Whether you are part of a recruitment agency, we can agree that the competition to hire candidates is indeed fierce. Think about it for a moment. Everyone wants to get that one golden candidate to join their clients’ organization. But, the supply (qualified candidates) is insufficient to cater to the demands (employers).
Gartner concurs in its report that the competition for talent continues to rise significantly no matter what macroeconomic conditions look like. To be precise, half of the organizations interviewed are still expecting the battle to attract high-quality candidates to increase exponentially.
Having said that, it’s no surprise that today we still see many recruiters experiencing common recruitment challenges. They need to hire candidates faster and evaluate their skill sets. On top of that, they also need clear communication with candidates, teammates, and clients to achieve business goals.
In this article, we have collected seven common pain points for hiring teams. As a matter of fact, these obstacles are what our clients face and how they solve them using recruitment platforms.
Hiring Teams Are Facing These Pain Points
The challenges that we have mentioned before are just the tip of the iceberg in the recruitment process for most hiring teams. There is a lot more that happens in the background.
Typically, they need to post jobs on high-traffic job portals such as LinkedIn, Indeed, and Monster to source candidates. Next, after receiving applications, they need to screen CVs, ensuring that applicants fit their criteria.
After this, they create a job pipeline to manage candidates’ data - full name, location, skill sets, qualifications, and more. They use tools such as Excel or Google Sheets to organize all data in the pipeline. However, challenges may emerge as the organization scales and the hiring team is required to hire a large number of people in a short time.
First, most hiring teams are swamped with hundreds of resumes daily and must sort through all the applications manually. While recruiters do that, candidates are waiting for their response, and if there aren’t any updates, candidates will assume the recruiters are not interested and move to other companies.
Next, their recruiters’ productivity is affected because they spend so much time screening hundreds of applications in a day. Recruiters could have used the rest of their working time to establish connections with candidates. In other words, their hiring teams can send acknowledgement emails to candidates or schedule interviews with them rather than spending hours vetting applications.
In a recruitment utopia, you wish for everything to be simple and linear when it comes to hiring. All you have to do is post a job, find the candidate, and hire them. However, it is not as straightforward.
Let’s take a look at what obstacles many hiring teams typically face when it comes to hiring. Then, find out how they solve each pain point with recruitment platforms.
Pain Point 1: Posting Jobs Manually
Because of rapid digital transformation, recruitment today has gone entirely online. In fact, with job portals, potential candidates only need their smart devices to search for vacant positions, and even passive candidates create their profiles on these job boards. That being said, many hiring teams turn to job boards first when sourcing candidates.
Now, even though this seems like perfection for hiring teams to source and recruit talents, job boards have their downsides. Let’s put it this way. Recruiters who are new to the job board may feel that this is the gateway to recruiting high-quality candidates. However, they will soon realize that competition is still - other hiring professionals also use the same channel to recruit candidates for the same position.
Hence, recruiters need to ensure that the job description is interesting enough to attract job seekers to apply. At the same time, they need to make sure their ads are visible and discoverable on most job boards.
Another obstacle that most recruiters face is manually posting their listings on job portals. This means that they have to create multiple job descriptions for different sites. Additionally, that also means they need to create multiple accounts and manage them individually.
Solution: By using technology such as an applicant tracking system, recruiters can manage all listings using a single platform. For instance, Manatal’s ATS allows hiring teams to post jobs on thousands of job boards from the platform - once they have enabled their career page with Manatal. They can post vacancies from their organizations or for clients on high-traffic general job boards, including Glassdoor, Monster, and Indeed.
However, suppose they need talents with specific skill sets. In that case, they can post vacancies on popular specialist sites, including Flexjob (for remote jobs), AllRetailJobs (for retail jobs), Behance (for creative jobs), and many more.
The best part of using this platform is that it reduces the time and effort required to post on and manage multiple portals simultaneously.
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Pain Point 2: Managing Applications From Various Channels
Besides sourcing candidates from job boards, most hiring teams also use career pages to source and receive their applications.
Assuming that a recruiter is using their work email to receive CVs, you can expect them to receive hundreds of resumes daily and manage them manually.
To illustrate, there can be 200 applications from job portals and another 100 applications from a career page. As stated earlier, they manually extract candidates’ information and put them into spreadsheets.
However, there are many issues that they experience using this practice. Among them are errors such as misspelling candidates’ names or locations, forgetting to update the sheet with a new batch of applications, and risks of breaches of candidates’ data.
Solution: Technology today enables recruiters to automate and simplify their daily tasks, including managing candidates’ data. With Manatal, they can create different folders for different jobs and clients.
With a cloud-based solution such as Manatal, they can automatically keep all candidates’ records online. Therefore, they can access them anywhere and anytime - even on different devices.
In addition, Manatal takes cyber security seriously; hence, our partners can rest assured that all data is protected, as only authorized individuals can access candidates’ information. Moreover, our software gained SOC 2 Type I and Type II certification - the highest security certification for SaaS companies.
LEARN MORE: Keeping Candidate Profiles Secure With Recruitment Tech
Pain Point 3: Importing Candidates’ Information Manually
This third pain point is a prevalent one. Upon receiving applications, they need to manage candidates’ information and track their progress throughout the job pipeline.
To do that, they have to extract candidates’ information from their applications and CVs and input details into spreadsheets.
This practice may seem sufficient at an early stage of an organization. But as the business scales, the need for efficiency becomes greater. So, recruiters need to plan everything properly, including their recruitment strategy.
Solution: An excellent ATS allows hiring teams to create candidates’ profiles instantly and effortlessly. For instance, as mentioned above, once they receive applicants’ CVs, the system automatically sorts them into a customizable job pipeline.
Plus, there is a more active method to create candidates using the software. This feature is useful when you already have your own database. All they have to do is upload up to 1,000 resumes at a time or import candidates using a CSV or JSON file.
Next, the software automatically parses resumes for data extraction, including name, age, contact information, and spoken languages. Additionally, those who are using Manatal’s ATS can parse CVs in different languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, French, and Portuguese.
Pain Point 4: Managing Duplicate Candidates
Another pain point that hiring teams face is duplicate candidates. This situation happens when an applicant applies for the same job or multiple positions using various email addresses.
There is also the possibility of candidates interested in more than one position. Therefore, these potential candidates might think using the same resume for different applications is acceptable.
The consequence of this action causes an increase in recruitment cost when you need to assess the candidate multiple times when it can be done by a job seeker only.
Apart from that, duplicate candidates can cause miscommunication within a team due to an unnecessarily high number of email triggers. Your team of recruiters might have to review the same applicants again and upload their profiles into the system. Thus, creating multiple profiles of the same candidates.
Solution: Manatal’s ATS’s two features - Duplicate Management System and Candidate Auto Merging - allow you to search and merge the same profiles. The software scans your candidate database for potential duplicates using their full name, email addresses, and phone numbers.
Watch how you can manage duplicate candidates here.
Pain Point 5: Using Multiple Tools To Communicate
Speaking about communication, most recruiters would use multiple channels - emails, instant messaging applications, and video conferencing tools- to collaborate between team members, candidates, and clients.
Recruiters might face issues when using different tools at the same time. Imagine receiving hundreds of applications via email and simultaneously receiving emails from team members and clients.
There is a risk of losing track of which emails are crucial, thus creating miscommunication.
Solution: Integrate work email with ATS to have seamless communication between team members and clients. Additionally, the platform’s chat function allows you to stay connected with all stakeholders whenever and wherever you are in the world.
But, what if they don’t use either Gmail, Outlook, or any professional email provider? Fret not because the email synchronization feature allows the platform to display messages in the Manatal Inbox and candidate or contact profiles.
Plus, everything is automated because once they have fulfilled the requirements (which you can read here), all emails that Manatal receives will be automatically added to candidate or contact profile pages and Manatal Inbox.
Pain Point 6: Monitoring Leads, Clients, And Candidates’ Progress
As a recruitment agency, handling candidates is half of what they do on a daily basis. In order to ensure business continuity, fostering a good relationship with clients is vital to achieving business success.
Therefore, both recruiters and their clients must practice efficient communication regarding their needs. For instance, what type of candidates they are looking for, where to source them, and what is the best method to approach them.
With that being said, it can be quite challenging to develop the relationship from leads to clients without an excellent digital tool.
Solution: Manatal’s ATS has a built-in CRM where you can track clients' progress throughout the sales funnel. Additionally, all information pertaining to leads and clients is stored inside your client pipeline.
READ MORE: 10 Best Practices in Recruitment CRM
Pain Point 7: Managing Data Silos From Various Sources
At the end of the day, with all the effort of sourcing candidates and landing clients from multiple channels, excellent recruiters will want to know which strategy worked and which didn’t.
They also want to know which channels are most effective in sourcing candidates.
In order to do that, they will look at a spreadsheet with different tabs. Then they use various formulas to get the sum from different columns or rows. After that, they then interpret the generated data.
However, to ensure the accuracy of their data, they must ensure that every piece of information within a spreadsheet is correct and no data entry error has occurred.
Solution: For this reason, when our clients use ATS and CRM, they are able to see hiring, leads, and clients' data in real time. For instance, they can see how their job pipeline is doing. They can see how many candidates are sourced by each recruiter, which channels they are sourced from, how many of them are dropped, what the reasons are, and many more.
This allows you to pinpoint any red flags throughout your recruitment campaign and take the necessary action by having this information.
Meanwhile, for a recruitment agency, other than recruiting candidates, it is crucial for them to generate sales and develop the business further. Hence, with features from Manatal’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM), you will be able to smoothen your sales pipelines.
The sales report also shows your sales performance throughout the funnel.
READ MORE: 4 Types of Reports You Need In Your Applicant Tracking System
To Conclude
The hiring process is not as simple as it sounds - post jobs, select candidates, interview them, and onboard them. In reality, the journey is full of obstacles and challenges that you, as a recruiter, face on a daily basis.
Hence, in order to alleviate the pain of recruiting, you should leverage recruitment technology such as an applicant tracking system to manage a large volume of candidates. In addition, if you are working for a hiring firm, you need another software to nurture the relationship between you and your clients. Hence, customer relationship management can assist you in managing leads and clients on a single page.
An excellent ATS allows you to simplify the hiring process by automating your daily tasks. Let technology like AI and machine learning screen candidates’ resumes, create their profiles for you, and give a recommendation. Meanwhile, you can establish connections with candidates and give them a positive experience.
With that in mind, if you’re looking for an ATS with a built-in CRM that is simple to use and highly customizable, Manatal is what you need. So, sign up for our 14-day free trial (no credit cards required) or schedule a demo call now.