Recruiting has become a high-tech experience. Recruiting software, applications, and platforms are now a $14 billion business projected to expand significantly in the next few years.
There are now thousands of recruiting options available to employers. How do you choose what to use? Here’s a list of some of the top tools to add to your recruiting toolkit.
Data-Driven Tools
Many recruiting experts summarize their success with one word: data. New data-driven tools aggregate tons of tiny details into better hiring strategy.
Data tools don’t just help you decide where to find good candidates. They also provide deeper, richer information like:
- Rankings of hiring sources by success rates and speed-to-hire
- The best sources for short-term workers or long-term employees
- Where to find specific candidate types, like high-revenue salespeople
- Whether your advertisements are influencing application decisions
- Candidates’ previous employers most associated with your successful hires
Here are some data tools that provide these kinds of metrics: Lever, Ideal, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics.
Job Boards Turned Innovators
In the past two years, SnagAJob quietly became the #5 most-used job board in North America. It’s not a flashy tool, but at any given time it holds about half a million job postings and handles 80 million users.
Some recruiters discount sites like SnagAJob because they seem a bit old-fashioned. Not so fast! SnagAJob works better on mobile than its big competitors and dominates the hourly job market. When people - especially people under 35 - want to find an hourly job within hours, not days, they use SnagAJob.
Other job board companies that are becoming multi-platform innovators include Indeed, ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn.
Applicant Tracking Systems
It might be hard for a non-recruiter to understand the value of an applicant tracking system (ATS), but any seasoned recruiter just gets it. An ATS is a big database that keeps track of all your applicants, shows where they are in the process, holds scores and rankings, and helps you maintain regulatory compliance.
An ATS is like a personal assistant for a busy recruiter. It makes you - and your company - look good. A high-end ATS is constantly sending automated messages, following up with top candidates, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Here are some good ATS sources: Taleo, iCIMS, Workday, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters.
Personality Assessment Tools
Finding the right candidates isn’t just about sources and systems. There’s also a human element: the touchy-feely, hard-to-pin-down personality factor. Bad personality/culture fit is the #1 reason for fast turnover.
Many employers try to solve this problem through personality testing. But traditional testing has a checkered history of legal and ethical issues. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has brought lawsuits over biased testing.
Innovative personality assessment companies are overcoming these obstacles with science and technology. HackerRank, which is targeted at tech jobs, uses a data-fueled quizzing process to weed out bad developers and software engineers. OutMatch focuses on the science behind job fit and the behavioral aspects of hiring, especially for hospitality, retail, and sales.
Perhaps the most robust personality matching tool is GoGig. This tech tool reveals candidates’ hidden personalities through a mix of voluntary questionnaires, social media scanning, geolocation, and confidential chatting. If you’re not familiar with GoGig, a free 30-day trial might just reshape your entire hiring toolkit.
