Recruitment Technology: All the Tools You Need in 2020
04 Sep 2019
Recruitment technology: what is it? By this term, we indicate a group of tools and platforms that can help recruiters and HR specialists in their pursuit of better results.
In this article, we will list some of the best tools and platforms on the market. Those that will shape the future of Talent Acquisition.
But first, let us explain why these instruments will be more and more important to your career.
The name Olivia Bland still brings a shudder to many in HR. This is the 22-year-old writer who, earlier this year, went viral on Twitter. She used the social to report her experience of a distressing interview for a job, where she had applied as a communications assistant. She pulled no punches in her description of the pressure the CEO of the company put her under. Her posts earned 39,000 re-tweets and 133,000 likes.
Social media had transformed marketing. Now, it put a rocket under the practice of recruitment. Candidates are no longer powerless, waiting to hear if you chose them for the role. The internet arms them with information and the opportunity to bring transparency to the recruitment process. The unsuspecting employer criticized by Olivia Bland discovered this to its cost.
To learn more about Candidate Experience and how to perfect it, we recommend you to read our Ultimate Guide to Candidate Experience Feedback.
Just as it presents threats, the digital world can also aid Talent Acquisition (TA). And savvy employers know it. The market is getting extremely competitive. A whole new host of recruitment tech tools help companies compete for the best candidates in the market. The tech sector is the epitome of this problem. Imagine: there are something like five job openings for each available software developer.
There’s also an increasing drive towards automation in HR. This process offers the chance to save considerable amounts of time and resources. Talent Acquisition Directors are to focus on more value-added activities. The vast majority of the recruitment tech tools across the TA landscape are geared towards this. The increasing sophistication of AI and machine learning means we’re still scratching the surface. So what can automation do for recruitment?
Finally, as Olivia Bland’s experience demonstrated, the whole process of TA is becoming highly visible. Social media, including specialist sites like Glassdoor, allow for interviews and other assessment processes to become almost reality-TV fodder. Interviewers are in the spotlight like never before. So HR managers are being forced to invest in the quality of the candidate experience. This is another area where new digital tools and platforms are offering potential.
The previous elements have combined to create an incredibly complex TA landscape. We will list the nine main types of recruitment tech tools and software every Talent Acquisition Director should have on their radar below.
1. Are you out there?
TA isn’t something that only kicks in when you have a vacancy. Smart recruiters now understand. A plethora of recruitment tech platforms now allows HR executives to use a far more strategic approach to attracting the best people.
Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) tools like SmartRecruiters have emerged in recent years. They help organizations streamline and automate their recruitment marketing activities. This saves them huge amounts of time and resources previously spent on admin. The benefit is that TA teams can now focus their time on the ‘human’ jobs requiring judgment.
Then we have Candidate Relationship Marketing (CRM) platforms for recruiters. Some examples are Beamery, Recruitee, and Talemetry. They post job listings on the most relevant sites or social media platforms. They also track ad views, clicks, and applications received. These are a step beyond a more traditional ATS, only organizing current applicants. The latest incarnation is a more sophisticated system containing passive and active candidates. They also include anyone who has ever applied to the company.
TalentLyft specializes in building long-term relationships well before a specific role might exist. This allows recruiters to keep a watching brief on candidates that might be a good match in a few years.
Yello has an interesting specialism. It offers TA teams the ability to target specific candidate communities. These include those it describes as diverse, students and government workers.
2. Hunting high and low
HR has moved on from the days when you posted a job ad and hoped the right candidate would spot it. Competition for the best candidates means teams are employing a range of recruitment tech tools. The latter helps them proactively search and analyze a potential employee’s suitability for a role.
Digital tools can search thousands of databases, and millions of candidate profiles. The purpose is to find the right person and get in touch with them. The best candidate may well be someone who isn’t necessarily looking to switch jobs. But they could spot your opportunity on their Facebook feed and change their minds.
Woo has built its own database (called Helena) of more than 50,000 tech professionals. These people are passively looking for certain roles. This tool can then do the job of accurately matching them up with your vacancy, and delivering you a pre-screened shortlist. TalentBin is another useful resource for tracking down tech talent. It integrates all publicly available social content posted by potential tech candidates into one platform. This allows you to use this info to then analyze suitability for a role.
GoAvrio’s FitScore grades online candidate profiles on the extent to which they match a vacancy using AI technology.
3. Are you the one for me?
If you’ve faced that pile of CVs you know how it feels. Finding the perfect candidate in a sea of applicants is time-consuming and difficult. Digital tools nowadays take over the more rational part of the screening process. They also handle the admin associated with contacting, interviewing, and assessing.
Chatbots can cut traveling and interviewing time. Furthermore, they keep candidates engaged at each point of the recruitment process. They do so by offering information to the job applicants.
Candidate engagement tech company Meet & Engage offers a variety of services. Among them, the ability for candidates to hear from current employees via a live-chat. They integrate a chatbot into parts of the recruitment process as well. This increases its appeal to candidates.
Then there are other AI tools, like Recruiterbox and Cubiks. These analyze information including CVs and assessments. The purpose is to work out candidates’ suitability for a particular role. Ideal also tracks and analyses chatbot activity
4. Talk to me
A new generation of platforms and communication media are transforming interviews. These offer increased efficiency and better evaluation.
Rather than meeting each candidate face to face, companies could access Wepow or Spark Hire. Platforms like these set up video interviews. The potential employees can record their answers to interview questions. This gives them the freedom to complete this at a time and place of their choice.
Pre-recorded video interviewing also saves recruiters a lot of time. This allows them to see many more candidates than they’d otherwise be able to.
Finally, this offers extra evaluation potential. HireVue has an interesting tool. It analyzes body language and use of words, aiding the candidate screening process.
5. Checking you out
Reference-checking is a fundamental yet tedious part of the recruitment process. Luckily, it is now ripe for automating.
Companies including Zinc, Xref and Veriteq contact referees by email. They direct them to a website to anonymously answer questions about the candidate’s skills level and conduct. Specialist tools like Procius offer criminal-records-checking too. Some, as Checkster, go one step further. They integrate reference information with the later performance data for an employee. As a consequence, they offer the ability to learn from the accuracy of references.
These type of recruitment tech tools can save plenty of time and money. Yet, automating reference checking has potential limitations. You could miss the vagaries of tone the human ear can pick. These might prompt a follow-up question eliciting crucial information about a candidate.
6. How was it for you?
As detailed at the start of this paper, it is now easy for disgruntled candidates to share details of their recruitment process online. This presents a real danger to the company’s brand. It makes it much harder to recruit in the future and could also impact sales.
Recent years have seen TA professionals investing in measuring their candidates’ experience. How well did their potential employees perceive their recruitment process? Candidate NPS has emerged from the original Net Promoter Score (NPS) system. The new version simply asks candidates how likely they would be to recommend the company to a friend.
Tech help has also emerged in the form of candidate feedback tools. SurveyMonkey and Survale measure and assess the candidate experience. (And Survale also measures how employees feel). Companies can unveil their mistakes, and act upon it before they create a public problem. Great Recruiters measures candidate experience for recruitment agencies.
Starred has taken the measurement of candidate experience to the next level. Their platform can also track the experiences of customers and employees. Thus, it offers a 360-degree view of your brand reputation. This platform can then be integrated into any CRM system your company uses. It also promises ‘military-grade’ encryption to ensure all that data remains secure.
7. Show me your worth
Recruiters use aptitude testing to derive more dynamic information on candidates than they say about themselves, and it is one of the simpler TA tasks to automate. Testportal and TestCandidates offer a range of different types of tests for recruiters to send their candidates. Hundred5 manages to pre-filter applicants by serving up tests before they have even sent in their application.
Equalture has an interesting twist on the testing format. They created games that also test candidates on a variety of metrics. This makes the assessment process much more engaging.
Tazio and Harver offer tests as part of more integrated platforms. They include video interviewing and candidate experience feedback. Harver’s tests range from language and personality to cultural fit and situational judgment.
8. Creating a corporate coat of many colors
The economic case for a diverse workforce is now well-acknowledged, if not universally acted-upon. Companies feel the scrutiny from employees, customers, and other stakeholders more and more. For this reason, they’ve sought ways to erase unconscious bias from recruitment practices.
Many recruitment tech tools employing AI are currently helping anonymizing applications as a basic. Without names, ages or pictures, recruiters can only judge on a candidate’s skills, knowledge, and experience.
Blendoor has built a database of diverse candidates that are then presented to recruiters anonymously. It also benchmarks the company’s diversity ‘rating’ against others. This gives you an idea of how well you are doing.
Gap Jumpers and Beapplied offer the facility to analyze companies’ recruitment practices. The purpose is to work out where the particular biases happen. One of the easiest targets is often to take a fresh look at the language used in job ads. Is it only appealing to one gender?
Roikoi bases its business around asking a company’s current employees who they know that they would like to work with. Afterwards, it evolves a recruitment system around this. By asking employees from the communities it is under-represented in, it can build diversity across the board.
9. You’re hooked
Research from Bright Network found 88% of graduates would reject an offer they have already accepted for a better one.
So it’s not surprising that recruiters now invest significant resources into ensuring they won’t get ghosted. Recruitment tech tools including Appical help companies to keep candidates engaged during the ‘pre-boarding’ phase. They do so by connecting them with current employees. This gives them an insight into how it feels to work at the company. Greenhouse also does this, as part of its more over-arching Applicant Tracking Software (ATS).
The ‘on-boarding’ phase is the process by which the new employee is actively introduced to their role. Digital platforms like Eloomi can now be a great help in planning training. They also manage introductions to key colleagues and tech support.
Not that it ends there. Platforms including Enboarder can manage communications with the new employee and beyond. They aid managers to keep eliciting and responding to feedback from them. This is where tech can really help improve relationships, raising retention rates.
Recruitment Technology: Looking ahead
It’s clear that no recruiter with a reasonable budget for technology now needs to be doing any of the admin.
The past few years have yielded plenty of useful recruitment tech tools for automating the more routine TA tasks. The many that use complex AI tech also help with decision-making.
Move forward a few years and the digital possibilities will multiply. The opportunities will benefit both recruiter and candidate. Let’s consider the case in which a candidate applied to multiple positions. AI could scan a CV, compare it to the available positions and suggest an even more suitable role. These new insights delivered from AI and Machine Learning will also change the nature of TA. It’s possible they’ll make the job much more strategic in its improvements to candidate experience.
It won’t all be plain sailing. The more information about candidates that is available online and accessed by TA teams raises the chances of overstepping the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations. Keeping an eye on how this regulation is applied and altered will be a key task for recruiters and their tech partners.
Finally, as TA teams add more and more tools to their armoury, the need to integrate them into one system will only grow. A key question for recruiters will be – are the companies behind these tools Application Programming Interface (API)-first? Put simply, have they been designed to talk to each other? This will let recruiters select a few different systems to use together. Some, including Bullhorn and Greenhouse, have already developed impressive Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that can act as a hub of TA tech activity.
The next few years may well see the emergence of a few ‘superbrands’ of recruiter tech. For now though, the market is busy with opportunities for those who want to explore new ways of improving their talent acquisition.