The best way to have a successful business is to find and retain talented employees. However, it is challenging to find qualified employees in this modern-day world and difficult to keep them for long. According to a survey from the ManpowerGroup, about 69% of organizations in the United States are struggling to find the right talent, an increase from 14% in 2010.
Recruitment and selection are a vital part of Human Resource Management that aims to maximize employee strength to meet the company’s goals and objectives. The recruitment life cycle is an end-to-end process of sourcing, screening, shortlisting, and selecting the right fit for the available vacant position. With each step, the candidates move towards the recruitment funnel, and the entire process gets streamlined, keeping everyone aligned.
Over the past few years, there has been a seismic shift in the recruitment industry, especially since Covid-19. The pandemic brought a massive change in talent acquisition teams, leading to virtual hiring and onboarding. People are left with no other option than to adapt to the new normal to facilitate remote communications. There were mass resignations because of the competitive and candidate-driven market. Recruitment tools and strategies were the only respites to survive in these tough times both for the candidates and recruiters.
What is Recruitment?
Recruiting the right fit for the job has always been an arduous task for any organization, irrespective of the size, annual turnover, number of staff working, etc. Losing an employee and trying to replace the same could be a costly affair, so having an excellent and highly-experienced recruiting team becomes vital for any organization. Several organizations outsource their recruiting needs due to a lack of proper management skills, while some rely on modern recruiting tools to advance their recruitment strategies.
Recruitment is the process of actively searching, finding, and hiring candidates for a particular job or position for an organization. It is basically an approach that needs to be followed while recruiting the right talent for the right position and at the right time. In other words, it is a process to attract, select, screen, evaluate, interview, recruit, and onboard the potential candidates that meet your organization’s needs. An excellent recruiting team could create a large pool of talented people and also reflects the company’s professionalism.
A good recruitment plan is powered by rigorous planning and evaluation. It needs teamwork to come up with the best results. The entire recruitment process needs to be streamlined so that each member has access to the tools and resources to carry out the plan successfully.
Benefits of an Effective Recruitment Process for Your Organization
There are several benefits associated with an effective recruitment process for your organization. Some of the most noteworthy ones are as follows:
Lower Hiring Costs
Cost is the most critical factor for operations in an organization, that companies strive to keep down as much as possible. Using a proactive hiring approach with a well-defined and well-planned recruitment process can improve your business performance as well as profitability by reducing the cost-per-hire. Once you create a talent pool as per your organizational needs, recruitment could turn out to be a very cost-effective process.
Using automation in the recruitment process can make the job less repetitive and more skill-based. Using the right recruitment tools can help recruiters reduce the overall recruitment costs by minimizing the probability of bad hires.
Saves Time
An effective recruitment process reflects the professionalism of your company and helps to save a lot of time and money spent on identifying, attracting, engaging, screening, interviewing, recruiting, and retaining employees. The repercussion of hiring someone not deserving could lead to unnecessary waste of your time and effort that goes into their training. As soon as you get the right fit, you get the roadmap to success for your organization.
ATS and other similar tools can help the recruiters accomplish their day-to-day tasks while saving a tremendous amount of time, as the unfit applications are removed at the beginning of the process itself rather than towards the end of entire recruitment life cycle.
Achieve Better Quality of New Hires
A constructive recruitment process helps fast-track the hiring of better-quality candidates. A slow and lean recruitment process leads to candidates’ loss of interest, thus tempting them to seek a job elsewhere. As per research, companies that make an offer within a week or so from the interview day are likely to get better quality of new hires.
Improve Employee Productivity
Using a robust recruitment process, the HRs can invest their time in training and onboarding new employees. Employee engagement and performance can be fostered when the entire focus shifts to learning and development, thus improving employee productivity.
An employee who is proactively looking for a job is not dubious of losing the present job due to poor performance. So, a smart recruiter needs to use the interview round to elicit responses to understand the employee’s strengths, weaknesses, skills, limitations, etc. That could help predict the employee’s productivity in the future.
What are the different types of recruitment?
There are five types of recruitment that we will discuss in detail here to help you understand and deploy the same efficiently.
Internal Recruiting
Internal recruiting is a method deployed by recruiters to recruit talent internally, i.e. from the same organization but different departments. It enables the team members to fill the skill gaps and motivates them by creating career growth opportunities. It cuts down the cost of recruiting someone new from outside as it saves both time and money.
The main advantage of deploying internal recruitment within the firm is to reduce the employee turnover. Using this approach, you can find a potential candidate for the vacant job role in a cheaper and faster way. The recruiters need not go through the testing and vetting with the existing employees again.
Retained Recruiting
Retained recruiting is one of the ways most companies follow when they fail to find a perfect fit. The companies hire a firm to do the recruiting for them and pay an upfront fee in return. These firms are responsible for bringing the right fit to your organization and continue their search until the position is filled with a perfect match.
The best advantage of using retained recruiting is that there are lower risk of bad hires, making it the safest option for the recruiters.
Contingency Recruiting
Contingency recruiting is another type of outsourced recruiting in which a fee is paid to the firm only after a successful hire. The company and the contingency recruiting firm follow the principle of “no selection, no fee.” It means that it is a kind of free service until the candidates accept the job offers and stay with the organization for a stipulated period.
Contingency recruiting firms are not restricted to one project and one company. Instead, they closely connect with multiple firms and companies, making the search easy and quick. And the same is true for companies. The companies that follow contingency recruiting can hire multiple firms to find suitable candidates to fill their job roles.
Staffing Recruiting
Staffing recruiting is selecting and hiring prospective candidates and retaining the present skilled and competent workforce. In this modern-day competitive world, maintaining employees is quite an arduous task. So, staffing is necessary to prevent or reduce employee turnover.
Staffing is a managerial function that includes looking into the workforce environment, encouraging the employees to apply for the vacant positions, hiring the best candidates from the job pool, placement of the hired employees in the right project as per their skills, job appraisals, incentives, appreciation rewards, promotion and compensation. It could help in retaining and maintaining the employees effectively.
Campus Recruiting
Campus recruiting is an inexplicable part of the hiring process, irrespective of the exponential increase in the millennials and freshers. It is a process followed by companies to hire fresh talent in their organization and is often associated with large companies seeking bulk-hiring. One can get a myriad of choices when it comes to this recruiting process.
Recruitment for campus jobs is generally an extensive process that involves targeted campus visits, pre-placement actions by way of university internships, assessments, interviews, and boarding. The goal of campus recruitment is to gain access to a huge number of graduates who are looking for jobs. This assists companies in meeting the ever-growing demand for talent by hiring candidates from various universities.
7 Stages of the Recruitment Process
Finding the right talent has become a challenging task in this competitive world. A good and effective recruitment process is the need of the hour for all the recruiters out there. Let’s take a look at the seven stages of the recruitment process that you should follow. There is no stage that is more important than the other. In fact, all of them together work to help you locate and recruit great employees for your organization.
Identify your Hiring Need
This is the most important stage of your recruitment process and involves gathering maximum from the client or your hiring manager to completely understand the expectations and needs related to the job-position. You need to ensure that your recruiting needs are identified timely and accurately with perfection.
It is important to get this part of the hiring process correct as it will influence the remainder of your recruitment process. Make sure you are well-prepared and understand what the new hire will need to fulfil and which type of candidate is best suited for the task.
Before you start on the journey of hiring a new candidate, be sure to have all the facts, priorities, skills, long-term and short-term hiring plans, etc. Analysis and evaluation are necessary factors when identifying your hiring needs.
Preparing the Perfect Job Description
The job description defines the requirements of an organization clearly and is a vital part of every recruitment process. It helps the applicants understand the job role better and allows them to evaluate whether they are the right fit for the job role or not. The job description should be as specific as possible with no jargons.
A perfect job description involves a job title, an introduction of the company, a job overview with the necessary details, responsibilities, day-to-day tasks, expected skills, salary range applicable, preferred locations, benefits provided by the company, and added advantages. If you have these things incorporated into your job description, you could be sure of attracting the right candidate for the vacant job role.
Talent Search Process
This step is a crucial one wherein you start promoting and advertising your job posts or job ads. If the talent search process turns out to be successful, you can get the right candidate for your vacant job position. This step decides the type of talent that comes to your organization and also helps you determine what kind of talent you seek for your organization.
Some of the most common ways of the talent search process are social media recruiting, browsing through the internet, sharing the vacancy on career websites and job boards, employee referrals for external recruitment, and internal recruiting. You can try out these methods to successfully recruit the most deserving candidate.
Shortlisting the Candidates
According to Glassdoor, a typical corporate job application attracts about 250 resumes. Shortlisting is typically the most time-consuming and difficult phase of the recruitment process. It involves selecting the candidates in your applicant pool who match the desired and required specifications and whom you’d like to proceed with the next step in the recruitment process, that usually involves some type of interview.
A survey of the top talent acquisition executives reveals that 46% struggle to find high-quality candidates in the current candidate driven market. However, 52% of respondents said that the most difficult aspect of recruitment was shortlisting the most qualified candidates from a candidate pool.
Interviewing Candidates
Conducting interviews for the shortlisted applicants is another critical stage of the recruitment life cycle. Effective interviews uncover weaknesses, flag up potential risks as well as ensure expectations align with compensation, salary, and the personality of the candidate. It can also be used to verify qualifications, abilities and capabilities.
The majority of Interviews are often a two-way process. In the course of an interview, the prospective candidate is also evaluating whether your company is a good match or not. So, you need to be courteous and respectful, and at the same time also promote the advantages of the position and the company.
As a recruiter, you need to prepare questions that provide you with detailed information about each candidate’s background and professional experience to determine whether they’d be suitable for the position you’re offering. Avoid asking irrelevant to gauge the response of your candidate. Instead, you should keep your questions specific to the job
Evaluating Candidates
How do you choose the final candidate if you have more than one qualified candidate? It can be extremely difficult to choose between multiple candidates, especially when the final batch of applicants is highly qualified. Most companies will answer this question with a post-interview assessment.
It’s a tricky choice and also one that can hold severe repercussions if the incorrect selection is made. After all, a large amount of resources is required to conduct the recruiting tasks. If it fails, your company could lose weeks, or even months of productivity.
An interview alone is not enough to evaluate candidates. Post-interview evaluations give those responsible for making the hiring decisions a set criterion to use in their final decision. This will reduce the time and cost of hiring qualified candidates.
Employee Onboarding
As per the research, onboarding experience directly impacts the candidate’s engagement with team members, performance, and longevity in the organization. So be sure to create a positive impact. The integration with the company should be smooth and seamless, making it easy to adapt for the newcomers.
Some of the steps in onboarding processes include setting expectations, boundaries, goals and deadlines, building trust and confidence within the team, and building relationships outside the project and within the organization.
Tools to Simplify your Recruitment Process
Recruitment tools are essential for organizations that require to coordinate hiring tasks and also enhance the recruitment process. They can save you time and money as well as assist you in funnelling resources easily in the labour-intensive recruitment processes.
Here is a list of recruitment tools that are used for various hiring purposes. Consider the 7 types of recruitment tools below that could help you to improve your hiring processes in your organization.
Recruitment Tools for Sourcing
When done manually, sourcing the right candidate can be a tedious and monotonous errand. All gratitude to the innovation and technology which revolutionized the whole framework. You can now focus on a lot of potential candidates who could be the right fit for the gig posts with the assistance of these sourcing tools.
These tools can prove to be very helpful in connecting with active as well as passive candidates. The recruiters could quickly put filters to make it user-friendly and accessible. It gives you a simple interface that is easy to use, and you can get results in seconds.
Some of the recruitment tools for sourcing are Recruit’Em, OctoHR, Shapr, Joveo & Wonderkind
ATS tools for Recruiters
The Applicant Tracking System permits you to track the candidate’s application throughout the recruitment process. You can glance through the application and put your remarks as per the flow. It provides you with a range of benefits ranging from automated emails, gentle reminders, the status of the uploaded files and docs, and similar other things.
The ATS allows candidates to have a self-service portal that they can use readily as per their comfort. It enables the business to deal with small to medium-sized applications and uses automation and artificial intelligence to increase the speed of the entire flow.
Some of the ATS tools for recruiters are iSmartRecruit, Zoho Freshworks, Jobvite & Recruiter Box.
Recruitment Tools for creating Job Descriptions
Writing a perfect job post or a job description requires a lot of practice and skills. The job description is the first thing that the candidates see, so it should be catchy and appealing, and this is all possible with the help of these recruitment tools.
These tools provide you with proper formatting styles that give a look and feel to the candidate while reading the job description and propel them to proceed with the company. If you are oblivion of the best practices followed for doing the same task, it would be wise to use these tools to stand out in the crowd.
Some of the Recruitment Tools for creating Job Descriptions are Ongig, JDXpert, Hireology, Competency Core & ADP Workforce Now.
Recruitment Tools for Managing Social Media Engagements
Social media recruitment is one of the trending recruitment strategies used by companies while managing social media engagements. About 95% of the recruiters use LinkedIn for recruiting candidates required by clients. Use of social media platforms for recruitment has now become easier with the help of the tools. There are multiple recruitment software available that is used in the recruitment industry to automate the entire manual work in one click.
It is the easiest way to reach Millennials and Gen Z in today’s world. Creating and managing campaigns and posts can be a seamless process. Social media recruitment tool is an all-in-one tool that unzips the true potential of the social media platforms and encourages the recruiters to reach the most deserving candidates.
Some of the Recruitment Tools for Managing Social Media Engagements are Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Agora Pulse & Bamboo HR.
Recruitment Tools for Onboarding
The recruiter’s job does not end just after recruiting the right candidate. Instead, it is extended to onboard the newcomers smoothly and keep them engaged during the initial period. It is necessary because the company might lose the candidate if they do not put any effort to make them feel comfortable in the new place.
Organizations should use recruitment tools for onboarding to make these things handy. These tools are responsible for every work from day one, and reduces the requirement for manual interventions. All the onboarding documents and related formalities are taken care of with the help of these tools.
Some of the Recruitment Tools for Onboarding are Avature, BizMerlin, Boardon, Chief Onboarding & Ableteams.
Recruitment Tools for Video Interviewing
Recruitment tools for video interviewing are a total game-changer in this modern-day world. It is now used widely to ease scheduling clashes and enhance the video interviewing process. It effectively reduces the cost and time involved when scheduling a one-on-one interview.
As per the recent reports, there will be an exponential rise while deploying these tools in the employee recruitment life cycle. These tools could turn out to be fruitful for the recruiters because most candidates turn down the job offer if the interview process is not good enough. The AI and ML-powered technology attached to these tools can help screen the most prospective candidate from a myriad of submitted video interviews.
Some of the Recruitment Tools for Video Interviewing are VidCruiter, MyInterview, SparkHire, XOR & Avature.
Chatbot Tools for Recruitment
A chatbot is a conversational interface that helps to accomplish fundamental tasks for the recruiters using artificial intelligence and machine learning. This could be something as straightforward as allowing an employer understand the number of interviews they have that day to something more intricate, like setting up meetings with prospects.
A chatbot can perform a multitude of admin tasks ranging from collecting info, screening candidates, shortlisting, scheduling interviews, and many more. It saves a lot of money and time and all manual tasks get automated using this tool, making the application user-friendly. It acts as a direct gateway for the applicant’s to the recruiters and HRs of the organization.
Some of the Chatbot Tools for Recruitment are Olivia, Humanly, XOR’s chatbot, Brazen & Ideal.
Conclusion
Though recruiting is a simple concept, deploying effective recruitment strategies combines art and science that leads to reliable results. The recruitment landscape is constantly evolving and will not remain the same for ever. You need to ensure that a proactive approach is taken to identify, attract and retain the right employees for your company.
An effective recruitment process can help organizations save time and money and could help in improving productivity from both an employee perspective as well as from a standpoint of hiring engagement.
Recognizing the potential of a proper recruitment process can help businesses create benchmarks and by following the above mentioned guidelines, you can easily find the qualified candidate for your company.
Thanks Merin for this great article! Recruitment has come a long way from manual screening to chatbots for inducting bright talent into the organization. There are tools for almost all stages of recruitment now.
Wow, thank you for this thorough guide on the recruitment process and lists of various recruitment tools. This really helps me. Will look forward to your other articles!