Technology is setting the tone for the recruiting and staffing industry. Some see it as a threat. But top agencies see it as a “secret weapon” to more efficiently attract and retain top talent.
If you want to compete against these agencies—and become one yourself—you need to start seeing technology as a strategic advantage. You need to use the wide array of tools out there to enhance the candidate experience, make better connections, and build trust with your audience.
For people who are used to traditional recruiting tactics, this can seem scary. Change often is! But when you understand the benefits of using recruiting technology as a strategic advantage, you won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things.
Don’t believe us? Read this post for four ways that recruiting technology can make your agency and recruiters more effective, efficient, and successful.
1. Enhance the candidate experience—at every stage
In today’s candidate-centric market, every recruiter and agency should be laser-focused on providing the best possible experiences. Otherwise, these prized candidates will go work with someone else.
One of the great benefits of recruiting technology is that it enables you to enhance the candidate experience at every stage of their journey. You’ll see the greatest impact when you use technology to automate the tedious and mundane, freeing up your recruiters to engage in more human-to-human interactions.
Sourcing
By extending your reach beyond your recruiters’ individual networks—either through job platform aggregation or programmatic advertising—you can increase your chances of attracting your ideal candidate. This also opens up the door for you to pull in candidates who you might not otherwise engage with, allowing you to field a more diverse array of talent.
Screening
Modern recruiters are no stranger to candidate screening technology. As AI algorithms become smarter, these systems are better able to weed out bad fits by scanning resumes, cover letters, online profiles, and more. Keep in mind that in order to work effectively, these tools require human inputs. When humans and technology work together in harmony, you can save a lot of time and surface top contenders faster.
Nurture
As recruiters bring more candidates into their pipeline, keeping them engaged and maintaining those relationships becomes more difficult. Applicant tracking systems and recruitment marketing technologies enable automated messages, segmentation, and personalization that enables tailored communication at scale.
Feedback & transparency
Gone are the days of waiting for a year-end survey to receive actionable feedback on recruiter and agency performance. Now, online reviews and experience management platforms (like Great Recruiters) empower you to seek out, analyze, and share this feedback in real-time. This not only enables you to fix issues before they become big problems, but it also enables brand promotion opportunities—let your top reviewers sell for you!
2. Augment the human touch—don’t replace it
There’s a natural tension between humans and technology, and that’s never going to go away. For many traditional recruiters, there can be a fear that technology will replace the human touch—something that separates good recruiters from the bad.
But the most successful agencies don’t do away with the human touch. On the contrary: they use the technology at their disposal to augment human-to-human experiences. They do this by essentially letting the technology do what it does best—segment, automate, alert—and let humans do what they do best—engage, empathize, relate.
In fact, without the human touch, recruiting technology is completely ineffective. Imagine receiving a form email from a recruiter that gets your company wrong, calls you by your last name (no salutation) and recommends a job that is way outside your qualifications. You’re probably not going to engage with that email—beyond just chuckling at it.
Some things you can do to maintain this balance include:
- Segmenting your communications for specific industries, verticals, job descriptions, job levels, etc.
- Let your users drive the process—allow them to unsubscribe or change their email preferences
- Create workflows that include both automated messages and personal outreach (e.g. scheduled emails and unscheduled calls or texts)
Finding the right balance will depend on your priorities and agency needs. When you adopt new technologies, be sure to spend some time acclimating to the technology and making sure it aligns with your company culture.
3. Improve your recruiters’ quality of life
One study showed that most managers lose up to an average of 14 hours a week completing tasks they could easily automate with tech. For recruiting agencies specifically, this is a real challenge, especially as the demands of the job require recruiters to manage more and more relationships.
But if you let your recruiters work themselves into the ground, they’re going to burnout or quit—neither of which is good for the long-term success of your agency. So it’s to your advantage to use technology and automation to improve your recruiters’ quality of life.
Here are some ways to make that happen:
- Automate outreach and follow-up messages using predetermined templates and personalization tags
- Request feedback automatically when applicants reach certain stages in your ATS
- Sift through thousands of candidate profiles to find the best ones
- Monitor recruiter performance through online reviews to identify teachable moments in real time
You won’t want your recruiters staying up until the wee hours of the morning just to do their jobs. Using technology to reclaim some of that precious time can help everyone achieve more balance in their lives.
4. Build transparency and trust among your community
One final advantage that recruiting technology offers is the ability to build trust among your community—candidates, clients, and recruiters alike. In an industry that struggles with a reputation problem, transparency and trust are precious assets.
Nearly every recruiting agency says the same thing on their website: “we value people,” “we get results,” “we have great relationships with our clients.” But anyone can write up some copy and throw it on a website. The true test of trust comes in what your community says about you online.
With experience management technology, you can request reviews, view them in real-time, analyze the results, and use them as a brand promotion tool. Instead of saying what you’re about, let your community do it for you.
In a time when people always Google a brand before doing business with them, owning your digital reputation is critical to your success. The right technology enables you to do that easily, efficiently, and in real time.
