How Tech Can Change the Way We Think About Recruiting

Technology isn't anything new for hiring, and it's become part of recruiting best practices in several ways. However, are you thinking about all the different ways that tech can change your recruiting techniques? If you're not, you may be neglecting some sound strategies that can help you free up your time to focus on building relationships with candidates. From reducing the time to hire new employees to the cost of recruitment, technology can help you in numerous ways when you fully embrace it. The following are some examples of how can technology help recruitment.

1. Changing Applicant Tracking

Tracking applicants is one of the recruiting best practices we should all be keeping up with, however, manually doing this task can be so time consuming and costly that it's easy to fall by the wayside. An applicant tracking system, or ATS, can help you with this important activity while you get other things off your enormous plate. By using an ATS system, you can digitally handle the application process from start to finish because the program collects and manages applicants’ information from the moment they hit send in response to a job advertisement. 

In addition, applicant tracking systems help you screen candidates who responded to a current job post, find previous applicants based on keywords in their resumes, and manage responses to multiple posts at once. Also, an ATS can help you with the onboarding of new employees, as well as tracking data that improves the retention rate at your organization. 

These features make ATS systems a great way to reduce the time and money it takes to hire new employees, and it's so effective that many organizations have made it part of their recruiting best practices. And companies are getting results: According to Career Builder, 78 percent of employers that use ATS technology have reported it makes finding quality hires much easier.

Want to step it up even more? Enrich your ATS data with Untapped's candidate screening software and unlock the diversity of your applicants while reducing time to hire by over 30% with efficient applicant filtering. You can maximize the power of your ATS by switching to 100% self-reported data for all inbound applicants to effectively hire a representative workforce—without the guesswork.

2. Changing Communication

In the early stages of hiring, applicants are likely to have a lot of questions about the process and your company—especially if they’re not familiar with your employer brand. Fielding these questions alone can be an all-day affair, so to get some much-needed help, you can add a chatbot to your recruitment website that will provide answers to common questions instantly. In addition, chatbots can prequalify applicants for you, as well as schedule interviews and provide application updates to candidates.

And the best part is that chatbots do all of this for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which can create a great candidate experience as it frees up your time. In fact, chatbots are so effective in early talent recruitment that 35 percent of organizations are expected to incorporate them into their hiring process. 

Another way to keep to connect authentically and to keep conversations going with candidates is through Untapped's Talent Communities. You can invite potential candidates to exclusive and curated private communities, or reach the entire talent network with a public community. By continually sharing open roles, updating folks on processes, publicizing company news, and answering questions, you'll be able to nurture both active and passive talent all year round.

3. Changing Candidate Assessments

It's easy for candidates to use some puffery when describing their abilities on resumes since they're trying to market themselves to employers. And in some cases, they can be equally convincing during interviews—which may lead to disaster if companies hire them only to find out later that they don't have the qualifications they claimed to possess. 

Online assessment tests help to stop exaggeration in its tracks because you get the opportunity to find out whether or not candidates can actually do the things they claim before you even schedule an interview. Adding digital assessments to your process will streamline hiring and allow you to confidently make judgments about candidates' abilities.

4. Changing Your Candidate Reach

The Internet has made recruitment much easier for organizations, so it's important to fully take advantage of it. Since long gone are the days when companies found employees by putting ads in the help wanted section of the local newspaper, you shouldn't limit your reach now. If you're not finding the type of talent you want in your area, use the Internet to expand your search. Seek out people with the qualifications you need who may come from different states, or even different countries—especially if you’re recruiting for a job that can be done remotely.

If you're trying to increase the diversity in your organization, using technology in this way can be especially helpful if your local community is homogeneous and you don't have access to talent from underrepresented backgrounds. To reach the goals of your diversity recruitment plan, you can use the Internet to not only post jobs in the places that cater to talent from specific demographics, but also to adopt a sourcing strategy to proactively hire workers from these groups.

If you're unsure of where your diversity gaps lie, you'll need to analyze your pipeline in the more detail. Thankfully, with Untapped's recruitment analytics you can optimize your recruiting process by cutting, slicing, and dicing the data depending on the insights your organization is looking for. By using diversity analytics, you see see the demographic, experiential, and cognitive diversity of inbound applicants with over 75 self-report data points to keep a pulse on your diversity gap.

The more you make technology part of your recruiting best practices, the more you’ll make your process efficient and effective. Using technology to recruit employees is a new way will help you boost the quality of your hires, while saving time and money.