Talent acquisition is one of the most challenging strategies for any company trying to stay ahead of its competitors. However, it is ultimately what is going to lead to growth and development. Without the right people for the job, your company can say goodbye to its business dreams and goals.
Recruitment tools are an absolute must in this day and age. In this tech-savvy world, companies depend upon them to source the right talent. More traditional means of marketing have been replaced by the latest CRM software. Identifying your recruiting goals and challenges is the first and most important step towards purchasing the right recruitment tool.
Purchasing the correct tool or tested browser extension
There is a multitude of different things to consider when making a purchase, but starting with your goals and challenges should be the first. Take a moment to consider some broad goals and what your company wants to achieve. Do you want to get more applicants through career sites? Maybe you’d like to find other ways of job candidate sourcing, or you might have other more holistic goals like discovering better ways of approaching passive candidates, reducing your time to hire, or improving hiring workflows.
If you’re unsure, we’re here to help. That’s why we come up with this guide, identifying some of the most common goals and challenges, and taking you through every step of the process. Let’s find out more.
Candidate awareness
There are many stages in the recruitment process, and the candidate awareness stage is one of those that never stops! It encompasses communication about the job opening, plus making your candidate aware of your company’s employee value proposition and employer brand. Reaching prospective candidates is also part of the process. If you have leads in mind but aren’t able to get in touch, you could use tools such as the SignalHire to find verified email and phone contacts when visiting people’s social channels. What is even more convenient – there is a tested browser extension that allows you to do this only by clicking on the right panel of the screen. It’s important to know what challenges your company faces in this stage, as it will help shape the kind of recruitment software that you need.
Some common challenges include:
- Not having structured employee referral programs, i.e. not making the most of the employees your company already has, to source new talent
- An inability to automate multiple job postings on different boards at the same time
- Spending too long on job ad creation
- Not being able to find passive candidates and obtain their contact details
- Not having enough out there on social channels for job promotion
- An inability to search through existing candidate databases to source applicants from previous openings
- Not having enough employer branding ideas
Candidate consideration
The candidate consideration stage is one where you are trying to convince your candidate to choose your company and be their employer of choice. It’s a stage that is all too often overlooked when considering what recruitment tools to purchase. It is by no means an easy process, especially since candidates do more “shopping around” for jobs nowadays than ever before. Today, somebody looking for a job can find thousands of applications from even the convenience of their smartphone.
It is imperative to have a concise candidate engagement strategy for those candidates that have become aware of you. In the case of hard-to-fill roles, it’s even more crucial. If you’re not able to offer honest and engaging communication, along with useful content, you may find that candidates aren’t going to stick around for long!
Signs that you may need to think about this stage in the process:
- Not enough structure to your social media campaigns
- Your company cannot provide enough useful and engaging content for prospective candidates
- A lack of candidate relationship management strategy
- Limited email workflows and email campaign strategy
- Not enough events for engagement in the talent community
- A limited inbound recruitment strategy
Candidate interest
Does your business face any challenges when it comes to making candidates interested? It’s vital that once a candidate has seen or applied to your company’s job opening, you want to express interest in that job. How can you keep someone engaged and wanting to continue right up to the stage of job acceptance? It’s a challenge that will shape what kind of tools you’re going to use.
Does your company experience any of the following issues? If so, you might want to pay close attention to candidate interest.
- A badly designed site that’s not optimized for careers
- A site that is not optimized for SEO or mobile devices
- A site that lacks useful and engaging content that would help recruitment
- Application forms that aren’t user-friendly and take too long to complete
- A candidate communication strategy that is slow and ambiguous
The application stage
If you haven’t got a lot of job applicants, you’ll need a tool that can solve this issue quickly. After a candidate has done all the tests and ticked the boxes on your website, the challenge will be to convert them into an applicant. After attracting a candidate and convincing them that you will be their new employer, it is unfortunately all too often the case that a candidate could lose interest and go somewhere else. You’ll want to pay attention to the integration between tools and any platforms or software that you’re currently using. Can you integrate their output with your recruitment tools?
Here are some of the common challenges facing this stage:
- Complex and long-winded application forms
- Application forms that are optimized for mobile
- An inability to track new traffic, where it is coming from, as well as other statistics such as abandonment rate
- Your company doesn’t know why candidates are leaving the process
Candidate selection
This is the stage that begins when you have applicants and ends when you have your new hire. Even though you may have a high-quality applicant that is edging in the right direction towards the hiring process, a lot of companies fail to move applicants through the talent pipeline and make the conversion they need.
Are you facing any of these challenges? If so, you should consider this crucial stage in your recruitment tool purchasing decisions.
- It is difficult to triage and review applicants
- There is no centralized database of applicants and candidates, or the database is poorly managed and messy
- It is difficult to find a candidate’s profile
- There is no streamlined workflow on candidates
- You find it difficult to share information with other team members on candidates and a particular person’s process in the recruitment marketing funnel
- It takes time to schedule interviews with prospective candidates
- You don’t have an effective email campaign strategy
- There is too much bureaucracy, spreadsheets, and paperwork
The hiring stage
This is the final stage that you will need to consider. What challenges are you facing to get your candidate who’s been through all the stages up and at their computer working? For companies that use human resource management systems, it’s most important to be able to integrate these with other tools like ATS and employee management platforms.
The right recruitment software for your needs
We hope to have illustrated all the possible challenges that you need to consider when making recruiting tool purchasing decisions. Do you face any of these challenges, and to what extent? How do they align with your company’s goals? It is only after you can succinctly answer these questions that you will be able to consider what software is right for you. Pay close attention to goals and challenges – let the data and insight you gather shape your decisions. Good luck!
