Hiring on All Cylinders - Streamlining Recruitment from Job Posting to Day One

Tech-assisted hiring processes are helping businesses of all sizes and industries to negotiate some of today’s biggest recruitment challenges including:

• Intense competition for talent in some sectors
• New expectations and demands from employees in terms of working conditions, benefits, and compensation
• New expectations from job-seekers in terms of application processes  
• Support building a deeper, wider talent pool 

Recruitment management systems, including candidate relationship management systems and more, play a key role in accelerating and improving the hiring experience for employers and job hunters.

Pandemic accelerates digital adoption 

Adoption and uptake of hiring tech has ramped up significantly over the past two years, more crucially since the onset of the pandemic. 

According to the State of Talent Acquisition 2021 report produced by Mercer / Mettl – a respected assessment technology provider - 49% of the companies surveyed for the report said they had recently invested in technology to establish virtual hiring systems. 

Disruption on an unprecedented scale has pushed companies – who had been using legacy hiring systems - to go digital and agile as soon as possible. Covid-19 was the “wake-up call” that prompted many companies to embrace recruitment software, and online systems and processes sooner rather than later. 

Candidate screening, onboarding, and other hiring tasks are here to stay. Traditional hiring activities such as in-person learning and development meanwhile, may never return to normal, at least not in the near term. 

There are technologies to improve each step of the hiring process including solutions to identify where new talent is needed - whether to fill a vacated position, help a team better manage its workload, or expand the reach of projects or organizational tasks.

Digitizing the key steps

Once recruitment plans and job descriptions have been approved by relevant internal teams and employees, technologies can be used to accelerate efforts to find the best candidates in the market at every key step starting with: 

Step 1. Advertising the position 

Career pages

With most people connected closely to their smartphones and mobile devices today, making job adverts mobile-friendly is essential. This step should begin with a career page. 

A career page is a candidate sourcing channel found on your website that displays current job vacancies. It can also be used to attract candidates by offering them in-depth information about your company history , business focus, achievements, work culture, management team, sustainability aspirations, key partners, stakeholders, and more. Think of careers pages like an employer branding resume to the world or a glimpse into working life in your company. 

How to create one? Well-established recruitment software and applicant tracking system (ATS) providers such as Manatal, offer a free career page builder tool for users with easy-to-use templates to create eye-catching job listings. 

A user-friendly career page that inspires, or showcases your work environment or culture in a fun, creative, authentic way is also a terrific marketing tool. If it captures the attention of job hunters and others, they are likely to share it on social media and other online channels.

Sourcing features 

While they have been around for a long time, online job boards remain popular because they are targeted to, and customized for folks actively seeking work. 

They are especially popular for companies with a low profile, or low-traffic website because job boards enable them to reach as many candidates as possible for little effort. 

The only drawback (in the past) was the need to post jobs to multiple job boards. This involved logging into several sites and copying and pasting the same job post repeatedly.

Thanks to new hiring software in ATS platforms this repetition is a thing of the past. 

Manatal’s job posting functionality, for example, makes posting a job to multiple sites possible in a few clicks. It enables exposure to many free and premium channels globally including Indeed, Monster, Linkedin, Facebook, Google for Jobs as well as local and specialized job boards. It’s a feature that allows hiring teams to get maximum value from their recruitment budgets. 

Whatever the role, an ATS allows you to cast the widest net possible by posting job ads to multiple job boards across the country or world.

Step 2. Reviewing candidates

Resumes piling up in a corner, waiting to be read and analyzed by hiring managers over several weeks is no longer a reality for many HR teams. 

Resume parsing has accelerated the process of screening out unqualified applicants to help hiring teams reduce time and cost significantly. In simple terms, resume parsing functionality sorts and stores data from the applicant resumes based on keywords, and other criteria set by hiring managers for a specific role.

Keyword parsing is the most common and popular option for many recruiters – it involves the software scanning resumes and candidate cover letters to look for set phrases and words that match the job description. 

Besides saving a lot of time, resume management software enables hiring teams to store resumes conveniently in easy-to-find ways online which is a great help especially when hundreds or thousands of resumes are sent in for advertised roles. They also ensure accuracy in the candidate search as no keywords, qualifications, or skills will be missed.

Once a shortlist of candidates has been identified by the parsing software, recruiters can use enrichment software to build a bigger, clearer picture of the candidate. Sophisticated ATS platforms, for example, use AI tools to browse the web in search of additional data on candidates – they can look at their social media and online footprints to gain more insights to evaluate if they are a potential “good fit” for the company. 

Step 3.  The interview 

With diverse stakeholders involved in the recruitment process, keeping everyone in the loop regarding status updates, shortlisted candidates, interview schedules, and more, is a challenge for hiring teams, in terms of communication, organization, and time.

These challenges have been addressed by ATS software and tools designed to deliver a smoother, easier to organize and run interview process. 

Key features include scheduling software to eliminate scheduling conflicts. For example, standalone calendar software (or linking to popular calendar options such as Outlook or Gmail) to make scheduling easy, accessible, and transparent to everyone in the team. 

Alerts and notifications can also be set up to send “heads up” emails or messages to hiring managers about upcoming interviews. Artificial intelligence can also be engaged to find the most suitable time for all parties to schedule an interview.

Once schedules have been finalized and confirmed, ATS software can come up with sample interview questions, and a scoring system to rate candidates based on their responses. Speed-to-hire momentum can be increased by enabling interviewers and stakeholders to upload their notes and scorecards to the ATS immediately after screenings and interviews.

Sharing notes and feedback is not only great for collaboration across diverse departments, but it also helps to ensure that your company is following and upholding fair and transparent hiring practices 

Finally, when all of the interviews have been conducted, a candidate profile database can also be created for the hiring team – with this they can see how each interview went and whether there will be subsequent interviews scheduled.

Step 4. Shortlisting the shortlist

Post-interview assessment of the leading candidates can be conducted easily now thanks to ATS technologies and platforms. Through these, standardized tests measuring skills, reasoning, reading comprehension, emotional intelligence, and more, can be run to gain more insight among competing shortlisted candidates. Job-specific projects, particularly in IT hiring, can also be assigned to them for ranking and rating by hiring teams. 

Step 5. Onboarding and Employee Management

Just about everyone remembers their first day of work with a new company. 

While having jitters, or feeling nervous is entirely normal, a strong onboarding program can go a long way to dialing down first-day anxieties.

A positive and productive onboarding will boost employee engagement and confidence making new hires ready to hit the ground running sooner rather than later. 

Scheduling face-to-face onboarding is often challenging due to timetable clashes and so on, and more so in the ongoing pandemic environment. 

These challenges are addressed by ATS software that will make your onboarding process more effective, and efficient. The software provides a central place for recruiters, HR, hiring managers, and IT to create a list of key dates, such as start date, end of probation and more. 

Start hiring on all cylinders today 

From start to finish, ATS and other recruitment technologies turbocharge your hiring processes to make recruiting easier, faster, more convenient, and pain-free for employers and job hunters.

ATS solutions allow you to track effortlessly:

• Candidate pipeline status
• Hiring stage progress
• Response rates to job boards 
• Number of candidates received per role
• Candidate profiles and backstories 
• Interview schedules and feedback 
• Onboarding schedules

ATS solutions and resume data software help hiring teams and recruitment agencies optimize their resources and outcomes – especially in building candidate relationships with successful applicants, and others who may be great hires for new roles in the pipeline.

Recognized as a pioneer and trailblazer in the HR technology industry, Manatal is the preferred software option for many companies and recruitment agencies, with a strong track record of supporting hiring teams of all sizes around the world. 

If you have been quiet on the hiring front over the past two years, and would like to modernize your processes and systems asap, we invite you to start a 14-day Free Trial today (no credit card required) to discover how Manatal will ramp up your efforts to find the best and brightest job seekers.