Whether we are talking about a two-man shop or employ hundreds of workers, streamlining the recruitment and selection process is the key to success. Cost-effective strategies are required, to find candidates, narrow searches, and onboard new employees. Resourceful recruiting boils down to one question: What’s the organization’s time worth?

The more time is spent on recruiting, the more money is poured into the hiring side of the business. Are those funds being spent to simplify the recruiting practices and draw in quality candidates? If not, it might be time to think about new employee recruitment and selection strategies.

You can save time and money by introducing technology to your hiring efforts. Technology can speed up the recruiting process while opening doors to more qualified candidates.

Using technology to find talent

When we hear “recruitment technology,” we might think of complicated, expensive applications designed for professional recruiters. But, the truth is, some technology is both affordable and user-friendly. These tools help businesses recruit valuable team members.

Make technology work during the recruitment and selection process. Here are just a few basic tech solutions to try at a business:

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) help recruiters sort and manage candidates. A recruiter can use an ATS to post job openings, view resumes, and track where candidates are in the hiring process. And, resumes can be imported right into the software to organize candidates by skill level.

Digital templates give the business’s hiring efforts a uniform look and allow them to zip through document creation. If a recruiter manually types and sends every rejection or offer letter, a lot of time is likely to get wasted. Digital templates marginally reduce the time (and money) spent on communicating with candidates.

Social media is an effective tool that can be used to connect with potential hires. Social media accounts may be used to advertise openings, introduce new hires, and engage candidates. The mobile-friendly platforms make it easy to keep up with recruiting tasks.

How technology improves the recruitment and selection process

When hiring for a business, using technology can make the recruitment process less time consuming and costly. Here are three ways technology saves time and money.

#1. Increased productivity

It is common knowledge that higher productivity leads to greater economic growth. The more produced, the more is sold. And the more sold, the more money is made.

So, where does technology fit in? Technology involves automation, which cuts down the time it takes to complete tasks. The automation feature streamlines social sharing, managing emails, and delegating tasks. Not to mention, the ability to quickly compile and organize data.

Cutting out tasks that require repetition and organizing by hand is a huge time-saver. For example, an application tracking system automatically imports resumes to the software. Recruiters can narrow down candidates without sorting through a mound of paper resumes or emails.

#2. Less risk for a bad match

One does not want to go through the entire selection process only to have new hires quit. Employee turnover costs add up. In fact, a recent case study showed that one company had a difference of $1.3 million in net value while improving onboarding and management practices over a three-year period.

Businesses can reduce employee turnover by avoiding bad matches in the selection process. Recruitment technology lets businesses discard unqualified resumes without tediously sifting through each one.

For example, applicant tracking systems often include resume parsing. This feature extracts information from resumes and enters it into the same format. Eeach candidate’s qualifications can be compared easily, making it possible to avoid those that do not fit the bill.

Technology also makes it easier to reach out to candidates. Whether a business is using social media, a job board, or an email system, communicating with technology is faster than making phone calls and sitting down for interviews. Save face-to-face meetings for quality candidates that have potential to be good matches.

#3. Get more strategic

Like any other part of business, the recruitment process requires a plan to manage tasks. Analytics lets us measure how well the business’s hiring strategies work. By using analytics built into recruiting technology, a business can get more strategic about its selection process.

From finding candidates to offering a position, there are many metrics that could be measured using technology. Here are just a few questions which may be answered with recruiting analytics:

• Where do your best candidates come from?
• How long does it take to hire an employee from start to finish?
• Where are your candidates at in the hiring process?
• How many candidates accept the job offers you extend?

Organizations are advised to use technology to track, measure, and apply analytics to recruiting. That way, time and money is not wasted on practices that are not working. Businesses are able to see, with numbers, how well their processes measure against the successes. Then, a business can create data-backed strategies to improve your recruitment and selection process.

Recruiting anyone based on their resume and interview alone is not enough most of the time. Every once in a while a recruiter will come across a candidate that just seems “off” to him/ her as a recruiter. They might be too ambitious, too scared or simply unwilling to disclose past working experiences.

Candidates that are difficult but have hidden potential need to go through further screening in more detail, and social media recruitment is perfect for the opportunity. The traditional ways of putting out a job vacancy and waiting for people to come are a thing of the past in most industries. What can we do to fully grasp the importance and versatility of social media in our recruitment strategies in order to end up with quality candidates for the company?

New generation of workers

More and more young people tend to spend time using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They spend so much time on them however that it becomes nigh impossible to reach them in any other way.

This is exactly the type of connection needed in order to reach a new type of worker. This worker is completely used to using digital platforms and computers, they are very versatile and easily adapt to new technologies and ideas and best of all, they can work at any time of the day. Youth is used to staying up all night long using their social media profiles to talk to their friends, read up on interesting trivia and celebrities they adore and learn more about what their friends and acquaintances are doing.

Slipping a business’s own advertisement and job position ads in between those articles and posts is the perfect way to reach them and gain their interest in applying for a job offer.

Reaching a crowd

Narrowing the search based on social media criteria can make a recruitment job a lot easier. Facebook is well-known for allowing companies and prepaid advertisers to post their content based on people’s profiles, interests and times of day. Depending on the criteria set and the frequency of your, gain a huge reach van be gained in numbers, whatever position to be filled.

Let us imagine setting the parameters so that all the graphic designers in Europe see a job ad at exactly 8 PM local time when they scroll through their news feeds. Many of them will look at the offer and actually apply for it. This is only a fraction of what social media can do when it comes to narrowing down candidate profiles.

Passive and insecure candidates

One thing to keep in mind is the fact that a lot of today’s youth lacks self-confidence. While it is not a universal rule, majority of people who spend time on social media during their free time lack the conviction to apply for a job position themselves.

That is why social media platforms are a perfect place to not only advertise on but also reach out to potential candidates. Social media recruitment team may be set up that can be trained to effectively and professionally screen potential candidates based on their social media profiles.

This can work just like advertisement but go a step further than that, ensuring that the recruiters do not wait for the people to come to them but ask them if they want to work for the company instead. This kind of proactivity on the part of the company is rarely seen and can easily be recognized as forthcoming and positive by the potential candidates.

Background checks

Candidates’ social media profiles may be checked for more information on them is nothing new. Interviewers usually check the internet for their candidates in order to see if they have any longstanding professional recommendations, issues with friends or the law or even to look for any Google information about the candidates.

Social media can provide a huge insight into which candidates actually are when they step through the door. Many candidates do not feel the need to disclose any personal information on the interview and tend to keep things to them.

Some people have families and go through tough times that they do not like to discuss with strangers. Others might have used the word point in order to write their resumes and translate them to foreign languages. This can be easily overcome by checking their backgrounds behind closed doors and making the final call about whether to hire them or not based on that.

Live recruitment

One of the best options that social media platforms give recruiters is the ability to live recruit new employees. Screening employees has never been so simple because of the possibilities that social media offers when interviews and testing are concerned.

All the recruiters have to do in theory is type a simple message to the candidates and wait for them to turn on their camera and start talking in a matter of moments. No long travels across the city or country, no need for complicated appointment times and best of all – no need for specialized recruitment offices. New employees may be hired from anywhere in the world by using social media to interview them live over the internet.

Curated company pages

Opening company pages on social media platforms offers a plethora of options when it comes to recruitment. The off-peak period may be used to build up an audience by posting interesting content, articles, testimonials and company documents in order to gain the public’s trust.

Once recruitment period starts, a recruiter can easily garner a huge number of applications from the pool of people that have started following the company’s social media pages. This is a great opportunity to constantly work on recruitment regardless of the current need for new employees.

Forthcoming and friendly

Leveling the playing field with younger and more energetic candidates by using social media as a means of communication is a great way to establish trust. Giving the bulk of responsibility concerning recruitment to a young and passionate team and letting them communicate with their equally young candidates is a great way to insert some friendliness into a brand.

Interviewing and hiring candidates based on social media communication in which the business has already recruited young workers do all the talking is very forthcoming in the eyes of the candidates. Best of all, it shows that the company is accepting of new technologies and trends, giving them a huge incentive to consider applying for work at the company.

High speed, low price

The most obvious reason for including social media in the recruitment strategy is the fact that a company can set up social media pages very fast and very low prices. Sometimes it is fully free during the entire recruitment campaign depending on previous reach and community buildup. Getting ad revenue from Facebook or Twitter takes quite a while, but once there, the company will be at a neutral zero when it comes to recruitment advertisement expenses.

Getting pages up and running is also very fast and simple – all it takes is putting up a couple of branded company materials on the page and sharing a few official company announcements. If the company is well-known, people will start following the pages quickly afterwards.

Conclusion

While the benefits of using social media in recruitment strategies are numerous, it is also important to point out that adequate content management is also needed. If there is a person without any internet advertisement experience in charge of developing and distributing content, it may be difficult to reach the required number of people before the ad campaign starts.

Also, reaching the wrong audience is just as easy as reaching the right one and it all depends on the type of content published. If we give our social media advertisement a good look before denying its applications, one might be surprised with the results during the next recruitment cycle.

A Recruiter may not always be hiring for his / her Clients or for the Organisation working with, but he/ she should never stop Recruiting for top players. Keeping the supply of talent filled with the highest quality of professionals, requires continuous talent acquisition and a focus on identifying, hiring, promoting and retaining high level performers.

If an organization receives a resignation before it starts Recruiting, then the organization is putting itself in a bind. But if the talent pool is already filled with “A” players, hiring in a hurry can be avoided and the organization will not end up hiring candidates who are not up to the mark.

However, there are challenges associated with recruiting “A” players including how to afford this top talent and how to persuade them to join the organization when they have other choices.

To start, even if there is not enough budget for topmost talents now, at least they may be contacted in order to get a feel for their talent and ambitions. A good Recruiter will find out what makes them tick. He or she will stay in touch so that when he/ she is ready to make and the budget is in place, a list of hireable “A” players is already there.

However, since there is a high demand for this select group, they will have choices. The Recruiter will need to develop a capture strategy that revolves around a winning value proposition. Selling a job to a “class one” player is exactly like selling to a discerning consumer. The candidates will be asking themselves: “Why should I join your company?” or “Why should I make a move at all?” Therefore, the Recruiter will require compelling and persuasive answers and actions to these questions. Here are 5 to consider:

1) The Recruiter should the best employees to serve as ambassadors for his /her company or for the Client working for.

He / She will train and equip his best employees to be the faces of the company. He/ She will allow them to engage with highly eligible candidates and talk about why they should consider working at the firm. This is an effective and efficient way to recruit top talent due to the fact that people trust an expert within a company more than they trust the CEO.

2) A successful Recruiter always helps “A” players continue to succeed promotes responsible and successful business practices, lets top talent know that the Recruiter is open to new ideas and business initiatives that will yield positive results. Also, a good Recruiter will definitely convey and/or demonstrate how a well done job is acknowledged and appreciated.

3) A successful Recruiter takes time to develop a relationship. “A” level candidates are usually passive candidates and are not actively seeking employment. Therefore, they aren’t in a hurry to make a move and expect want to be courted. The Recruiter has to spend the time and effort required to help them build familiarity and trust in the organization. The Recruiter should be accessible and encourage open and regular communication.

4) A good Recruiter remains aware of talented candidates’ challenges or pain points.

When the Recruiter is engaging with star performers, it’s important to zero in on what they need but aren’t getting from their current employer. In other words, their pain has to be identified and addressed by the Recruiter. The Recruiter should leave no stone unturned to make the best talent know how his / her company is different. Also, it is important to learn what concerns they might have about accepting the position offered and directly speak to any hesitations.

5) A successful Recruiter will offer the talent a Work/Life Balance. Since “A” players stay at jobs longer than the average worker, they are looking for more than a Pay check; they seek a work/life balance. It may be of interest to note that money alone rarely entices them. More likely, it’s a balance between family, work, and fun.

To summarize: If you are a Recruiter and aspire to be a successful one, never stop Recruiting for top talent. If you are not dedicating a large chunk of time to Recruiting, you may not succeed in landing the talent you want. Selling your organization to the “A” player is core to your success.