It’s a brave new world of recruiting as it becomes more and more apparent that remote work is not only working well but is preferred by a vast swathe of employees across all industries. The needs of employers are shifting, the skill sets expected of employees are evolving, and recruiters are pivoting to meet new demands from both.
Identifying new talent is more important than ever, with a labor market that is incredibly tight and massive skills gaps making it hard for companies to maintain peak operational capacity. Competition is fierce for employees known to possess the skill sets now in high demand, but the obvious candidates aren’t the only candidates fit for any given role.
New recruiting tools can help recruiters not only identify fresh talent but correctly gauge each candidate’s skills to ensure the best match possible and improve quality of hire. It’s possible to use modern recruitment techniques to streamline and speed up the recruiting process, reduce bias, and encourage retention.
The applicant tracking system, or ATS, has been around for quite a while, evolving along with technology to make centralizing and analyzing data about candidates easier. Today’s ATS has massive functionality as well as the ability to be connected with other tools.
An ATS should be more than a database. It should be a communication network, allowing hiring professionals to identify top talent, discuss applicants internally, reach out to the best candidates, and gather information to confirm if they are right for an open role.
Finally, an ATS can be a repository for data that can be continually analyzed, allowing recruiters to build profiles for quality of hire and retention. When employers can create a strong correlation between a common candidate attribute and their performance or longevity at their company, they can look for corresponding markers in potential hires and leverage that knowledge for better decision-making.
Tools like Zoom were already starting to gain ground, but the pandemic kicked everything virtual into high gear. Demand went up for high-level communications options as employers and managers scrambled to find ways to communicate with and control a suddenly distributed workforce.
Now, these same tools are coming into heavier use on the recruitment side of things, allowing for seamless contact in a familiar format. Use virtual meetings to handle candidate interviews, virtual classrooms to administer pre-hire tests or assessments, and virtual surveys to maintain contact with employees post-hire, for a read on their satisfaction and stability.
Virtual tools are particularly helpful for hiring remote candidates since there’s no requirement for an in-person or on-site meeting. Recruiters can also ask candidates to self-interview and submit their videos, to help narrow the field and learn more about applicants’ soft skills and potential culture add.
The reference check is one of the oldest tools in the book and can be one of the most critical processes in the recruitment funnel. A reference check can deliver vital information about a candidate’s suitability for a given role. However, this is also one of the biggest time drains for recruiters
Unfortunately, many companies only partially complete reference checks or leave them extremely late in the hiring process, leading to bottlenecks in hiring when a candidate falls through at the last moment due to something coming up in a reference check.
Digitizing the process makes completing reference checks easier, faster, and less costly for the organization. It also helps remove unconscious bias by standardizing each reference, allows for self-reference checking to be completed to provide a jumping-off point for evaluation, and can improve diversity.
4 Key Ways Recruitment Reference Checks Can Reduce Your Cost Per Hire
Artificial intelligence and automation tools are slowly but steadily making their way into the complicated world of recruitment. For enterprises, these tools can be critical to finding new talent and keeping fresh candidates on deck. For SMBs, tools that simply include an AI component or help automate even a single process can be invaluable.
AI can manifest in many different forms, from chatbots that support candidate inquiry processes to deep-dive analytics that help develop models of a perfect candidate. Using AI to sort through thousands of resumes and identify front-runners is becoming common practice, but AI is only as good as the data fed to it, so there are still bias risks.
Automation is also becoming a familiar part of recruitment, from sourcing to onboarding. Digital processes can be readily automated, and multi-step funnels streamlined using automation for driving applicants or candidates to the next action without delays or confusion.
The cost of a bad hire is even higher than the original cost of acquisition. Having to go back to the hiring process only months after completing it for the same role can severely disrupt productivity and morale in the workplace.
Being able to correctly identify the right person for each role and swiftly complete the hiring process, then retaining that employee past the one-year mark and beyond is key. Companies need to look for tools that improve the accuracy of their hiring process, and diversity, increased revenues, and quality of hire will follow.
Recruiting tools can help surface candidate quality indicators that correlate to job performance and extended retention, helping organizations hang on to their hard-won talent for as long as possible. The best of these tools can also help identify hidden talent already within the organization, supporting promotion from within.
Crosschq provides a complete suite of tools to aid in the recruitment process.
Ready to explore new recruiting tools to help maintain a full and active workforce and build a thriving company culture? Request a free demo today.