Why You Need Custom Pipelines in Your Recruitment Platform

Although there are hundreds of recruitment tools out there, the main challenge for recruiters these days is finding software that can actually solve the problems specific to their organizations.

Every recruitment team is different, and the truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for everybody. If your recruitment team is experiencing bottlenecks in one specific step in your recruitment process, such as coordinating interviews between candidates and executives, for example, how can you be sure that a tool can help you solve it?

Recruitment platforms, like an applicant tracking system (ATS), are marketed as an all-in-one tool that solves most of the problems recruiters face. However, the key deciding factor that distinguishes a beneficial recruitment platform from the rest is how much you can customize the software to fit your organization’s needs.

Much of a team’s bottlenecks and other challenges happen during the recruitment process itself. This is why job pipelines–the way recruiters deal with their open requisitions–need to be customizable to fit each recruitment stage. 

And in this article, we will be exploring why you need to pay attention to your recruitment platform’s ability to be customizable where it matters most, and how to check for sure whether a tool can improve your recruitment process.

What are recruitment platforms & job pipelines?

To start things off, it is best to understand what a recruitment platform actually is and what it should do, as well as why you should care about job pipelines in these types of software.

A recruitment platform is essentially any software or tool that aims to make the overall recruitment process easier. Naturally, this broad definition opens a lot of doors for different kinds of tools.

However, recruitment platforms most commonly come in the form of an ATS, as they take care of the whole process, from job posting, to applicant tracking, candidate sourcing, and performance tracking.

The vast majority of recruitment agencies and recruiters currently use some sort of recruitment platform to manage their workloads. In fact, the global online recruitment market is set to almost double in value in less than 10 years' time, from US$ 29 billion in 2022 to US$47 billion by 2029.

This means the competition for top talent is rife, and any recruiter or recruitment agency not using available tools–and customizing them to grow their organizations–will risk lagging behind the competition.

Now that we have covered recruitment platforms in their most fundamental sense, let us move on to one of the most important components of a recruitment platform: job pipelines.

What is a job pipeline, and why does it matter?

A job pipeline is an overview of all open job requisitions that a recruitment team or recruiter needs to work on at a time. Such overviews come as a given feature, which is included in most comprehensive recruitment platforms.

Typically, pipelines include a dashboard of all candidates, separated by different stages of the recruitment process of your organization. This could include an Applicant stage, Qualified Candidate stage, or Interview Scheduled stage, to name a few.

For example, here is a screenshot of a job pipeline within Manatal’s recruitment platform: 

The dashboard here clearly separates each candidate based on the stage of the organization’s recruitment process. This is an essential component of any reliable recruitment platform, as it helps manage each candidate based on priority.

The main benefit of having access to practical job pipelines on a recruitment platform is that it saves time by automating things. And especially in recruitment, any time you can save is crucial, as all the extra time can be spent sourcing more and better candidates for clients or your organization.

In fact, it takes around 33-49 days to hire for a position, depending on the industry, according to LinkedIn statistics. The median time to hire for IT positions is 44 days, while finance positions take 46 days to fill, for instance.

This means that it could take at least a month to a month and a half to find a new hire, which is a timespan that most recruiters would prefer not to fully utilize.

Tools like recruitment platforms that feature job pipelines can thus help streamline the process, by eliminating back and forth within the team. However, the key here is that the recruitment platform must allow you to customize the pipeline feature, to ensure that you can adjust it to your organization’s process.

And in the following section, we will be covering exactly why job pipelines must be customizable for them to be a worthwhile investment for you.

RELATED: A Beginner’s Guide to Recruitment ATS

YOU MIGHT LIKE: How Can You Manage Your First Contact With A Prospect? 

5 reasons why job pipelines on a recruitment platform need to be customizable

“Customizable” might not be the first term that comes to mind when one thinks of recruitment tools. However, here are some reasons why the ability to customize job pipelines should be the top priority when you look for the right software to use:

1. Customizable pipelines help recruiters organize tasks better.

Imagine working in a traditional recruitment workflow, where you post a job opening, receive resumes via email, look through them all, recommend candidates to your client organization, and contact each of them–all manually. And the worst part is that while you are doing all of this, more resumes are flying in.

Under this setup, you might miss out on potentially great candidates who get lost in the sea of resumes and CVs, or you might simply forget to send a few crucial emails that contribute to losing a candidate.

Of course, you can use spreadsheets to manage this better, but the capabilities are limited. This is where customizable pipelines on a recruitment platform will come in handy.

All it takes is for you and your recruitment team to conclude different stages of the recruitment pipeline together, such as how many interviews are needed, or whether assessments are required for some jobs.

Once you have your pipeline steps, all you need to do is customize the pipeline titles in your recruitment platform to reflect those steps. Instead of jumping back and forth between resumes, emails, and your notes, you will be able to manage everything on this one dashboard:

Manatal’s recruitment platform allows you to drag and drop candidates as you move them up and down your pipeline. For example, you can move someone from the “Applied” column to the “Shortlisted” column once you have decided to include them in your candidate shortlist for a client.

Having an overview of your and your team’s entire workload in one pipeline will help you ensure no opportunity is wasted, and that you can organize and manage your priorities accordingly.

2. It improves collaboration among team members.

In a team where recruiters are dealing with several job openings at once, using customizable job pipelines will help keep everyone on the same page and focused on the most important tasks at hand.

With a suitable recruitment platform, each team can customize its own job pipeline and use it as an outline of clear steps for everyone to follow. This serves as a way to maintain processes, measure productivity, and even identify bottlenecks in any step.

Without a customizable recruitment platform, teams would have to stick to the rigid categories that have been predetermined by the software they are using. This is why finding a tool that lets you customize titles is crucial.

Additionally, this makes it much easier when you are rotating team members, or when a new member joins your team, as it makes the onboarding process much simpler to manage. The newcomer will only need to refer to the dashboard to understand all of the processes involved, instead of having to go through months of preparation each time.

Moreover, the recruitment platform should organize all communication related to candidates. For example, Manatal’s ATS lets recruiters add notes in each candidate profile, which allows them to communicate with one another with reference points:

With such information in hand, recruiters can make better choices when developing candidate shortlists, which is exactly the next point on this list.

3. It helps recruiters make more well-informed decisions.

Forbes reported that the cost of replacing employees who quit could be up to one-half to two times their salary. This is why most clients recognize that a bad hire can be incredibly damaging to their company.

Every candidate who gets sent in by you will be scrutinized for their degree of long-term commitment to the client’s company. This is why it is a recruiter’s job to ensure that everybody coming into the recruitment pipeline is of high quality in terms of relevance to what their clients need.

With a customizable pipeline, recruitment teams can both organize and adjust their recruitment processes according to what works, instead of sticking to one process that cannot be adjusted. For example, if you need to hire for a position that requires more assessments than other jobs, you can customize the pipeline to match those additional steps, instead of trying to fit the extra step into a fixed layout.

In addition to being customizable, Manatal’s recruitment platform also provides AI-driven candidate recommendations for each candidate, expressed in a percentage. The percentage is calculated based on how similar a candidate is to a client’s customized criteria of skills, work experience, background, and more.

They are the percentages under the profile pictures of each candidate in this screenshot: 

Recruiters can use these recommendations as an additional factor when they are searching for suitable candidates on their recruitment platform. Furthermore, the criteria can always be customized and adjusted according to the client or recruiter’s needs, like this:

‍YOU MIGHT LIKE: How AI Helps Recruiters Ace Hiring Goals

ALSO: How Recruiters Can Drive Results from Technology

4. It eliminates the need for several tools.

Any lack of customization capability could leave you looking for even more tools to solve your challenges, because you might feel the need to make up for the limited capabilities of the tools you are currently using. This can result in increased expenses per month, and, often, much more back-and-forth in switching between recruitment platforms just to complete a single task.

However, a reliable recruitment platform should help you make all the functions related to your recruitment pipeline easier to use overall. One of the most tedious parts of this process is communicating with candidates, as you could potentially slip up or delay some crucial email loops that could affect their final decision.

Switching between your recruitment platform and emailing tab on a browser can get incredibly cumbersome if you need to do it all day. This is why recruitment platforms will need to include an email integration feature that can be accessed through your candidate list.

This feature should streamline your candidate communication process by organizing conversations with each candidate, so that you will always have a reference point when you are moving candidates up your pipeline.

Here is an example of Manatal’s integrated emails feature:

As you can see, emails are all accessible from the “Candidates” tab. Furthermore, you can also customize your preferred email provider and integrate it into the system, allowing you to stay on one recruitment platform without having to use several tools at once.

5. It improves the candidate’s experience.

The ability to customize job pipelines helps you source candidates quickly. And being swift in recruitment can result in an improvement in candidate experience overall. In fact, 60% of candidates lose interest in a job if the hiring process takes too long.

If recruiters are stuck reviewing their notes and end up forgetting to contact candidates in a timely manner, they will risk losing them to other job openings.

Having a customizable job pipeline ensures you have a process that is set, but can also be tweaked according to your organization’s needs, depending on what type of candidates you are sourcing.

Having a clear process unique to your organization also eliminates the need for redundant steps where the candidate has to repeat themselves every time they meet someone new in the recruitment process.

This helps you spend less time on one candidate, and, ultimately, results in favorable candidates receiving quicker offers. This will maximize your chances of finding the right people for your clients.

RELATED: 5 Ways to Improve Candidate Experience in 2023

ALSO: Why Is Candidate Experience So Difficult To Improve?

Curious to find out how customizable job pipelines on a recruitment platform can help transform the way you recruit? Manatal is currently offering a free, 14-day trial for its ATS, which features a customizable job pipeline, AI-driven candidate recommendations, integrated email capabilities, and much more.

To sign up for your free trial, click here.