facilitating intuitive publishing, social listening, insightful analytics & helping track social media ROI.
Its top features include engaging with candidates, listening to social conversations, publishing scheduled content, collaborating with other team members, tracking and reporting and building relationships with a target audience of candidates.
LiveChat is a complete customer service platform, enabling memorable chat experiences, qualifying leads, solving customer problems and anticipating & resolving customer queries. It is highly rated for its clean and user-friendly software for live chatting and its ability to integrate with more than 200 tools and CRMs, helping 25,000+ companies communicate efficiently with visitors on their websites.
#8 MeetUp
MeetUp is a networking platform that brings together people with mutual interests to learn and share their experiences with others. It serves as a great enabler with endless opportunities for people to create communities, learn new skills, start & grow their business, expand their network, test prototypes and even pitch to investors through online and in-person events. For candidates and recruiters, it’s a great way to meet potential candidates based on their skill sets and expand their network.
#9 HackerRank
HackerRank specializes in technical recruiting and is a leading technical interview platform to identify and hire developers from anywhere in the world. It serves as both a technical assessment and remote interview solution for hiring developers, creating a real world coding environment with questions and code analysis.
It is a powerful training and assessment tool, helping match developers to great companies. With more than 18 million developers on their platform, it helps technical candidates practice coding skills, prepare for interviews and get hired.
#10 EventBrite
Eventbrite is an online community of people searching for and hosting events. It serves as an excellent platform for companies to hold hiring events, job and career fairs. It provides an opportunity to meet and network with potential candidates in-person via marketing networking events and informational sessions about a company prior to their starting the application process, helping impress and influence them to become brand ambassadors.
Spark Hire is a top rated video interview tool and enables live and pre-recorded video interviews, helping companies interview to scale. The video interviewing platform fosters collaboration and objectivity in the hiring process by reviewing the recorded interviews and enabling a bias-free hiring.
With video messaging capabilities, this platform integrates with more than 30 applicant tracking systems and more than 1,000 productivity apps.
#12 BambooHR
One of the popular recruitment and onboarding tools, BambooHR, provides services from hiring and onboarding to payroll and performance. It employs a modern approach to hiring, with applicant tracking tools that improve everything from job posting to offer letters.
It also has an employee self-onboarding process with custom onboarding checklists enabling new hires to complete onboarding effectively and securely. It enables effective workforce data management with analytics and insights, with all employee information in a single, secure database, with powerful reporting tools.
Wrapping Up
Gone are the days when a strong brand and a good job post together were enough to attract and hire top talent. Now it is more about the social brand, the values that the company espouses and a clear articulation of the EVP that make or break the talent deal.
The recruiting software and tools are built on the philosophy of creating a customer-like experience for candidates and empower recruiters to nurture long-term relationships with the candidates. This facilitates building a rich talent community of highly qualified professionals who can be engaged for future opportunities. The tools help recruiters attract and hire top talent who are well-aligned with the organizational vision and values, helping drive exponential business growth.
Recruitment tools and software enable recruiters to find and source qualified candidates quickly and efficiently. There are different types of recruiting tools available that help create job posts, screen and sort applications, conduct assessments, interviews and onboard potential candidates quickly. Some of the recruitment tool types are as follows: JD writing tools Applicant Tracking Systems Assessment tools Video interview tools Onboarding tools
What tools do recruiters use to find candidates?
Recruiters leverage tools to streamline their hiring, boost their productivity and lower costs. It enhances candidate experience and builds a strong brand image too. Most recruiters use the below tools to source high quality talent: Job boards & career sites Job aggregators such as LinkedIn, Indeed Applicant Tracking Systems Networking tools such as MeetUp, EventBrite
What is ATS tool for recruitment?
An ATS, Applicant Tracking System, is an applicant repository, workflow automation and compliance tool which enables recruiters to centrally collect and manage applications through all the recruitment stages. In addition to streamlining the recruitment process, it serves as a selection tool, scanning resumes using keywords and phrases to select potential candidates with specific skills, expertise and qualifications. Some ATS also help recruiters create attractive career landing pages, job applications and postings, sharing them on social media, career sites and company websites, helping attract and engage top talent.
What are 5 sources of recruiting job candidates?
Recruiters rely on diverse talent sources to find and attract potential candidates. Some of the key sources of recruiting job candidates include: Job boards or career sites Social media such as LinkedIn & Facebook External hiring agency Talent marketplace (job posting & hiring of internal talent) Employee referrals
What is CRM in recruitment?
A recruitment CRM (candidate relationship management) is a relationship platform based on the philosophy of creating a customer-like experience for candidates. It helps streamline the recruitment process and enables hiring professionals to build and maintain long-term relationships with the candidates, regardless of the final outcome of the interview. It facilitates the creation of a talent community of passive and potential candidates who can be engaged for any future opportunities.
