Talent acquisition is a highly competitive process for organizations - especially in the current job market. Employee expectations have shifted as professionals reprioritize what matters to them. Additionally, retention and engagement efforts at many companies are falling short, leading to record high levels of employees quitting their jobs and engagement at all-time lows.
As a result, companies are looking for any advantage to help them attract top talent, including the consideration of dedicated recruitment platform.
When we say recruitment platform, we are referring to software that centralizes hiring tasks, automates workflows, stores and protects data, and integrates with other business tools. While many organizations may have a tech solution that addresses one or two of these, it would be valuable to invest in an all-in-one solution.
In essence, the best software solutions for recruitment allow HR teams to manage every step of the recruiting process, from sourcing candidates to onboarding.
The competitiveness of the hiring market is even more notable when you look at the effort that companies put into attracting talent with sought-after skills - often with minimal success. According to Canada’s Public Policy Forum, more than a third of SME respondents to a survey conducted in 2021 indicated that a shortage of skilled workers affected their business.
In the United States, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) reported that 90% of small business owners who tried to hire in October 2022 reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill. This inability to fill key strategic roles impacts everything from employee workload and morale to a company’s ability to innovate with new products or services.
While large, well-known enterprises can rely on their reputation and robust hiring tools to attract top talent, small businesses must work harder to entice the same candidates to join their companies. When compensation, benefits, and perks aren’t enough to stand out from the crowd, nimble and adaptable small businesses can quickly address changes in what applicants are looking for from potential employers.
The most common features that many employees are seeking in a new job today are purpose and flexibility. Small business leaders can easily refine their employee value proposition (EVP) to reflect and align with these employee needs.
The impact of these changes will show in your talent acquisition and employee retention metrics, as an effective EVP can reduce turnover by about 70% annually and increase new hire commitments by nearly 30%.
To ensure that your organization succeeds in hiring high-quality candidates, consider pairing a comprehensive recruitment platform with a killer talent acquisition strategy. These seemingly simple adjustments can make all the difference in the type of applicants the company receives. Then, with an EVP that resonates with employees and an emphasis on maintaining strong employee relations, companies have a greater chance of retaining these hires.
As the sole HR professional in your organization or a boutique recruitment agency, investing in a recruitment platform can streamline hiring activities, standardize tasks, and allow you to operate as though you have an HR team staffed with several people.
Recruitment platform solutions on the market may vary - in terms of features and pricing. However, when evaluating software options, the best tools include these four essential features.
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Applicant Tracking System
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a crucial element of any recruitment platform. It provides a blueprint for your company’s hiring process, which enables you to deliver consistently positive candidate experiences and reduces errors. Cloud-based applicant tracking solutions like Manatal allow HR professionals to manage the entire hiring process through a single view that can be customized to suit your unique approach.
This means that you can apply company branding at each step in the process and modify the steps to include assessments or mass updates to inform candidates or clients about the status of the talent search. It is also a simple way to maintain communication with candidates in your database who may not be actively looking for a new job.
Candidate profiles are easily accessible and remain up-to-date with information from resumes, social networks, and other online sources. This dramatically reduces the difficulties involved in identifying and managing candidates during the hiring process. This makes it simple for teams to collaborate throughout the process and manage multiple job listings seamlessly.
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RESOURCES: Hundreds of free and ready-to-use job description templates for your HR needs.
Recruitment CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is vital to running a successful recruiting business. Therefore, this is an essential feature for recruitment agencies to have in a recruitment platform.
A Recruitment CRM solution allows agencies to manage client relationships and projects - as well as cultivate prospective clients. It is also a useful way to keep customers informed and invite them to collaborate on projects. With Manatal, agencies can share a dedicated and customized view of hiring projects with the ability to manage permission levels down to specific roles.
Combining a recruitment CRM and ATS solutions in a recruiting platform is an ingenious way for recruitment agencies to manage hiring and commercial activities in one place effectively. Hiring teams and the client contact can quickly see that projects are being completed on schedule, and agency leaders can review data to determine if clients’ job vacancies are being filled successfully (i.e., with professionals who stay in their role beyond the probationary period).
Artificial intelligence and Automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a popular buzzword in the corporate world, with applications of this technology found everywhere, from chatbots to fraud prevention. The value of AI is that it can be programmed to complete tasks that were assumed could only be done by humans. In human resources, repetitive and time-consuming tasks like parsing resumes can be done much faster and without the errors that people tend to make.
Selecting a recruitment platform that includes AI capabilities will further enhance candidate sourcing efforts by quickly identifying the most qualified candidates in your database that fit your job parameters. Additionally, your hiring team will be able to select particular job requirements and identify the most qualified candidates blindly. This helps to reduce the human biases that can creep into the hiring process and increase the number of candidates from underrepresented groups who interview for vacancies.
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Centralization and Customization
A significant selling point for a cloud-based recruitment platform is that all activities and data are stored in a central location. Team members can access information at any time, regardless of how many other people are attempting to retrieve the same information. This reduces how much time it takes to execute each step in the hiring process, which helps HR teams improve metrics around time-to-hire and time-to-fill.
Maintaining all of the hiring activities for all job listings across sources and candidate profiles in the cloud is also crucial for making collaboration easier for remote teams. Integration with calendars and email also ensures that all communications related to candidate interactions or hiring activities are consolidated and stored in one place. If all of your team members are operating from the same playbook, candidate and client experiences can be more consistent, and teams can be more productive.
Another feature of many of the best recruitment platforms is the ability to customize various aspects of the software. No two companies are the same - and neither are their processes. Customization allows your company to infuse a personal touch and your company’s unique value proposition into the system to reflect how the business operates and help make activities more efficient.
The benefit of leading recruitment platforms is that customizations can be completed easily without deep IT expertise - a plus for organizations with limited staff.
With Manatal, customers have the ability to customize their branded career page and job listings to attract different audiences and stand out from competitors. HR departments and recruitment agencies also gain an advantage from being able to customize their hiring process and dashboard. This allows HR leaders to emphasize and analyze specific hiring activities.
MORE: Learn how Manatal’s ATS can help streamline the recruitment process for your business
What to look for in a recruitment platform vendor
As you evaluate which recruitment platform is right for your organization, it is important to make sure that the vendor sees themselves as a business partner. This level of commitment is crucial to ensuring that the solution works well for your organization and that you are not left high and dry should a problem arise. Also, make sure that pricing for the software is simple and transparent to avoid any hidden costs that could be a substantial blow to a small company’s finances.
Another critical aspect of evaluating a recruitment platform is the vendor’s security and data privacy compliance stance. These are important to ensure that your customer data and other intellectual property are protected at all times. It is not just a regulatory issue but also a reputational issue, as clients may be reluctant to work with you if you were the victim of a significant breach due to lax security. As a small business, having a technology vendor that takes this seriously is a huge plus.
Learn more about Manatal’s cloud-based, AI-powered recruitment solution by starting a 14-Day free trial today.
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