Hiring freezes are continuing to cause turmoil in our job market. To confront this reality, organizations are investing in robust recruitment platforms that give their HR professionals and recruiters the technical tools they’ll need to navigate the troubling waters ahead.
But do hiring freezes necessarily mean bad news for your organization? Perhaps not so much. We’ll show you how the right recruitment platform can help your organization to not only get through a protracted hiring freeze, but we’ll show you how this kind of HR technology can be used to make your organization a more attractive and stronger employer in the future once companies begin hiring once again.
What is a Recruitment Platform?
For organizations and recruitment agencies that want to lay a solid foundation for the upcoming fight against hiring freezes and a pending recession, the sophisticated technologies that come embedded within today’s recruitment platforms are being hailed as the best option.
Many people think of Applicant Tracking Systems or ATS when the term recruitment platform is mentioned. While originally designed as a database software for warehousing resumes, modern ATS systems have gone through an incredible revolution.
Today, this technology is largely offered as an SaaS (Software as a Service) solution that does a spectacular job of helping organizations automate many components of their recruitment processes. It’s also worth noting that the market’s best recruitment platforms come with an embedded Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
This is proving to be especially valuable to recruitment agencies who can use CRM software to better manage their leads, clients, and customers, all within a single interface!
Whether your business has its own HR department to handle recruiting or you’re a staffing agency trying to do its best to brace for what a hiring freeze might do to your prospects, a powerful ATS system can be your best weapon in preparing for the pending slowdown in hiring that’s expected to affect a wide array of industries.
Below we show you how.
YOU MIGHT LIKE: A Fun Definitive Guide to Recruitment ATS for a Better Recruitment Process
Strengthen your Talent Pipeline
As serious as a hiring freeze might sound, history has shown that it will likely pass. When this one does, it will be the organizations who’ve wisely used this lull in the action to strengthen their talent pipelines which will be in a position to recruit the market’s best talent. Now is not the time to let the technological advantages of your recruitment platform sit idle.
Nearly 70% of today’s organizations have made building their future talent pipeline a strategic priority. That means recruiters should be using their ATS systems to double down on their communications with potential applicants to cultivate these new relationships.
If your organization hopes to continue hiring the best talent once the hiring freezes subside, start using your recruitment platforms to reach out to as many job candidates as you can to emphasize keeping the employer brand top of mind, and the relationships warm. That way, you can keep job prospects excited about upcoming opportunities and it will serve to keep your organization on their radar.
Enhance the Candidate's Experience
The Great Resignation demonstrated that, in a competitive job market, the best candidates have options. With the many choices that come with being the crème of the crop, the candidate experience often ends up being the determining factor in whether a prospect decides to come work for your company. Even more compelling, the quality of the candidate experience that you offer can have a huge impact on your company’s talent pipeline, not to mention the blow that it can levy against your “brand” if it’s not up to par.
The candidate experience is a way to describe how appealing candidates find your application and recruitment process. Speed and fluidity play a large role in the candidate experience – two key areas where a powerful ATS system can make your organization more competitive.
The candidate experience will continue to be a vital component of your talent acquisition efforts, and hiring freezes should be seen as an opportunity to maximize the quality of this experience. Why? Almost 70% of the job candidates out there will be more than willing to share their “negative” experiences on their social networks – something that can have serious repercussions when trying to further promote your organization’s brand.
RELATED: 5 ATS-Powered Recruitment Hacks to Find the Best Candidates
Build a Positive Brand
Companies with positive brands get twice as many applications as companies that don’t. If you want the best candidates to come to you (and what recruiter doesn’t?), hiring freezes should be seen as opportunities to use your recruitment platform to promote your organization’s brand.
It may be difficult to see the connection between a recruitment platform and building your brand, but the chief benefits of an ATS platform is the time that it gives back to recruiters via automation. This is something that recruiters can leverage by taking that time and focusing it on activities that will improve their employer’s brand.
Deepen Existing Relationships
Don’t forget about those who’ve previously applied to your organization. One of a recruitment platform’s chief purposes is to inventory resumes and applicant data. However, the technology embedded within modern ATS systems makes retrieving information on previous applicants very simple, and it only takes fractions of the amount of time it used to take. Use your ATS to pull up resumes from a few years ago.
Connect with these professionals to see if their situation has changed. Think you’re just wasting your time? Almost 90% of the talent in our workforce says they accept a job offer faster when they’re contacted by a recruiter.
Maybe they were a great candidate, but the offer didn’t work for them then at the time. That doesn’t mean they won’t consider your organization in the future. Remember, runner-up candidates usually have a lot to offer, so reach out to former number two choices who may be nestled comfortably in that “passive” job seeker category but are willing to entertain future offers.
PODCAST: EP7: The impact of technology on IT recruitment
Data Metrics | The Value of Stored Applicant Information
We mentioned earlier how SaaS HR software systems designed for the HR industry, especially the cloud-based recruitment platforms or ATS systems on the market today, were originally designed as an inventory mechanism to store resumes and applicant data.
That is still one of the chief purposes of investing in a recruitment platform. However, over time as more and more candidates apply, recruiters can tap into that information. In other words, it can be a treasure trove of valuable insights.
Extract and analyze those metrics in the time leading up to (and during) a hiring freeze to shed light on what recruitment strategies are yielding the most success and which ones are proving to be too costly in terms of time and money.
RESOURCES: Thousands of ready-to-use job description templates
Evaluate Your Recruiting and Hiring Workflow Processes
When was the last time you tried to apply for a job at your own company? Have you ever? How can you rate the candidate experience that your organization offers if, as a recruiter, you don’t even know?
A hiring freeze is a perfect time to do an analysis of your recruiting processes to see what it’s like and, more importantly, discover what components of your recruitment platform can be used to implement improvements to the application process.
We’ll let you in on another big secret: the best job candidates know they don’t have to put up with a tedious application process. In a survey conducted by CareerBuilder, at least 7 out of 10 respondents preferred a one-click application process over a lengthy one.
As hiring freezes become more common, your organization needs to be preparing for this reality by configuring your recruitment platform to make the job application process more fluid and more engaging to keep candidates interested after they apply.
SaaS software technologies designed for HR have made a quantum leap over the past few years. The best recruitment platforms offer very intuitive artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that can reliably automate many traditional HR processes that used to take up much of a recruiter’s workday. In fact, more than 85% of employers in the U.S. rely on AI for their recruiting activities.
Any organization that isn’t using the downtime associated with a hiring freeze to perform a thorough analysis of their recruiting process to determine where technologies can be plugged in to make it better are putting themselves at a huge disadvantage when it comes to the hiring game.
Conclusion
As hiring freezes become more widespread, the right recruitment platform is essential to helping your organizations prepare for the impact these events will have on your company.
Of all the recruitment platforms we’ve researched, only Manatal’s ATS platform offers organizations and staffing agencies the wide array of powerful tools and resources they need to successfully navigate the volatility and turmoil of our modern job market.
The intuitive, AI-powered technologies embedded within Manatal’s platform allows organizations to take automation to an entirely new level and the highly customizable interface makes the platform immediately adaptable to any business, whether large or small.
Manatal’s ATS platform also features recruitment CRM technologies which staffing agencies will find incredibly useful for managing communications with candidates and clients as well as enhancing the quality of services they offer.
To discover just how well Manatal’s ATS platform can help your company or staffing agency contend with looming hiring freezes, take advantage of our 14-day free trial.
.png)
.webp)
.webp){kind=logo}
.webp)
.png){kind=small}
