The last 7 years have seen significant innovation in the recruitment space, as well as companies and individuals being innovative. The truth is that not all innovation brings the improvements they promise.
For example, take the fixed price multi-posting solutions that have emerged in their hundreds in the last few years. On the surface and to the untrained eye, they all look to provide comparable services and solutions.
However, when you look at their performance, there is a gulf of difference between the outcomes of the majority that struggle to fill more than 25% of the jobs advertised and the minority that successfully fulfil more than 50% of the campaigns posted on them. The challenge is to see past the marketing and BS, and get to the truth about what they can actually do.
Many of these systems have integrated 3rd party tools and so you are potentially looking at several recruitment solutions in one. Take parsing for example, which is often advertised as a feature on many of these sites. Now for those of you who are unaware of what parsing is, it is basically a software solution that segments data and populates it into a specific field within a database.
Parsing software can also be used on CVs and job adverts to identify matching key words and phrases to generate a score that places the applicants into order of suitability. However, the range of parsing solutions out there varies dramatically from market leaders, like Burning Glass, to inferior products that simply don’t work.
Market fragmentation
In the UK alone there are around 5000 job boards, hundreds of social media channels (and an equal number of Social Media experts), hundreds of fixed price solutions, dozens of aggregators, dozens of PPC providers, hundreds of databases, tons of data-mining services, psychometric tools, behavioural tools, Social profiling tools and video profiling, and much more.
My first recommendation to anyone that wants to establish what the best tools are out there, is to first list your company and personal objectives, because by determining exactly what you want to achieve, you can start to think about what tools and services can help you to achieve them, and this will also encourage you to evaluate the effectiveness of the tools and services that you are already using.
For example, your primary objectives might be to reduce recruitment costs, by reducing your dependency on agency recruiters, or you might want adopt a more efficient system for managing your recruitment activity or improve the quantity and quality of candidates applying for your vacancies. If you are interested in receiving a more comprehensive list of the primary objectives that companies set themselves as part of an improvement program, then inbox me on LinkedIn, and I will be happy to share a document that I have on this.
If you are open to utilising multiple solutions, you will need to accept that each job potentially requires a different combination of solutions, but there will be some tools and services that will be appropriate for all your requirements, and these are the ones you might want to start with.
You can make the process easier for yourself by breaking the recruitment lifecycle down into 3 stages and then research, review and trial each of the tools that can potentially help you to meet your objectives for each stage of the recruitment process.
Where does the talent live?
Stage one of the recruitment process is all about the talent attraction. Choose the job posting and advertising solutions that are most appropriate to your vacancy. Job board advertising is still by far the most effective way to attract applicants, and choosing which ones to use can be made simpler by searching in Google for the job title and location to get a steer on where the applicants are most likely to go.
If job boards are not working for you (and there are a lot of options for you to try), then you might want to consider aggregators like Indeed, LinkedIn or social media sites like Facebook. Senior positions and hard to fill roles deserve to have a larger budget and may require more investigation into the potential solutions.
Stage two is all about campaign management and to execute this effectively you will need to find a platform that you can operate everything from, whether is a CRM, an ATS or a Recruitment Management Platform.
I would personally look for something that is cloud based and ensure that there is the flexibility to integrate other tools into it (quickly and at minimum cost), especially skills assessment, competency based and screening tools. It needs to perform all the functionality of an applicant tracking system and have the ability to generate reports so that you can measure performance.
A good parsing software will help reduce administration time and a good selection of pre-integrated tools is something to look out for. For SME’s in particular, avoid long contracts and up-front fees until you have trialled the system and are satisfied that it is going to meet your objectives.
Choosing the right platform is probably your biggest decision, but is central to achieving a best in class status for your recruitment activities, and when you get this bit right, selecting other tools and tactics that can work within it becomes a lot easier.
The screening stage
Finally, the third stage of the recruitment lifecycle is about due diligence and the screening and final selection of applicants.
There are lots of tools to consider, that can assist you here. In particular, for customer facing roles, you might want to look at video profiling technology and to ensure that you recruit the right cultural fit, consider using behavioural assessment tools. Before moving to offer you can utilise ID, background and reference checkers.
I realise that there are lots of tools, technologies and methodologies that I have not mentioned in this article, but I hope that this articles succeeds in giving a reasonable and simplistic overview of what the recruitment technology landscape looks like and provides food for thought about how to go about identifying and selecting the best recruitments tools, especially for anyone that finds the market confusing.
