Must-have hiring tools to match Talent Acquisition trends in 2023

Talent acquisition is undergoing a massive transformation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting to widespread preferences for fully remote working arrangements - as well as greater flexibility and concern for their wellbeing - employees are successfully asserting the upper hand in their relationship with employers. 

In response to these seismic changes, HR leaders are rethinking their hiring tools and tactics to meet talent acquisition goals in a more challenging job market.

In 2023, HR departments will have their hands full managing growing workloads as a possible recession tightens the job market further. As McKinsey points out, leading companies are still taking steps in a somewhat confusing economic environment to close talent “supply-demand gaps''. Companies are achieving this by strengthening their existing workforces, deemphasizing degree requirements, and - most notably - streamlining their hiring processes and enhancing candidate experiences to attract more applicants as well as lift conversion rates. 

As companies look to the future, talent acquisition will remain a critical aspect of HR department strategy in spite of the economic situation. Without it, companies may lose out on talent with the skills to drive business strategy forward and with the potential to become future leaders in the organization. 

To achieve their goals, companies, large and small, will need to adopt the mantra of working smarter rather than harder. Hiring tools, including applicant tracking systems (ATS), customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, and online job boards, will come in handy for HR departments and recruitment agencies to hire effectively. 

These tools will make it easier for HR teams to attract the highly qualified talent they need for vacant roles. It will also enable leaders to assess if their activities are having an impact and allow them to adapt to new market situations. 

While the latest SaaS solutions and web-based resources will be defining features augmenting HR activities, the sheer number of hiring tools available may make it difficult to prioritize investments. Let’s take a look at some of these talent acquisition trends that are expected to have a huge influence on recruitment activities - and how existing hiring tools can be utilized by HR departments to take advantage of these trends. 

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Job boards and social media

The number of sources that HR teams can go to online to find top talent has expanded exponentially in a relatively short time. Whether you are conducting a general search for talent, seeking professionals from diverse backgrounds, or filling niche roles, job boards and social media are essential hiring tools for finding them. It is also an opportunity, in some cases, to manage the company’s reputation. Learn more about the different types of job sites in the United States here. 

This has widened the talent pool and made professionals more aware of companies that they may not have discovered on their own. The challenge for HR teams, however, lies in monitoring and managing all of these sources. A single job listing for your company on a site may receive hundreds of applications that will need reviewing. Multiply that across sites and job listings, and the extent of the job will immediately become clear - especially with a lean HR team. The power of these sites can be harnessed to work for HR teams through integration with their recruitment software. This allows HR teams to post job listings across these sites simultaneously and pulls resumes from all the sites into one platform, which speeds up the initial stages of the hiring process and makes it easier to review applications for each job. 

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Pre-interview Assessments

As recruiters gain the ability to post job listings on more online job boards and social media, they are also receiving more applications for job vacancies. This has widened the talent pool considerably, but making sure that the most qualified applicants are selected for interviews - and are ultimately hired - is becoming more complex. This complexity has lengthened the interview and onboarding processes without any guarantee that the most qualified candidates are being selected. 

As a result, many HR teams are now looking beyond a candidate’s education and work history for more tangible evidence that they can hit the ground running and execute the required tasks once they are hired by turning to pre-interview assessments. These hiring tools gauge capabilities that employers determine are essential to a role - or to the corporate culture - including an applicant’s job knowledge, personality, or integrity, and help recruiters narrow down the applicants who are most qualified to interview for a job. Assessment tests can easily be administered to applicants and accessed during the interview process once these cloud-based hiring tools are integrated into your department’s ATS.

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Artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged in recent years as a futuristic idea with real, practical applications across industries and business functions. Like other hiring tools, it has the ability to condense hiring timeframes for recruiters and empowers them to focus on the human aspects of talent acquisition (i.e., building a rapport with candidates). 

Instead of the days and weeks that it could take to parse resumes and identify the most qualified candidates manually, AI reduces that process significantly. The use of chatbots in the hiring process can also provide candidates with quick responses to frequently asked questions and information, ensuring that a qualified candidate isn’t lost in the shuffle.

With AI-powered recruitment solutions, recruiters can deliver better candidate experiences and reduce the number of applicants who drop out of the interview process. It can also contribute to a more diverse workplace when used in the candidate sourcing process by removing human biases and selecting applicants based solely on their qualifications. In these ways, AI-powered recommendations can help HR departments increase the chances of making a lasting hire.

Interviewing software

The pandemic helped to normalize virtual hiring for many employers who were reluctant to adopt this approach. As more fully-remote roles are created in 2023, virtual hiring will become a more established practice in HR departments to expand the talent pool beyond local candidates. To support this activity, HR leaders will need hiring tools such as Zoom, Hireflix, and Willo to conduct virtual interviews smoothly and streamline the hiring process. Implementing this can effectively go a long way in boosting candidate experiences. 

Solutions on the market today enable recruiters to conduct one-way interviews (meaning that pre-written questions are answered by candidates for later review) or two-way interviews. The best of these hiring tools also allow recruiters to set up interview formats that enable candidates to provide written or recorded responses within an allotted time frame.

Applicant tracking system

The most essential of these hiring tools for HR departments is an applicant tracking system. With opportunities for problems to arise at every stage of the hiring process, an ATS helps HR teams avoid situations like candidates being overlooked or talent searches stretching for over a month - or more. These are essential capabilities in a competitive, pressurized job market. 

Today’s ATS solutions like Manatal empower recruiters to enhance each stage of the hiring process to increase their chances of making lasting hires. Job listings can be written and posted on your company’s career page and multiple job boards instantaneously. Through integrations, responses to these listings will flow into the ATS so that it can be managed in a central location. 

Recruiters will be able to identify candidates faster from a database that is regularly pulling updates from their online resume or social media. Candidates are ushered through the interview process more efficiently with simple pipelines that can be modified to align with the HR department’s processes. Teams can collaborate and share notes with each other in the system seamlessly, while communications can be automated to ensure that candidates receive updates throughout the hiring process and are notified about changes to the status of a job listing to reduce ghosting situations. 

With talent acquisition covered from candidate sourcing to onboarding in an ATS solution, HR teams can monitor activities to see what tactics are working - and which aren’t. They can also integrate other hiring tools to build an all-in-one solution.

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The bottom line

Each of the hiring tools discussed above provides HR departments with advantages that the traditional methods of talent acquisition cannot deliver. Regardless of your department’s budget or the size of your team, there is a way to incorporate each of these solutions into the hiring process and achieve your talent goals. The key when evaluating solutions is to select vendors that prioritize data compliance and privacy and identify solutions that are easy to use, cloud-based, and that make integration with your recruitment platform simple. 

The worst thing any HR department can do in the face of a challenging economic environment is to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. Solutions that support HR departments in enhancing employer branding, refining the organization’s talent acquisition strategy, and positioning the company for success in the future will be worthwhile investments.

Schedule a 14-day Free Trial of Manatal’s cloud-based comprehensive ATS solution today to see how all of your hiring tools can be put to work to meet your talent acquisition needs in 2023.