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Can Recruiting Software Improve Efficiency for Small Companies?

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Recruiting has many components to it. While all companies (large and small) will differ with their own specifics, there are some common things that are part of most everyone’s recruiting process:

  • establish your brand for potential applicants
  • consider different ways to attract applicants
  • nurture them if the time isn’t quite right for one party or the other
  • move them along in the process to avoid missing opportunities
  • keep track of what has been or needs to be done with these applicants

Larger organizations have used technology to help with these items for 10-15 years, but only recently has it become feasible for smaller organizations to do the same. Good recruiting software (also referred to as Applicant Tracking Software or ATS) is now a cost-effective way for small companies to gain efficiency in these common recruiting tasks.

A good analogy is accounting software. Unlike 25 years ago, small companies today have access to very functional (and affordable) tools to automate the various aspects of their accounting. Today, the thought of handling these functions manually is almost laughable, given the technology available. In many cases, smaller organizations are finding the same to be true with recruiting. Below are some quick examples of how these types of tools help companies streamline the common aspects of recruiting:

  • Branding — great recruiting software will reinforce the existing web presence of an organization. This levels the playing field against larger competitors who have been doing this for years.
  • Attracting applicants — making potential candidates aware of openings is critical. Beyond traditional job boards, leading-edge recruiting software solutions are utilizing technology available to help leverage the social and business contacts of existing employees to drive more passive candidate traffic. These are the people who are potentially open to a change, but haven’t yet started actively seeking opportunities on job boards.
  • Nurturing candidates until the time is right — more progressive ATS offerings will allow an organization to “drip” on potential candidates with new openings and/or social media updates to keep them engaged. This keeps the organization more top of mind for that potential candidate.
  • Move them along in the process — knowing which applicants have applied, where they are in the process, and the next steps to be taken are keys to successful recruiting. This keeps good applicants more engaged and helps to avoid losing them to other opportunities. This is one of the core functions of a good applicant tracking system.
  • Keep track of what has been done — this is important to any organization, as documentation can be invaluable for situations where discrimination or unlawful hiring practices are alleged. For organizations that are required to comply with Affirmative Action regulations, the right software application is imperative.

 

Using this type of technology can certainly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the recruiting process for an organization. To learn more about ExactHire and our solutions, please visit our resources section or contact us today.

Image credit: Internet Open by Blaise Alleyne (contact)

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3 Tips to Engage Your Applicants During the Hiring Process

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Any decent recruiter knows that it is critical to have an active pool from which to source candidates for jobs, but that doesn’t just mean a large number of any past job applicants. A truly good applicant pool includes applicants that are interested in future positions with your organization and have the qualifications required. Here is an overview of three tips to engage your applicants throughout the recruiting and selection process.

Have relevant and diverse content on your careers site

Maintaining a company careers site with current and RELEVANT job-related and company-culture inspired content will help attract top talent. Your website or career page may be your first impression with the applicant…so make sure it’s a positive and informative experience! This effort shows potential future employees that you are serious about your industry and your team, and it can provide compelling information to elusive passive job seekers who are just dipping their toe into the pool and contemplating job transition.

Moreover, feature this information in various forms and locations:

Acknowledge applicants’ efforts to apply for jobs on your site

Once the candidate has applied to the job, make sure he/she receives some confirmation of his/her formal interest in the company. Making this communication more personalized will help the candidate stay intrigued…think of it as a call to action. Invite the candidate to follow your company via Twitter or LinkedIn in the correspondence text, itself. By doing so, you can start to expose glimpses of your company culture early in the relationship and the right applicants will more likely stay interested in your company throughout the process, as a result.

Make the first meeting unforgettable

Most of the time, the first meeting between a candidate and an organization’s recruiting representative is an interview, so try to find ways to make this experience more positive and remarkable…not just a stiff meeting at an office in a conference room. Set clear expectations about what to expect from the rest of the interviewing process and then be accountable to following through with promises in order to bolster your organization’s credibility and employment brand.

When interviewing top talent for hard-to-fill positions, meetings could take place at a nice coffee shop. This would put the candidate at ease and also make the experience stand out in his/her mind. After all, when courting A players for critical positions, as a recruiter, you are competing against others that want this applicant at their organization, as well.

Finally, thank all applicants for their time…while not a radical idea, this is sometimes overlooked since normally it is the applicant thanking the hiring manager. These types of small details will leave a lasting and positive impression with your candidates.

As a recruiter, part of your job is to “sell” the position to the potential employee and make sure that each candidate is truly interested in the job. Keeping candidates engaged throughout the hiring process will help to ensure your top contenders accept a job offer, start off engaged and succeed at your organization.

For information on how ExactHire’s hiring software solutions can aid your efforts to engage applicants, please contact us today.

Image credit: engaged by Pia Kristine (contact)

Help! My Job Posting Isn’t Getting Enough Applicants!

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Occasionally clients will come to us in need of some insight as to why one of their positions isn’t receiving enough applicants. Their applicant traffic is falling short of what they would expect given the market, position type, unemployment rate, etc. In fact, here’s a recent inquiry from an ExactHire applicant tracking software client that was concerned about the number of employment applications being submitted for an arguably common, in-demand, type of position – Web Developer.

“We have been having a lot of trouble filling one of our open positions, and I wondered if you or anyone else at the ExactHire office might have some advice on how to pursue. The Web Developer position we know is a highly sought-after position. In light of this, we have considered the option of trying to attract international applicants, perhaps on an H1-B Visa. Are there any specific ways that you know of to attract these types of applicants since we see so little response from what we are doing currently?”

Check Your Job Listing’s Vital Signs With Analytics

There are many factors that could impact the popularity of a job posting, and so it makes sense to approach the situation from many angles and try some different adjustments to increase applicant volume. For this client, my first thought was to check their ATS site’s Google Analytics account…which we set up for all client portals. I logged into Google Analytics, and then looked up how many visitors had recently been landing on this particular job listing’s page URL. Visitors who landed on the job description page directly (for their first point of entry to the ATS site) would have been referred from other job boards (rather than from the client’s ATS portal’s external job listings page). This process gave us a snapshot into how easily the client’s job was being “seen” by external boards.
ExactHire ATS | Examine job analytics
For example, upon examining the data in Google Analytics, I could see that the Web Developer job’s URL (#19 on the list) had not received as many page views as some of the client’s other concurrent positions – even though the same job boards had been used for both listings. For example, #7 on the list for a Product Development Assistant position had received quite a bit more views (308 vs. 113). When I looked at that job’s description, it was not too long; however, it was at least double the length of the client’s Web Developer job description and so there were more opportunities for it to include keywords that external job boards could use to rank it higher in relevant search results to applicants. Plus, the Product Development Assistant position restated the actual job title in the first sentence of its description…this is a great way to get it appearing more prominently in search results.

The Web Developer position did not do that. I suggested that the client try putting it in the first sentence and making the description a bit longer. NOTE: At the time, the Web Developer description was only about 3 sentences long. While you don’t want to slip into the trap of making job listings too long – particularly for hard-to-fill positions where qualified applicants are difficult to find – you don’t want them so short that a lack of content leaves them unable to earn higher search engine result rankings, either.

What’s in a Job Name?

I also suggested, given that Web Developer is such a common job title, that the client be more specific in naming the position. For example, what kind of developer is it? Could our client include the primary programming language that would be required in the title, itself? This technique would help applicants who do specific searches for certain programming languages on sites such as Indeed to come across a related position more easily. For example, in this particular case, the client might have tried a title like “Web Developer – HTML/CSS – Jquery.”

Attracting H1B Visa Sponsorship Candidates

In regards to the client’s question about going the H1B visa sponsorship route, I advised my contact to make sure and mention those specific words in the job description to both set expectations with potential international applicants, as well as improve the likelihood that international candidates who may do a search including those keywords end up seeing your job listing in the results returned for the job board. For example, I Googled the term myself and landed on some SimplyHired search results showing job descriptions that did just that:
H1B Visa Keywords Job Listings

Diagnosing Your Job Description: A Review

So to recap, if you are looking to determine what ails your low-applicant-volume job listing, I would suggest:

  • Considering whether the length of your job descriptions is appropriate (hint: look at similar jobs that are at the top of external job boards’ search results and check the length of those descriptions)
  • Using a more specific job title
  • Restating the title of your job at the beginning of your job description text
  • Including other relevant keyword phrases in your job listing (i.e. h1B visa, etc.)

Image credit: Lubbock Heart Hospital, Dec 16-17, 2005 by brykmantra (contact)

Improve Your Hiring Process: Communicate With Applicants

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How often is your recruiting department fielding unsolicited calls from applicants that are inquiring about the status of their application with your company? Too frequently? Well, its time to proactively communicate with your candidates so they don’t even feel the urge to pick up the phone or shoot off that next email inquiry.

In the fourth installment of this “Improve Your Hiring Process” series, I talked about managing your pipeline of applicants effectively. A major component of that is keeping your applicants informed as they travel through your selection process. Otherwise, you will likely find yourself fielding numerous phone calls and/or emails from applicants wanting to know if they’re still being considered, what are the next steps from here, etc.

Similarly, this also ties in with the idea of protecting your brand — both your employment brand and your business/consumer brand. You don’t want to give people the ability to take shots at your organization. But if they feel their resume/application goes into a “black hole” or if they hear back a month after their interview (or not at all) that they’re no longer being considered for your position, you’re feeding the most common frustration of applicants. That complaint? Not hearing from you!

Keep Applicants Informed of Recruitment Progress

Now, if you fill 3 positions per year and only receive 5-10 resumes/applications per position, you likely don’t have this problem. You can keep your applicants up to date pretty easily with email and/or an occasional phone call. At the same time, if this is your situation, you probably lost interest in this topic long ago!

The more common scenario is that you have dozens (or hundreds) of applicants per position and multiple positions open at any given time. In this scenario, you have three options for keeping your applicants informed:

  1. Ignore the issue because branding isn’t applicable to your situation.
  2. Keep your applicants organized in a spreadsheet and utilize Outlook or Gmail templates to correspond with those applicants as you move them to different steps in your recruiting process. This is pretty involved and requires a good deal of effort, but it can be done.
  3. Use an applicant tracking software tool to automate this process for you.

This happens to be a pretty big sweet spot for quality applicant tracking system tools. Because you now have all of your applicants in a single spot, including where they are in your process at any given moment, the chore of logging that data is taken care of for you. From there, a good tool of this sort will allow you to automate mass emails in a one-to-one format to applicants as they move through your hiring process. You save time, applicants are kept posted as to where things stand, and you dramatically cut down the phone calls and emails asking for updates — everyone wins.

Next up is the final installment in this series — Bringing Objectivity to Your Hiring Decision.

Image Credit: By Einar Faanes (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Applicant Tracking Software for Blue Collar Employers

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In my dealings with organizations around the country, I occasionally (though not as often as in the past) hear concerns about moving the hiring process online for positions that are entry-level or blue collar in nature.  I especially run across this objection when speaking with individuals from manufacturing companies. When digging a bit deeper with these organizations, the concerns typically boil down to two things:

  • Do their applicants have internet access readily available?
  • Are their applicants tech-savvy enough to complete employment applications online?

The first question is probably a bit easier to evaluate than the second.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent publication on the topic, “Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2018,” around 85% of American households had internet access in 2018.  That means three out of every four applicants (on average) have internet in their home.  Beyond that, we also have to consider how many people have access to the internet through their smartphone or tablet device?  While there may not be any solid statistics to bring clarity to that question yet, I’m a believer that some reasonable percentage of the 25% population without home internet access do have access through one of these alternate devices.

Strategies for Applicants Without Internet Access

However, let’s look at this from a more pessimistic perspective.  To be fair, if I’m recruiting for positions that are more entry level or blue collar, I don’t want to potentially miss 15% of my applicant pool because they don’t have internet access.  If you subscribe to that theory, below are some things our clients have done to make our applicant tracking software more accessible for those who may not have regular access to the internet:

  • Set up kiosks so applicants may apply on-site.  Going this route doesn’t mean you have to purchase new laptops or desktops (or even tablets).  Instead, simply have your IT staff (or an outside group for very few dollars) repurpose older computers so that they may be used in a lobby or office for just this purpose.
    • If applicants do not have a current email address, then make sure your web-based employment application includes a link to a free email provider within its instructions – so that the applicant may create a new email account on the spot and then use it to complete the required email field on the application.
  • Suggest to applicants that they may access your career portal for free from most libraries.  All they need is a library card (also free), and they may apply like any other applicant.
  • Partner with your local Workforce Development office.  Given that its mission is to help create and/or fill jobs for local organizations, the staff there may be happy to allow applicants to complete your online application from their office.
  • As a last resort (if none of the above work), suggest to applicants that they use the computer of a friend or family member.  While I don’t anticipate it would come to this often, it does virtually guarantee that they’ll know someone with internet access.

Applicants Who Are Not Tech-Savvy

Now, on to the second question from above — are the applicants tech-savvy enough to complete online employment applications available through your applicant tracking software?  The reason this is more difficult to answer is because there are a handful of things that can influence the answer.  Chief among them are:

  • How user-friendly is the paperless application you’re using?  If designed properly, a good ATS should walk applicants through the process of finding and applying for the right job in a very simple, intuitive way.
  • What is the typical demographic you’re hiring for these positions?  There are some groups of people where access to internet and overall computer usage is lower than the national average.  Again, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s data, examples include households where the median age is above 65, and households located in rural areas with limited availability to purchase/use internet services.  If you happen to target these demographics, you may need to have manual options available on very limited stand-by for cases where accessing a web-based application doesn’t work for applicants.

So, if you hire entry-level or blue collar staff regularly, please take a look at your hiring landscape.  Feel free to use the guidelines above to help determine whether the advantages of applicant tracking software may be realized for your company, despite any initial concerns regarding affecting your applicant flow.

Image credit: Perfection is our Direction by Nick Harris1 (contact)