Even though increased productivity represents a desirable outcome for any business owner, recruiter or a hiring manager it is often a slippery slope while dealing with potential burnout scenarios. Therefore, finding the right solution to such a challenge without compromising your own or your workers' stress levels and ultimately health becomes a struggle.
There are a number of tutorials and blogs out there giving advice for increasing recruiters' productivity levels. However, the majority of them come from the management perspective and are missing some concrete advice on how you as a recruiter or a hiring manager can leverage the software solution you are using and maximize your performance.
According to LinkedIn's “Future of Recruitment 2020” survey, a top priority for recruitment agencies over the next five years will be keeping pace with their company’s rapidly changing hiring needs. In order to meet such demands of the market, the statistics show that 86% of recruiters say that using an ATS has helped them hire faster.
Therefore, discussing all the ways in which smart use of your recruitment software can help you meet the needs of the market, inspired us to write an article that will help you start making faster and more effective hiring decisions starting today!
For recruiters to be more productive, it doesn’t only mean being faster at hiring, but also being able to create high-quality and meaningful work. Creating and nurturing relationships with existing and potential candidates or having a good understanding of every candidate that is in your database is what makes you more productive.
For this reason, we invite you to keep reading the blog and make sure you are doing everything you can with your software to maximize your potential.
Having one place where all applications and candidate data are stored and automatically generated might sound like a dream to some recruiters. Instead of having to go back and forth through multiple spreadsheets, hard copies of CVs, and all other exhausting work that makes your days messy and long, a simple login with an overview of all activities can be a true lifesaver. By having one database not only you can save a lot of time in searching for candidates but you can also rely on your software to be one secure place to which you can always come back to for any task.
Having a large database that contains all your contacts, current candidates, future talent, their contact information, professional information and every interaction you have had with them in the past, requires a powerful search tool in order to increase your productivity levels. Not only that your large database contains a sea of information, but the boolean search that it requires in order to search through, is oftentimes not really user-friendly and complicated. While a boolean search may be thorough if used properly, there is always some space left for wondering if you really included all filters that you wanted to and if the software really offered every candidate with specific attributes you were looking for. The advanced search tool based on AI technology allows you to simplify the entire process and search based on the keywords you are looking for. Even misspellings and minor mistakes in the query can mostly be recognized by the tool.
Therefore, in addition to the complex boolean search, finding candidates in your database as simply as it would be Googling for the restaurants near you, saves a lot of time, makes your day-to-day work more productive and ensures that your database has been entirely searched through.
Besides having all candidates in one searchable database, it is important to look into the possibility of having all information about one candidate in one place. Having such a possibility creates a wide range of benefits that make you more productive by being faster and performing higher quality work!
Here is a few scenarios that we think might be plausible and which can easily be handled by having a detailed candidate profile:
Did your company ever decide to create a new job opening and you are encouraging your employees to apply for those positions, but once they expressed their interest you realized that you don’t even have their CV stored anywhere?
Did you ever interact with a candidate and then a year later you reached out to the same candidate without even being aware of your previous interactions?
Did your colleague ever assess a candidate for a specific position - the candidate didn’t get hired, and by chance, you ended up assessing the same candidate again for a similar position?
Finally, did you ever make the mistake of contacting the same candidate as your colleague with redundant or contradictory information? (Yikes )
All these scenarios are taken care of with the help of recruitment software in a heartbeat. Your relationships with candidates for that matter become stronger, more meaningful, and personal, and your work more efficient!
Tracking candidates through all stages of the recruitment process and easily transferring them from one stage to another may include a lot of unnecessary work. By using Talent Pipelines to track your candidate's journey from one hiring stage to another and simply transferring them with a drag-and-drop system from let’s say, assessment to the interview stage, you are gaining a lot of valuable time. Just think of the work you put into getting from a large number of candidates to finally hiring one of them. The amount of paperwork and confusion that might appear can be overwhelming and extremely time-consuming.
One of the great things about using recruitment software properly is building relationships with your entire candidate database. Recruitment stops being just a means for hiring people when there is an instant urge for it, and becomes a strategic process of building long-lasting relationships. For this reason, we are listing the Talent Network feature as one of the aspects of the tool that you shouldn’t neglect.
More specifically, Talent Networks and Bulk emails enable you to continuously select groups of candidates and create specific communication for them. By doing so, you save the time you used to spend on reaching out to all candidates manually every time there was a need for hiring new staff. Additionally, a less obvious benefit for your productivity levels is the fact that you are building strong relationships with contacts that are only going to become future candidates by tailoring your messages specifically for each group. For this reason, leveraging this extremely useful aspect of the tool is what makes your hiring process in line with the sometimes tricky needs of the market.
As the cherry on top, we left the analytics part. Even though the name speaks for itself and by now most of us already recognized that the great value of digitizing work is oftentimes the ability to have access to analytics, we still couldn’t go without mentioning it. Powerful HR analytics enable you to look into the success of every step in the recruitment process and make valuable conclusions for the future. By implementing analytics and having an analytical mindset in hiring, your productivity and success become better and better with time.
Besides the technical aspects of the software that make your productivity flourish, we can’t finish the article without mentioning two aspects outside of the software domain which highly impacts productivity!
First and foremost, providing a good onboarding experience for recruiters is of utmost importance for their performance. This becomes so important when recruiting entails the everyday usage of various specialized software tools. Besides the fact that employees tend to stay longer at the company after having a good onboarding experience, making them feel more welcomed with a better understanding of the company - there is a direct productivity benefit for them as well. Since most of recruiters use software at their work, it becomes essential for them to have an onboarding process in which they will tackle all potential challenges that they might run into while working. Therefore, onboarding training improves the productivity and success of your recruiters.
In addition to onboarding, recruiters should be motivated to keep performing well. One of the techniques can be providing regular reports which consist of individual’s performance statistics in comparison to their colleagues and their own performance statistics from the past. These numbers give recruiters a clear overview of how they used to perform and how are others performing to maintain their drive for success.
To conclude, it is difficult to find the balance between maximizing productivity and keeping recruiters satisfied at their workplace. Just like everyone else, recruiters are also going through an ongoing struggle with burnout if not managed properly. However, implementing a recruitment solution in addition to offering a good onboarding experience and finding the right way to motivate your recruiters might go a long way!
