Best Recruitment Tools in Simplifying Hiring

There is no getting away from the fact that an organization’s recruitment activities — from creating job specs and advertising roles to screening and interviewing candidates and onboarding successful hires — are often the most time-consuming and labor-intensive of all human resources (HR) processes. Recruitment tools have played an increasingly large role in the last decade, so let’s take a closer look at how they work and the benefits they can bring.

What is the role of recruitment tools​?

The purpose of recruitment tools is to simplify and streamline the tasks involved in an organization’s recruitment processes, improving consistency, accuracy, and quality.

The best recruitment tools have the potential to turn tedious and repetitive recruitment tasks into smooth and streamlined processes. 

Automating workflows to run without employee intervention means less time for the HR team spent on laborious administration and more on value-adding HR work. This can contribute positively toward the success of the wider business, such as coaching and mentoring employees or implementing HR strategies.

From a cost perspective, recruitment tools also have great benefits. Using them often results in the need for fewer man-hours as tasks can be automated. It is also likely that this automation can lead to improvements in the accuracy of data, and therefore reduce the error rate involved in recruitment activities.

Most useful best recruitment tools to simplify the hiring process​

Several great tools exist to automate and simplify the hiring process. Let’s take a look at some of the best programs out there:

1. Applicant tracking systems (ATS)

ATS recruiting software can be used to automatically manage candidates through the entire recruitment and onboarding process. ATS recruiting software can screen applications using predetermined keyword searches, assign candidates to vacancies, shortlist and arrange interviews with candidates and, crucially, provide a solid platform to communicate clearly and effectively with applicants throughout the whole process. This can improve candidate engagement and eventual recruitment success rates.

2. Recruitment marketing software

Recruitment marketing tools are ideal for supporting hiring managers to successfully advertise and promote current vacancies to attract the most suitable candidates. These tools also help build a strong and recognizable employer brand.

3. Candidate assessment and interviewing software

These recruitment tools enable HR teams to quickly and easily compare high volumes of applications and create talent pools of shortlisted candidates that fit the role profile well. Video interviewing software is a great way to interview candidates online via video. This method eliminates complicated interviewing arrangements for candidates in different locations, potentially speeding up the interview process.

4. Employee referral recruitment tools

This can be a useful way to promote harder-to-fill vacancies by asking employees to recommend candidates for roles.

5. Background checking software

There are often several checks that you need to carry out on potential employees, from referencing checking of previous employers to criminal records or qualifications validations. Background checking software is an efficient way of compiling and tracking these checks, as well as aligning them against a candidate’s record.

Compelling reasons for using a single best recruitment tool rather than standalone apps

So much change is happening so quickly in the recruitment tracker market. In light of this, many organizations have fallen into the inevitable trap of investing in several different platforms to manage each of their recruitment needs. This is inefficient and costly. Using one tool to carry out all of your company’s recruitment techniques has many benefits.

First, it means that all parts of the recruitment process can be aligned and integrated within one recruitment tracker, with streamlined and efficient workflows and vastly reduced margin for error. Ease of use for members of the HR team improves and processes are quicker and simpler to implement. 

Not to mention, there are inevitable cost savings that investing in a single recruitment tracker over multiple ones can bring.

The top 6 recruitment tools on the market

In addition to the existing recruitment solutions that have been around for a few years now, a batch of ultra-advanced recruitment platforms have sprung up, offering the most modern and up-to-date thinking in this area.

Here is a snapshot of the best:

1. Using AI for candidate screening

AI (artificial intelligence) can work in tandem with your existing ATS to pick out the most suitable candidates from a large pool of applications. It does this by analyzing your historical hiring decisions and applying that criteria to new candidates, grading them based on the skills, experience, and qualifications you value the most. 

AI in candidate screening has the potential to save your business significant time and money in the recruitment process. Skillate, Xor, and DeepSense AI are transforming the talent acquisition market with artificial intelligence. 

2. Making the most of candidate rediscovery

These recruitment techniques involve using AI as described above to search unsuccessful but shortlisted candidates for previous roles within your ATS quickly and painlessly. Thus, these techniques provide you with a new source of applicants that your business has already sourced. Ideal and Yello help businesses with intelligent rediscovery. 

3. Utilizing recruitment chatbots

Communicating quickly and effectively with candidates during the early stages of the recruitment process is vital to ensuring good candidate engagement and retention. Recruitment chat boxes can be a great way to provide real-time, on-demand conversations with applicants on simple issues such as FAQs or automatic interview scheduling, saving the recruiter time. AllyO, Olivia, and Brazen are best recruiting chatbots in the market today.

4. Software to reduce bias

Workforce diversity continues to rightly be a hot topic. The arrival of software designed to ignore candidate details that may produce unconscious bias, such as implied race or age, is a great way to improve the diversity ratio of an organization. HR solutions like Kissflow HR Cloud that take qualitative approach recruitment can reduce unconscious recruitment bias.

5. Highly targeted job advertisements

Tailoring your recruitment marketing to certain target individuals has been around for a while now. However, there is an increased appetite for software that can help to drill this down further and in a more automated way, such as by location, or even by individuals who have visited your company website in the past. Facebook, Glassdoor, Indeed, and other social job platforms enable targeted job advertisements.

6. Recruitment marketing software

This software is used to improve the brand awareness of your organization in the eyes of potential candidates by utilizing tools such as multi-channel use and candidate analytics. LinkedIn Recruit, SmartRecruiters, and Lever are some of the most common recruitment marketing tools.

How technology has improved the quality of time in the recruitment process​

​Relying on outdated processes such as using a manual recruitment tracker or paper-based techniques means that your highly skilled HR team are spending the bulk of their time updating basic information, carrying out manual data searches, and filing and coordinating by hand. The new generation of recruitment platforms provides a timely and low-cost method of improving the quality of your recruitment activities.