A Checklist for Being the Perfect Recruiter - Talentnow RecruitX

In today’s tug of war for talent, it has become quite a chaotic environment for the recruiters. If you are a recruiter the present job market scenario can be quite a challenge for the recruiters and there is nothing a guide book that can solve all your problems instantly. You can be an organized recruiter with some of the most promising strategies, but sometimes you would require some help to guide you in the right direction. Here are four things that you must consider to become a flawless recruiter:

Know Whom You Are Hiring

This consideration is one of the most obvious ones, but this is a much difficult task to accomplish than just saying. It is important to get a suitable candidate for an opening right from the start because there are chances of employee turnover in the initial 45 days of employment. So in order to ensure that you are hiring the right person, as a recruiter you need to:

• Ensure that your job descriptions are very realistic and clear.
• Get knowledge of their future plans and goals, not just their current skills. You should hire someone who sees a future with you and is not just a quick stint.
• Focus on the desired soft skills of the prospective candidate such as leadership and management, nature, or emotional intelligence and their technical capabilities.
• Allow the candidate to ask their queries and be honest with your answers. If you want to accurately represent the job as well as assess their curiosity and attraction to the role.

Employee Brand

Next, you should consider whether your company’s brand image is compelling enough to attract talent and retain them. Every job seeker wants to join organizations which essentially serve them as an alter ego of themselves like similar missions, vision, values, and goals for the future. In order to attract top talent, companies must have something more than just offering a competitive salary and employee perks and employee brand being one of them. In fact, according to some study it has been found that more than 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before they can even fill out the job application form.

The career site of your company page especially functions as the showcase of your unique company culture and employers brand. Here are a few things that you must keep in mind while telling your company’s story through your career site:

• You must boost up your employment branding. The moment job seekers take a look at your company’s career site, understand your company identity, personality, and values must be crystal clear to them almost instantly. If there is not enough engagement about your brand fully incorporated into your career site, then there is a chance that the potential candidates might move somewhere else.
• Try to tell your company’s story visually. One of the most important things that your career site can complete is to provide a visualization of the company’s life, not just simply the work life at your company but the human side as well. Photos, illustrations, videos, and social media feeds can help you shape the story about the culture of your company, work atmosphere, and the varied opportunities that you can offer to your prospective clients.

Candidate Engagement

In the United States, the unemployment rate fell to 3.7% in October 2018, according to the reports if the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record that has been comparatively lowered since December 1969. The job market of the present era is a candidate-driven environment; where young job seekers especially prefer to be a part of only those company cultures where they will have ample scope of being acknowledged and required encouragement for growing.

An effective and continuous candidate recruiting strategy must encompass a new focus for the recruiters and hiring managers so that they can deeply engage with the prospective candidates in meaningful ways.

Following are the two primary requirements for continuous candidate engagement:

• You must support every stage of the candidate journey, from a successful onboarding session. It should follow a single source of truth that would span the expanded recruiting process starting from the recruitment marketing to the hiring experience and even the new employee engagement process.
• Enables the facility of deep engagement with candidates at the right time with the right message that will support meaningful experience for every prospective candidate. This initiative creates a brand consistency at every situation of the candidate like the: career website, marketing campaigns, hiring, onboarding.

Applicant Tracking System

Make technology is your friend like with the help of an efficient ATS system in just a few clicks; you can have the competitive edge you will need to streamline your entire hiring process. By adopting technology as your aide you will gain the ability to:

• Automate repetitive tasks.
• Zero in on the best candidates.
• Attract more candidates by making the application process simple.
• Track every recruitment aspect you have with every candidate.

Rare talent of talented people often might not appear on the resumes and which is one of the biggest challenges of every hiring department. Recruitment software can automate many such screening functions like searching for unusual keywords and expand their searches by including social media tracking apart from integrating with third-party employment agencies. Using social media platforms, this software can look for behavioral patterns, and the kind of products and websites interested and potential job candidates can be found.

Still Not Successful…Remember These Tips

As a recruiter, you will face certain challenging situations when things will not work as you have imagined. Such scenarios you make you feel unlucky might due to losing a great candidate or due to budget cuts, or the lack of communication from a hiring manager. So always keep the following things in mind

Keep your efforts consistent and it will surely pay off. If you continue your efforts consistently to reach out to a candidate or a hiring manager via text, email, voicemail or even networking sites, the message will surely be heard. While things might not be according to you at that time, candidates will personify you as someone who cares about them due to your consistent efforts. This will pay off for you eventually in some time. Though it might not be immediate, but it will certainly pay off!

Next is patience and positivity there can be numerous scenarios like a candidate who went rogue, or negative interview feedback, or a drastic change in expectations about compensation. Whatever the case may be, always stay positive. Your message the prospective candidates will have more meaning and they will come off more professional and trusting than had you sent it immediately!

4 Ways in Which an ATS Can Help Improve Candidate Experience

As a recruiter, you must probably know that it is increasingly getting very important than ever to engage candidates and give them a positive candidate experience. But most of the recruiters are perplexed on how to provide this positive candidate experience to the candidates or how to provide real-time experience to the expectation of the candidates. An applicant tracking system (ATS) can be of great help in such a situation. So here are five ways by which ATS can directly influence the candidate experience.

1) An ATS can send Text messages to engage your candidates

If you want to reach out to the shortlisted candidates easily, it is better to reach out to them through the modes they use the most which are mobiles and you can either place a call or send a text message. But if you have an urgent message to communicate to your candidates, a text message is undoubtedly one of the easiest and guaranteed ways to confirm their receipt.

Studies show that while email has an open rate of 20 percent, text messages have a much higher open rate which is 98 percent. A good applicant tracking system like RecruitX offers SMS integration so that you can send text messages promptly to keep your shortlisted candidates engaged. Some ATS provide an added bonus, and that is to track your text activity as part of your communication history with the candidate.

2) ATS Personalizes your emails

If your email starts with, “Dear candidate” it is a clear sign that you hardly care for your candidates. Most of the recruiters are of the opinion that one of the greatest enemies of good communication with the candidate is time. Though as a recruiter you might want to write great personal letters to every candidate, to do so for every individual candidate at the suitable frequency would take you thousand lifetimes.

The solution for such a situation is to use an ATS that has the feature of mass mailing tool. The mass mailing function allows you to reach out as many candidates as you want with one message. A good ATS further uses the data from your database so that you can personalize each message without any extra effort.

3) Reach out to the candidates at the right time with an Applicant Tracking System

A major part of the candidate-recruiter relationship depends on time. An applicant tracking system is enabled with predictive or artificial intelligence that takes out the prediction work on your part so that you can reach out to candidates in the required time.

4) An ATS helps in streamlining the onboarding process

The candidate experience does not only end with placement it rather it starts with it. Like the onboarding experience of the candidate, if it is miserable, he or she will remember it throughout their life. There are a lot of things that can go wrong during the onboarding process. Communication with the candidate can die down or the paperwork can also slow down during the process and in a worst case, candidates will withdraw joining in the period between the offer roll out and the start date. Using an ATS for the onboarding integration to get rid of the paperwork that can make starting a new job less difficult is the best suggestion for the recruiters.

3 Ways of Creating a Paperless HR Department

Summary - Using paper is costing you time and money. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are the ways you can make your HR team fully paperless, organized, and efficient and more time-saving. And, with more time to spare, you can focus on staff and retaining that top talent you sourced.

The paperless workplace as a trend is gaining a lot of and a lot of traction. According to a survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), seventy-seven of time unit departments have gone paperless, and as a result, the HR department has been reported to become more efficient. From being environmental to being cost-effective every business irrespective of its sizes can get benefitted with this switch from paper and ink to digital and cloud solutions.  But whereas the paperless trend is gaining traction, there’s still much to achieve. If you’re a corporation owner considering on this massive move here are a few simple and practical steps to help you get started.

1.                   Automate your HR processes - Make your workflows, documents, and signatures digital. An automated HR work system will allow you to automate burdensome, manual processes. Take the hiring method, for instance, it is paper intensive and requires loads of approvals. Many time unit advancement systems have a problem and drop interface, so you can easily create or edit a recruitment process at the click of a mouse.

You can additionally convert position descriptions, offer and acceptance letters, and contracts into an electronic format. The system can mechanically route time unit work to managers for approval and send letters to candidates at every stage of the hiring method. Staff and candidates will then read, edit, and sign-off on documents electronically. Applicant Tracking System is one such tool that will help in creating a paperless HR Department.

2.                   Implement Environment-Friendly Systems That Encourage Less Paper Usage - The average employee uses up to 45 sheets of paper every day. Document printing takes up concerning ten % of IT prices in most organizations. And then there are document storage and disposal prices, along with postage and courier expenses (if they need to be shipped). Reducing paper use doesn't solely save on prices and house; there also are large gains in potency. These can be achieved by harnessing the power of the cloud. Transitioning to cloud permits workers to make and access existing documents anytime, anyplace with any device.

3.                   Embrace the HR cloud - The future is the cloud. Many human resources departments are already adopting cloud-based time unit tools to manage and store worker files. The reason is cloud document management systems save everything electronically, giving HR management access to documents anytime, on any of the internets enabled device, and all at in one single place. Cloud storage software like DropBox, as well as Applicant Tracking System (ATS), are making the need for physical file-keeping obsolete.

With savings in time and price, as well as increased document security, your employees, and your business as a whole will benefit from making the switch to a paperless HR department. By following the steps printed on top of, you'll be able to get your document overload in check and become a stronger, a lot of economical Human Resources department which would even increase your employee retention rate.

5 Candidate Sourcing Strategies For Modern Recruiters

As a recruiter you always wish for talented candidates to come across your job posting. But, in this candidate driven market where most of the talented candidates already have a job there is a huge possibility that the right talent might be interested working in your organization but is just unaware about the vacancy. This is why traditional candidate sourcing from job boards don’t always work.

Most recruiters have backup plans when it comes to sourcing candidates. But, even after keeping multiple contingency plans for sourcing candidates, the results are not always encouraging because traditional candidate sourcing methods are getting obsolete. There is a need for a creative and proactive approach to create a breakthrough sourcing idea. With more attention to passive sourcing coupled with a change in recruitment strategy from requisition style sourcing to community building, you can select the best candidates for the vacant position.

So does your candidate sourcing strategy need an overhaul? To find out that answer you need to dig deeper and ask these questions:

• Are you limiting your candidate sourcing and attraction strategy to posting job descriptions on job boards?
• Are you using the same strategies again and again in the hope that it will lead you to better results?
• Are you avoiding to learn about new sourcing strategies and methods?
• Are you overly dependent on manual process for all your work?

If the answer to most of these questions is yes, then there is a need for you to overhaul your candidate sourcing and attraction strategy.

To help you in the process, in this ebook, we have discussed 5 candidate sourcing strategies that every modern recruiters must adopt.

Just fill out the form on the right and download this ebook now!

Note:-  This article was originally published on – https://www.talentnow.com/5-candidate-sourcing-strategies-for-modern-recruiters/

5 Recruiting Strategies to Fill Crucial Roles

Recruiting for crucial roles in an organization requires more than just scrutinizing piles of resumes. It is true that you want to fill these roles as soon as possible, but for that you need a fresh approach and updated strategy.

Most of the recruiters across the globe miss out on opportunities to fill crucial roles. The best way to deal with the situation is to first understand why these roles are important. It can be that your organization is in dire need of a marketing manager to run the marketing department or a data scientist to scrutinize the big data that is lying in your organizational floor for months. Once you understand the requirements in a better way you will be in a better position to fill these positions.

But, traditional recruiting techniques like job boards advertising alone will not suffice in filling these roles. You will need to combine these along with modern approaches like tapping into employee networks and building online strategies.

Given below are 5 recruiting strategies that can help you in this regard.

1. Look for the right candidate internally in the organization

Often recruiters are guilty of moving to the external market far too quickly, even before considering someone in-house that can be the perfect fit for the crucial role. Although, the current employee might not be the exact match to your job specification the least you can do is to train him/her quickly.

The key is to select such an employee who has an inside information on how your business works and the critical aspects of the position being filled. One benefit of recruiting an employee internally is that it motivates them to carry on in your organization in case they were contemplating on leaving.

2. Use employee referrals

It has been researched and found that employee referrals are one of the most powerful sources of finding candidates for crucial roles, or any role for that matter. The people referred by your current staff typically are of higher quality, close quickly and stay in the organization for a much longer time period.

3. Be creative when creating job descriptions for the crucial roles

Never use old job descriptions while trying to create an advert for a crucial position. Contemplate on the different aspects of the position to be filled and the way it is going to evolve in the future. Also mention the benefits that the candidate can expect when they join your organization for the vacant crucial position like the company perks, career advancement opportunities and interesting projects to work on in the near future. Enumerate the key competencies and experience that are non-negotiable and which areas are desirable but not mandatory.

Never prepare a long list of essential requirements as it will drive good candidates away from applying for the position. Always mention the pay scale in line with the market rate as candidates will not bother to apply for a position where the salary is a secret.

4. Be flexible while trying to assess the talent of the candidate

As a recruiter, sometimes you can use pre-decided criteria for rejecting a candidate. But that is not the wise thing to do. Suppose, there is a vacancy for a social media manager in a chemical manufacturing company. A lack of experience in a chemical manufacturing setup should not be the reason enough to reject that candidate. Rather, you should look for a candidate who has a wide array of experience as a social media management expert across industries. That way they can bring in fresh perspectives on top of the best practices and learning from the other domains.

5. Use social media to your advantage

If you are worried that your job description will not get relevant views on relevant job boards, you can utilize social media platforms to spread the word about the vacancy. Publish the job descriptions on your official Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter feeds. Also, find whether there are any local forums or business groups where you can share your job description. This can be quite effective if your candidates are based locally.

You can even ask your employees to spread their word on their own social media networks to attract great talent for crucial roles by giving them an incentive for any candidate who gets recruited and stays in the organization for a longer run.

Note:- This article was originally published on – https://www.talentnow.com/5-recruiting-strategies-to-fill-crucial-roles/

7 Biggest Recruitment Challenges faced by Modern Recruiters

According to various recruitment stats,  attracting top quality candidates is the biggest challenge of recruiters and HR managers today. In this era of low unemployment rate coupled with ever-changing needs of the job market, talented candidates are the real kings and the ultimate power rests in their hands. Today, candidates have the upper hand of selecting the organization they want to work for as they have multiple offers in hand. This creates an atmosphere of intense competition all around among recruiters to pitch in the best candidates for their clients.

In this war of talent, organizations are guilty of using outdated recruitment strategies coupled with their inability to understand the changing needs of the candidates making the recruitment process even more difficult for them.

Gone are the days when recruiters used to place a job description on job boards and hope that the vacant position will be filled automatically. Today, there is a requirement of much more active participation from them. In this info graphic we have looked at the prominent challenges that modern recruiters have to deal with, supported by relevant statistics.

1. Failure to attract talented candidates

In this candidate-driven market where candidates are approached by multiple recruiters it becomes very difficult for recruiters to attract talented candidates. The top candidate that you have been trying to pitch might not be around when you finally decide to extend the offer after several weeks of interviews. Delay in the hiring process is killing the recruitment process, thereby making you lose out on top talent. Reducing time-to-hire also becomes a very difficult ask as you are juggling with multiple candidates at the same time and the follow-up interviews take a lot of time to set up.

2. Lack of understanding between the recruiters and hiring manager

Lack of communication and understanding between recruiters and hiring managers can cause lot of problems in the recruiting process, including inability to identify the right skill sets in the prospective candidates or deciding on the best channels for sourcing the right talent.

3. Retaining Millennials in the workforce for a longer period of time

Millennials are starting to dominate the work sphere as the baby boomers start to retire. The peculiar thing about millennials is that they love technology and tend to favor their personal needs more than that of the organization they work for. They long for open communication & regular feedback. The challenge for the recruiters is that these Millennials have the tendency to do job hopping that increases their workload as they have to search for candidates for the same positions more frequently.

4. Inability in using data effectively

Most of the recruiters today are well-versed in using technology tools to their advantage, but they do not have the ability to effectively use data. It is of paramount importance for recruiters to be able to employ the data to make better recruitment decisions and enhance their processes. But that is hardly happening.

5. Difficulty in balancing the speed of hire with quality of hire

Recruiters face one of their biggest challenges when it comes to balancing the speed of hire with quality of hire. Although you want to recruit a candidate as soon as possible, there is always an urge to get the best talent possible which usually takes time. Increasing the recruitment speed is perhaps one of the hardest tasks for the recruiters.

6. Lack of efficiency during the recruitment process

Most of the recruiters waste their valuable time by working on unnecessary and ineffective administrative tasks which can result in duplication of efforts. In particular, tasks like sourcing potentially talented candidates and reviewing their resumes should take hours and not days. Many recruiter spend time on these administrative tasks can be utilized in sending a candidate for final selection to the client. This has led to the increasing use of applicant tracking systems by recruiters.

7. Failure to provide superlative candidate experience

If recruiters are unable to provide superlative candidate experience during the hiring process it can create a bad impact on the overall corporate branding of the organization. Recruiters have to end the hiring process properly with candidates, even if they are rejecting them. If you are not doing that it will have a negative impact on creating a talent pool for the future.

Note:- This article was originally published on – https://www.talentnow.com/7-biggest-recruitment-challenges-faced-by-modern-recruiters/

5 Recruiting Trends to Follow in 2018

Hiring talent has become quite difficult in today's candidate driven market. With the global unemployment rates being at the lowest in several years, it is time for recruiters to dump their old recruiting ideas and come up with some innovative methods to lure talented candidates to join their organization. It is therefore no surprise to find that technology usage by recruiters has increased in the current year fuelled with data analytics and adopting of innovative interview methods being the top trends that are playing a vital role in the recruitment field.

Let us now look at some of the top recruiting trends to follow in the current year:

1. Total focus on hiring a diversified workforce

Innovative organizations understand the critical aspect of hiring diverse people in their workforce. Today, diversity is directly correlated with the organizational culture and financial performance. According to a research conducted by LinkedIn, 78% of organizations prioritize diversity to enhance the culture and 62% do so to boost financial performance. It has been observed that by including diversified workforce organizations can reap the benefits of being more productive, more innovative and more engaged.

Walgreens, Lever and Pandora have already made meaningful efforts towards hiring a diversified workforce and have achieved great results. We expect this trend to only grow from here and there would be no surprise if we see more and more organizations following the examples set by these organizations in the near future.

2. Rise in technology investments

In order to manage, a higher volume of candidates, improve operational efficiency and maximize revenue margins, more and more organizations will require tools that save their time and ensure precise data on candidates. This has resulted in many global organizations to take the assistance of applicant tracking system to track candidate activity and employ CRM system for business development. In the future, organizations will also realize the importance of having an integrated job board and email templates in the recruitment software resulting in rise in technology investments in the current year as well in the year 2019.

3. Using innovative interview methods to access candidates in a better way

Although traditional interviews are going to stay here they have proved to be ineffective when it comes to reading candidates completely. To combat subconscious bias and reduce the undercut of important information more and more organizations will be using innovative interview methods to assess the candidate. This includes the use of online soft skill assessment, conducting job auditions, casual interviews taking place in a relaxed environment like a restaurant, using virtual reality to test the candidates in a simulated 3D environment and conducting video interviews to save the time of the candidate.

4. The growing role of analytics

It is normal for recruiters to churn out numbers to track the candidates. But, in the current year with the amount of data available and the speed at which it can be analyzed it can be used to predict hiring outcomes. With the help of artificial intelligence and analytics, it is possible to make smart recruiting decisions. In the near future, we expect organizations to develop talent intelligence strategy on the basis of analytics and artificial intelligence for informed hiring decisions.

5. Increased use of social and mobile recruiting

Today, every other person has a mobile device and access to social media. During the current year, more and more organizations are using social and mobile recruiting as a part of sourcing great talent. But, few of them have still not adopted these recruiting strategies for hiring. In the current year and next, expect organizations to invest heavily in social and mobile recruiting efforts.

Are you ready to turbo charge your recruiting efforts by staying on top of these recruiting trends in the current year?

Vivek Asrani is a content specialist at Talentnow RecruitX, a world class Applicant Tracking System built for staffing agencies. Vivek writes about the various aspects of recruitment technology.

Employer Branding: The Definitive Guide For HR Pros | Talentnow RecruitX

If you rewind time to a decade back, only a handful of HR executives gave much consideration to the term “employer branding”. Today, as the recruitment market has become more sophisticated and high quality talent more difficult to find, HR executives are getting aware that they cannot simply rely on a strong consumer brand to recruit talented individuals. It is time for organizations to seek out the human capital that will make them a class apart from their competitors. As a recruiter, you need to understand specifically the career desires of the talented candidates and then effectively tell the story of what it is like working for your organization.

Forward thinking organizations are now understanding the importance of leveraging all means possible to attract and retain top talent. With platforms like Linkedin and Glassdoor you have the potential to highlight the power of your employer brand and showcase its attractiveness to potential employees. It has been researched and found out that 8 out of 10 employers cite employer branding as important or very important. This makes it imperative for you to develop a business strategy around the employer brand to attract top quality talent.

According to the US Department of Labor, the average cost of bad hiring decision can be equivalent to 30% of that individual’s first year potential earnings. It has been observed that most organizations spend less than 10 hours with a job candidate before extending an offer of employment. Yet, they will end up spending more waking hours with this person at work than they do with their own families at home.

Your employer brand is your first opportunity to allow potential candidates who don’t fit your organization’s culture to opt out. By clearly defining an employer brand, you encourage only those candidates who have a high cultural fit with the organization, encouraging greater productivity, increased levels of engagement, higher rates of retention and superior bottom line results.

But what exactly is employer branding and how do you, an an employer or HR decision maker go about building your employer brand? This question is what we have discussed at length in this ebook and prepared a handy guide for anyone who cares about winning the modern talent war.

Here’s what you will get with this ebook.

• What is employer brand?
• Importance of building an employer brand
• Debunking the myths associated with employer branding
• Steps to build a strong employer brand
• Implementing your employer branding strategy
• Measuring the effectiveness of your employer branding efforts
• Pitfalls to avoid while building an employer brand

Download this ebook now and upgrade your knowhow on, currently, the most potent weapon for the modern HR pro.

Note:- This article was originally published on – https://www.talentnow.com/employer-branding-the-definitive-guide-for-hr-pros/

Top 5 Recruitment Software in 2018

In this candidate driven market, HR professionals are always on the lookout for a recruitment software that streamlines the recruitment process making it more efficient and effective. When you are able to use a good recruitment software in the right way it will give a strategic advantage for recruitment marketing and enhance your employer branding. Needless to say, it will also help you to improve the quality of your hires which will ultimately result in improved candidate experiences. 

Due to technological advancement, there are lot of recruitment software solutions that can help you in data streamlining and candidate sourcing effectively. To help you select the best recruitment software for your organization, we have provided a list of 5 of the best such software.

1. Bullhorn

Bullhorn is the best recruitment software containing CRM that relies on a cloud-based platform. It has been the recruiting software of choice for the top recruiters to hire the best talent. The reason being, it integrates recruitment best practices right into the application, resulting in your clients to work smarter, make more placements and track their metrics to determine ROI. Some of the salient features of Bullhorn, include:

• Social sourcing
• Job posting
• Candidate sourcing metrics
• Candidate search
• Career page configuration
• Dashboard creation
• Workflow building
• Hiring processes tracking
• Scheduling
• Applicant data management
• Candidate evaluations
• Automated resume parsing
• Candidate-facing statuses
• Recruiting marketing
• Sourcing and candidate identification
• Job posting
• Screening and assessments
• Applicant tracking
• Onboarding
• Customization of unique processes
• Integration APIs
• Internationalization
• User, role and access management
• Performance and reliability
• Mobile user support
• Reporting
• A real-time user interface containing dashboards

2. Jobvite

It is a social recruiting and applicant tracking solution consisting of different modules, including:

Jobvite Refer

It uses social media platforms to search for potential candidates.

Jobvite Engage

It helps in creating talent pool of the candidates.

Jobvite Hire

It assists in automating applicant tracking and processing.

Jobvite Video

It enables on-demand video interviewing.

Some of the salient features of Jobvite, include:

• Social sourcing
• Job posting
• Candidate sourcing metrics
• Candidate search
• Career page configuration
• Forms library
• Provides electronic forms for employees to complete
• Allows new hires to sign forms electronically
• Perform background checks
• Offer letter approvals
• Offer letter templates
• Dashboards
• Workflow building
• Hiring processes tracking
• Scheduling
• Applicant data management
• Candidate evaluations
• Automated resume parsing
• Candidate-facing statuses
• Self-service portal
• Automated team introductions
• Provides compliance training
• Provides automated onboarding workflows
• Provides on boarding notifications
• Recruiting marketing
• Sourcing and candidate identification
• Job posting
• Screening and assessments
• Interview and offer management
• Applicant tracking
• Onboarding
• Time-to-productivity reporting
• Onboarding process reporting
• Customization of unique processes
• Integration APIs
• Internationalization
• User, role, and access management
• Performance and reliability
• Mobile support
• Reporting

3. BambooHR

BambooHR provides an effortless and integrated applicant tracking system (ATS) as a part of cloud-based HR platform. It has been specially developed for small and mid-sized businesses. This software assists HR professionals to concentrate their time and efforts on important tasks. It assists in administering all the aspects of an employee’s life cycle. Some of the salient features of BambooHR, include:

• Centralized employee database
• Accurate reporting
• Easy to use system
• Applicant tracking system
• Report generation
• Smart reminders
• Controlled Access
• Employee onboarding
• HRIS software
• HRMS software
• Performance management
• Absence management
• Applications management
• Bonus management
• Data Import / export
• Email invitations & reminders
• Employee lifecycle
• Employee portal
• Goal management
• Goal setting / tracking
• Multi-language
• SSL security
• Secure data storage
• G Suite

4. TalentNow

Talentnow is a technology leader in recruitment software and has helped several leading organizations seamlessly manage quality manpower recruitment. It provides a continued commitment to deploying cutting edge technology helping clients manage recruitment with higher predictability, and with more efficiency. Talentnow brings in strong & unmatched recruitment domain expertise, achieved by working with thousands of recruiters. Through this technology, it adds significant value to organizations to acquire the best manpower, which will define their future success. Some of the salient features of TalentNow, include:

• Job management
• Candidate management
• Client management
• Vendor management
• User management
• Analytics & reporting
• Integrations with 14 different applications
• Mass mailing functionality
• Integration with your corporate website
• Task management
• Appointment management
• Interview management
• Resume parsing 

5. iCIMS

iCIMS provides cloud-based talent acquisition solutions. It assists hiring managers and recruiters throughout the recruitment cycle by providing complete access to users during the entire hiring pipeline in a single dashboard. The great thing is that the dashboard can be configured and customized according to your likes enabling you to monitor job openings, recruitment data and application statuses. Some of the salient features of iCIMS, include:

• Assessments
• Background screening
• Billing & invoicing
• Candidate management
• Collaboration tools
• CRM
• Internal HR
• Interview management
• Job requisition
• Onboarding
• Payroll & commissions
• Reference checking
• Resume parsing
• Resume check
• Self service portal

Top 5 Staffing Agency Software in 2018

With the help of a good staffing agency software, it is possible for a staffing agency to find and manage candidates on behalf of corporate customers. It even aids in tracking all the interactions made between both candidates and corporate clients throughout the hiring process starting from job orders to payroll. Many of its features are similar to sales-related applications like candidate relationship management (CRM) tools and pipeline management capabilities. 

Even traditional HR related features like applicant tracking and sourcing tools can be found in it. A good software also includes self-service portals which assists candidates and corporate customers to access and share information, including resumes, job opportunities, cover letters, etc. It helps you find, interact with and evaluate candidates. Managers that supervise the recruiters are able to track and monitor the performances of their teams with the help of the right software.

But, with so many software available in the market, it becomes very difficult to select the best one. To help in this endeavor, we have provided a list of top 5 staffing agency software in 2018. This list is in no particular order.

Note: This list includes only software which are more suitable for staffing agencies than corporate recruiters.

1. Bullhorn

Bullhorn is the best staffing agency software consisting of a cloud-based applicant tracking and customer relationship management solution for small and midsize recruiting and staffing agencies. Some of the salient features of this software, include:

• Email integrations
• Social media integration
• Reporting tools
• Mobile recruiting
• Data storage
• In-built reporting and analytics capabilities
• Configurable dashboard
• Assists in tracking KPIs
• Passive activity tracking
• Management of business contacts
• Tracks candidates
• Post job openings
• Fill open positions

2. Jobadder

This staffing agency software provides a cloud-based recruitment management platform for staffing agencies and in-house corporate hiring teams. It can be assessed through a web browser on any internet-enabled device. Some of the salient features of this software, include:

• Job order management
• Match applications to jobs and track candidates’ progress
• Resume parsing
• Candidate searching
• Internal candidate searches
• Post jobs to a variety of job boards and social media websites
• Records candidates’ performance
• Manages candidate communication through phone, email and SMS
• Task management features including manage and prioritize tasks and set task completion reminders
• Integrated email plugins for Gmail, Outlook and Office for better management of contacts and communications
• Online training tools
• A website builder
• Online timesheets

3. TalentNow RecruitX

RecruitX is a SaaS based ATS product from Talentnow, which is built exclusively for recruitment agencies and staffing companies. It has the right combination of ATS, CRM and VMS features that help you win more clients and optimize your recruitment process - right from sourcing more and better candidates to making more submissions to closing more jobs. Some of the salient features of this software, include:

• Job management
• Candidate management
• Client management
• Vendor management
• User management
• Analytics & reporting
• Integrations with 14 different applications
• Mass mailing functionality
• Integration with your corporate website
• Task management
• Appointment management
• Interview management
• Resume parsing 

4. Zoho Recruit

This software has been created keeping in mind the needs of the staffing agencies. It is both a powerful recruiting software and a cutting-edge applicant tracking system that helps in streamlining the hiring process. Some of the important features of this software include

• Custom careers website creation
• Post to popular job boards
• Post jobs to social sites
• Resume parsing
• Search tools
• Resume preview without entering candidate’s profile
• Customize email templates
• Send SMS/ text messages
• Make calls
• G Suite integration
• Zoho Apps integration
• Zapier integration
• Assign roles

5. Avionte

This staffing solution software provides integration support between front office, back office and web portals to help staff members to access real-time data. This software needs to be used in the cloud. With the help of this software, you can gather and sort data about clients and employees like work-specific details and general requirements. It even provides performance metrics for branch operations, sales, corporate profitability and service. Some of the important features of this software include:

• Applicant tracking
• Resume generation
• Mobile searching
• Mobile sales application
• Sales pipeline management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Reporting
• Electronic invoicing
• Cash card integration support
• Payroll management
• Email integration with Microsoft Outlook 

How to Choose the Right Recruitment Software?

As a part of their hiring efforts most recruiters undertake the tasks of creating job descriptions, posting them on different job boards and social media platforms to get access to a wider range of talent pool. But, if they are not well-equipped to handle incoming applications in an organized manner, with the aid of a good recruitment software (or ATS), then the entire effort to attract top talent goes to waste.

But many recruiters are either unaware about modern recruitment software or don’t have the necessary budget to make use of a professional software. That is why a good and cost effective recruitment software is the need of the hour for recruiters in this candidate driven market. It boosts the recruitment efforts by streamlining social engagement, having an entire hiring workflow in a single integrated platform and sourcing. It also ensures that the candidate experience is superlative and that the internal hiring teams find recruitment an effortless task.

But, since getting a recruitment software is a huge decision for an organization, making one incorrect move can have an adverse effect on the entire hiring efforts put in by the recruiters. It can result in waste of time and money, lost talent and unhappy management. It can also lead to lots of frustration for the internal team due to their unsuccessful attempt to hire top talent.

To overcome this issue we have listed down 5 criteria that your recruitment software should meet.

1. Determine the exact use of a Recruitment Software in your organization

There are only a select few organizations that choose a software before making a full assessment of their needs and what exactly they want the software to do. A recruitment software can assist an organization in more ways than just screen resumes. Some of the other uses of an ATS include: sourcing of candidates, interviewing, reporting, communication with the applicant and job postings. Understanding the exact requirement of your organization, both current and projected for the future will help you to select the right recruitment software to meet your requirements.

According to Christy Hopkins, Human Resources Consultant and Writer at Fit Small Business, Choosing an ATS is important based on a few factors. First, what level of recruiting are you doing? If you are doing 10+ years experience recruiting or technical recruiting, you probably don’t need an ATS that also posts to job boards; you instead need one that integrates with LinkedIn and other ways to attract passive candidates. Next, you need to determine its purpose. Will it be active open positions, replacing current people, or creating a pipeline for future talent? If you need it for active positions, you will also want an ATS that posts to job boards and includes a customized careers website.

2. Integrates with other services

As a recruiter, you want your recruitment software to integrate with some other systems. Most of the times it would be an integration with your website so that you can source applicants directly from your corporate website. In other instances, you might want to connect your ATS with other business platforms, including social media accounts, email and CRM. This makes it critical to choose a tool that allows you to seamlessly integrate with different platforms.

A recruitment software that allows you to post jobs on your official social media channels, multiple job boards and on your career website with ease will be highly valuable tool for your hiring process, making it more streamlined and productive.

According to Roi Stone, Executive Vice President of TazWorks, “The goal of an ATS is to streamline your hiring process as much as possible, but that can’t happen if it doesn’t easily connect with your other software tools. Find out if they have an open API or what integrations are already built in so you can think about your employee management process holistically, rather than ending up with a fragmented system that doesn’t actually make your life easier.

3. Provides superlative candidate experience

Due to widespread use of technology, a recruitment software should have a great user interface and should be easy to navigate and use. There is no use of investing in a software that has a plethora of features, but has little real utility because of a clumsy interface.

A good recruitment software should have an intuitive design that makes it easier for recruiters to post job descriptions in an effortless manner and makes it easy for the candidates to apply for positions. It should also be easily accessible on a plethora of devices. In this age of mobile devices, responsiveness of the design is also critical.

According to Dorris Hollingsworth, President of Evergreen HR Group, “With current technology, most recruitment software will have the essential functions of retaining files, reporting, and candidate email communication. I focus on the candidate experience and the hiring manager experience in making my decision — you can’t afford to lose time and interest on either end of that process so a good user experience will increase both your pipeline and manager involvement. For high-volume recruiting (call centers, technicians, customer service), I look for a mobile application functionality to drive more traffic to the company.

4. Meets the compliance needs

It is crucial to select a recruitment software that meets the compliance needs. Recruiters and HR personnel spend sleepless nights worrying about legal compliances and there is a good reason for that. Failure to comply with the compliance can result in lots of extra paperwork and possibly result in your organization paying a hefty fine.

According to Lynnette Vollink, Director of Human Resources for automotive supplier Federal-Mogul’s Powertrain division, “An ATS should make it easy to stay compliant with the employment laws in the countries where the organization does business. We post to many different job boards across the globe and the ATS ensures we comply with varying labor laws in those countries, sometimes even in particular cities.

Conclusion

Choosing the right recruitment software is a time-consuming process as it should have all the requisites mentioned in this blog. However, whatever time it takes to get to the right software is worth it not only because a new software installation is a serious investment, but also because the right software can turbo charge your organizational growth by getting the right people on board.

To help you in your decision making we provide free trial of RecruitX, our recruitment software. You can signup for free and work with the product to see if fulfills the above criteria.