How to make online recruiting software work for your company

Introduction

It is safe to ask any company to stop assuming that the traditional hiring process still works. Among the many important reasons; high-value candidates are already getting scooped up by online recruiting software for other companies. The yesteryear methods of finding employees are left to fish in a pool of outdated employees.

Problems with old methods

• Revenue Losses

Reallocation of the workforce from revenue generation processes to recruitment processes, Time taken for the information on recruitment to reach the threshold number of potential candidates, and post vacancies during such period contributes to revenue losses

• Inflexible screening processes

Screening based on checklists, degrees, percentiles, etc, from information provided or collected through resumes and online sources, can only provide a superficial assessment of candidates and are not truly representative of candidates' potential

• Poorly configured Pre-interview Assessments

Aptitude tests have proven to not only restrict access to otherwise talented candidates but also have translated into poor utility for the company's revenue generation processes. There has been a marked shift from hiring based on degrees to skill-based hiring in the last few years, recognizing the fallacy of standardized tests.

• Hiring biases

Biases may be based on gender, appearances, past employment, politics, etc., A biased hiring process leads to diminished cultural diversity at workplace and groupthink (the act of making unchallenged, poorly reviewed decisions due to the practice thinking with a group identity rather than individual identity).

Process

Introduction

Recruitment software is an umbrella term for a variety of hiring solutions. Some companies offer a full-stack approach, while some specialize in certain parts of the hiring pipeline.
Most online recruiting software can be broadly classified into the following categories:

Applicant Tracking Systems, Job Aggregators, AI, and Automation, Testing and Assessment, Candidate Relationship Management, Remote Interviewing, and Talent Community Management
To decide where to start, we need to look at where we are getting hurdled in the hiring process.

Recruitment process flow

Recruitment Planning

Recruitment in general starts with identifying the work that needs to be completed, the number of hands required to do it, deciding whether it is a short term commitment or long term commitment, pooling available funds for the drive and allocating it to the different stages of recruitment.

Advertising Strategy

The Company needs to come up with definite personas of employees they are in need of and they need to look at the best sources to contact such candidates. Different strategies are required to approach different candidates pools such as; online forums like GitHub, Reddit programming, social media outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn, talent communities (if the company is curating one, or have access to one), print media, other media outlets like radio or TV, campus recruitment, employment agencies, etc

Screening / Shortlisting

At this stage resumes and cover letters are reviewed and candidates are shortlisted based on educational relevance, appropriate work history/ career progression, background checks, etc… All these are obtained through the written word and can stand for only so much. The rest needs to be verified through interviews

Interviews

Telephonic or video interviews or direct interviews, depending on the scale and budget available, this helps in verifying the candidate's credentials through questioning, assessing positive/ negative behaviors and traits and proposed fit for the company

Offers and onboarding

Once the final list is concluded upon, offers are sent out to the first batch and if any rejections are encountered, the waitlisted candidates are pulled in. A rejected offer is the most expensive failure of the traditional recruitment process.
Onboarding is the process of transitioning a new recruit to a bankable revenue generation unit for the company by acclimatizing them with the company culture, expectations, and workflows

Evaluation and Control

Recruitment is an expensive process involving Administrative expenses, Salaries to the Recruiters (if external agencies are involved), Advertisements costs, Overtime and Outsourcing costs for the vacancies awaiting candidates, Logistics and other Recruitment overheads, etc… so the end result needs to be analyzed  based on performance and revenue growth, with analytics to better the process

We need to identify where in the above timeline time and resources are wasted opt for a solution

Types of s/w based on the type of organization and requirement

From the POV of online recruiting software, companies may be divided into four types: Staffing/ Recruitment Organizations, Institutions requiring temporary workforce, Small and Medium Businesses and Corporates/ Enterprises

Based on the requirement, Companies may require specialized solutions based on existing software environment, as sometimes a solution might not be compatible with the existing software architecture of the company, and software must be able to integrate with the existing databases or operate from within an existing ATS. Another aspect would be the requirement of the full-stack solution vs. specific solutions

Staffing/ Recruitment Organizations

Data collection of new graduates through partnerships with educational institutions, or maintaining a working relationship with online and offline education platforms, skill development institutes, etc., Job aggregators like Indeed, Linkedin Jobs, Monster, Naukri, etc., are among the most widely recognized aggregators. Google for Jobs is slowly making its way into the market.

Institutions requiring a temporary workforce

Institutions requiring temporary workforce may fall into one of these categories: Contractors, Governmental Projects, Public-Private Partnership undertakings and domestic. They mostly require a blue-collar workforce. And hence focus is on indexing pass outs from vocational institutions, local worker hubs and communities through offline marketing and simple candidate relationship management solutions. For example, Urban Clap, and Justjobs, indexes jobs ranging from housekeeping, tailoring and babysitting to peon jobs and tutoring.

Small and Medium businesses

Small and Medium Businesses tend to go for a full stack solution which requires minimal intervention from the company and which is also cost-effective eg., Zoho Recruit or TalScale,or businesses may prefer to outsource cost-intensive parts of the recruitment like screening and shortlisting through testing and assessment software like Pymetrics or TalScale or Time intensive parts like direct interviewing maybe be mitigated through remote interviewing solutions like Spark Hire, Vidcruiter, etc...

Corporate & Enterprises

Corporates owing to their scale have elaborate recruitment processes. In a corporate setup, the process of recruitment starts with job requisition to the HR department, ratification by the finance department, post which the hiring manager consults with the marketing department on recruitment strategy, followed by reassigning staff for the selection process, ratifying selection with the top brass, sending out offers, and on-board the members who take up the offer.

In such cases, AI and Automation solutions help minimize human error, de-clutter and streamline internal hang-ups due to communication delays, approval delays, decision making/ scheduling delays, etc. Zoom.ai and Ideal operate in these spaces.

At an enterprise level, with a wide spectrum of job types within a single organization, Human Capital Management software becomes necessary to handle tasking, payroll, HR requests, performance reviews, etc., without which the HR department might either start consuming more workforce or start stretching too thin.

Data security

Definitions

In a digitized recruitment process, Candidates are “data subjects.”, Employers are “data controllers", and the recruitment software is a “data processor.” When a company collects and handles candidate data through online recruiting software like ATS, the company is considered a data controller. As a data controller, the company is responsible for the protection of your applicants' personal data. This means the company needs to have full control over how your recruitment software processes personal data. So it is imperative to choose software that is compliant with the data security policies of the land, or global data security polices if it is an international organization.

General Data Protection Regulation

One of the easiest ways to ensure data protection during a recruitment drive is to engage software which is GDPR Compliant. GDPR is a European law that aims to strengthen people’s rights to privacy and protect their personal data and is widely followed companies everywhere.
Some of the main features of GDPR compliance are;

• The requirement of legitimate reasons to acquire and process candidate data
• The requirement of candidate consent to process sensitive data
• Transparency about data storage, and purpose of processing candidate data
• Providing candidates the right to access and change data, or have their data forgotten and have the system completely void of it

GDPR compliant software removes the company's liability regarding the candidate's data, improves candidates confidence in providing sensitive data, and also makes sure that the interests of the company are preserved.

Personalization

Testing and Assessment of Softwares

Each company is different, having varied requirements from their candidates, this requires varied methods of assessing candidates. This spectrum is traversed by employing flexible Testing and Assessment Softwares, which can provide assessments that mirror the job role and see how the candidates would perform in real-time.

Hacker earth, codility, hirevue, are some of the TA s/w available right now. Our company's offering, from Talscale, is positioned to compete with the best in the market. The programs can be set up to auto-generate role-specific tests and assessments with a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks, with options to see how the test taker approaches the problem in real-time. The data collected over the course of the test is analyzed to provide assessments of the effectiveness of the hire based on their dexterity in various aspects of their skill set to choose candidates with the most desirable strengths

Extra-Curricular Testing

Companies like Mettl Assessment Battery and Pymetrics are offering more than just work compatibility tests; they are offering holistic evaluation of the candidates' personality, traits, motivations and values, which is hard by any metric to analyze without bias. These are essential in hiring policy-level staff/ top management staff, etc

Recruitment success metrics

Recruitment can be expensive, and the expense has to reflect value. Evaluation of a recruitment drive and be cumbersome in traditional settings, but here are a few basic metrics that can be easily tracked by online recruiting software which can be analyzed in depth to evaluate the success of the drive.

Time to Fill

It is the time taken from advertising a job vacancy to onboarding a candidate to fill that vacancy. The mean and median of the time taken to fill all the vacancies will help figure out the overall efficacy of the online recruiting software used, and the individual timelines for each vacancy will help decipher which posts required the longest periods. Further inquiry into that will reveal subcutaneous issues, which can be worked upon consequently

Cost Per Hire

It is the cost of all successful hires, and the cost spent on all the unsuccessful hires will reveal what and where things went wrong. The cost per hire measures the average expense incurred on filling a vacancy from sourcing to onboarding. For big businesses, the recruitment cost has a major impact on the bottom line and for a small company; it can make or break the annual budget

Conversion Rate

Conversation rate is the percentage of candidates who have accepted the job after being made the offer. An informal reach out to candidates who turned down the offer to get some feedback can go a long way in figuring out what didn't work for them and how the company can work on them. This in most cases is a direct reflection of the markets' offering versus your companies offering. Salary, perks or growth opportunities and employee experience are factored into this

Source of Hire

Many pipelines are pulled together during a recruitment drive, like job aggregators, individual recruitment agencies, professional networks, online communities, and employee referrals; and software help figures out the efficiency of each pipeline based on the money spent on acquiring a pipeline, and the conversation rate in each. This data can help predict where the next lot of hires might come from and also help cut spending on pipelines that are not that effective

Quality of Hires

Each company derives value from each employee differently so it is up to the company to set up individual metrics for hires, tracking them for up to a year, and online recruiting software offers employee tracking methods to evaluate ultimate utility. Not all top-performing candidates become assets for the company, so the company needs to focus more on taking in suitable hires than just the cream of candidates

Employee Turnover

It refers to employees leaving the organization due to termination or voluntary resignation. There may be a variety of reasons behind both, but in terms of recruitment, employee turnover/ attrition rate refers to the cases where people leave the office for a proposed better job offer, poor employee experience, low diversity, etc... The company on its side needs to analyze why they are leaving and where they are heading, to position themselves better

Candidate Experience

The recruitment experience for a candidate often stands in place for the company experience itself, one-sided communication, delayed communication, depersonalized attitude towards the candidates all account for the conversion rate. A bad recruitment experience can ward off the cream of candidates. So feedback on this aspect is also essential in bettering the recruitment drive. Online Recruiting software allows companies to receive in-depth feedback on the process.

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