As we head further into 2019, there’s still one lingering challenge on every organization’s radar: the talent shortage. Worldwide, employers are feeling the strain and turning to recruiting firms to help connect them with the talent they need. But when skilled professionals disappear from the job market in less than 10 days, even seasoned staffing and recruiting professionals are going back to the drawing board and reevaluating their talent acquisition strategies.
Here are the tools and techniques we’ve seen forward-thinking organizations implement to eliminate barriers to success throughout the entire recruiting lifecycle.
1. Offload sourcing and basic screening from your recruiters’ daily activities. Reducing the time spent at the top of the recruiting funnel on sourcing and basic screening activities enables recruiters to focus their attention on higher conversion activities like relationship building, candidate interview preparation, and offer negotiation. When recruiters are sidetracked by lower conversion (but nonetheless pivotal) activities like sourcing and basic screening, their effectiveness in selling candidates on roles and getting those candidates in front of hiring managers dwindles.
In an effort to maintain a rapid tempo in the hiring process, many successful companies focus on streamlining sourcing and screening tasks, effectively improving both time to fill and cost-effectiveness. Often, this is achieved through a combination of emerging technologies and newly defined in-house or outsourced roles. This allows recruiters to connect with high-quality professionals faster while still directing their primary focus towards securing the hire.
PREMIUM CONTENT: Internal staff on how to build trust with employees
2.. Supply your recruiting team with analytics and insight to perform at their best. Recruiters empowered by the right blend of data-driven analysis and insight are better positioned to find appropriate candidates, and thus improve their placement and retention rates. However, a 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey found that though 85% of global organizations expressed the importance of people data, only 42% said they were ready to fully capture and implement that data within their HR strategies. It’s no surprise that recruiters without the right reporting tools and analytical insights will swiftly fall behind their competitors.
The good news is that a growing number of applicant tracking systems include advanced reporting features that provide staffing firms with more data-driven insights. With these tools, recruiters and managers are able to build a prioritized list of requisitions, scoring mechanism for sourced candidates, and a targeted recruitment approach that simplifies the search process for an individual client’s ideal candidate profile. This wealth of data and analytics enables your recruiters to identify high-quality candidates more quickly, and enables you to objectively evaluate the performance of your recruiters.
3. Automate or outsource tedious manual tasks slowing your recruiters down. Time is especially valuable for recruiters because of how quickly top candidates vanish in this job market. In fact, one of the biggest recruitment challenges that onshore recruiters have historically faced is the need to complete a laundry list of low conversion activities before they can make a placement. This restricts the most important skills in their arsenal – their communication and interpersonal skills –as they sweat through more routine tasks to source, screen, submit, and onboard top talent. There’s a solution: high-powered recruitment automation platforms. Here are a few of the newer products that have proven results:
- Recruitment marketing analytics and automation tools
- Job parsing and semantic search tools
- ATS integration tools
- Automated candidate engagement tools (text, email, and voice)
- Automated scheduling
While these technologies have changed the game for recruiters, not every administrative task can be automated. Critical yet time-consuming tasks such as resume formatting, background checks, or onboarding document processing benefit from dedicated support – that’s where enlisting the help of a shared services team or offshore RPO comes in. With these specialized teams, organizations receive dedicated recruitment support with their recruiting-funnel activities so their internal recruiters can get back to making connections and filling open roles with quality candidates.
