Can Recruitment Software Help You Beat the Competition?

I began recruiting in the days when an electronic typewriter and a photocopier were considered state of the art technology, and were the only items in a recruitment agency which needed to be plugged in (apart from desk lamps, if you were lucky). This fact doesn’t confer any special knowledge on me of how recruitment was better “in the olden days”. Frankly, it’s much better now.

The level of IT competence expected of today’s recruitment consultants would be considered as “expert” by most other people (unless they are a programmer). Even the most Luddite of recruiters deal with a multitude of technology daily: Word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint, pdf files, email applications, job boards, blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter...

Of course the one essential piece of technology which was normally outwith a frontline recruiter’s access was the shop-window of their firm’s own website. Sure vacancies could be posted to it, but there was no way (until relatively recently) of having that website wholly integrated with the live database used by recruiters for their core workflow.

Leaving aside the fact that by necessity recruiters have built up valuable expertise in IT, what most really want are the tools which allow them to get on with the fundamentals of their job; finding, screening, assessing and delivering quality candidates to their clients – and, most importantly, faster than their competitors.

In an industry where a competitive advantage can be measured in the minutes between your candidate being submitted before your rival does the same, speed, efficiency and traceability are critical. In technology terms, the biggest hindrance to recruiters is transferring information from one platform to another; from candidate’s pc to job board, to email, to extracting content from a pdf, to entering and parsing the data on your own system. Each step hinders the process, and costs valuable time.

A website with an integrated recruitment system means that the immediacy which recruiters, clients and candidates demand, can be realised. Once a recruiter has experienced that direct interaction with candidates via their own website, it quickly becomes central to their daily tasks. A working, fully active and continually changing website is much more attractive to both candidates and recruiters. No longer is it merely a noticeboard or brochure site, which gathers dust and is treated as an afterthought. Integrating your recruitment software fully in your firm’s website is the very best way of gaining that commitment to technology from your recruiters, which is essential now more than ever.

Join recruitment experts Stephen O’Donnell and Wendy McDougall next week for a free webinar. They’ll be revealing the common traits of the best – and worst – recruitment agency sites out there, and discussing the part of recruitment software in a successful website. If you’re looking for some take-away tips to help you attract more candidates and clients directly, get involved! It’ll be at 2pm GMT on Tuesday November 19th - sign up here.

Credit: Images from Just2shutter & digitalart via freedigitalphotos.net