As reports flood in of a boom in recruitment, both in terms of permanent vacancies and applications for these open positions, new technologies are helping recruiters stay on top of the chaos. Read on for the best ways technology can help your business navigate these exciting times.
Data released by Broadbean indicates that, year over year, permanent vacancies increased by 19.3% at the end of Q4, 2014, alongside a 6.8% increase in applications for each post. This is all fantastic news for the industry, but it also adds up to a lot more work for recruiters. All these extra positions and applications require serious leg work to get the right candidates in front of the right clients.
That means it’s time to consider what certain technologies could and should be doing for you. The industry has come a long way from the days of printed job ads and manual processes. Online job boards and applicant tracking systems have helped, but recruitment technology is on the move again.
As quoted by Inc. magazine, Sharlyn Lauby, President of ITM Group and author of the HR Bartender blog, expects more companies to soon embrace video services as a primary interviewing platform. Video interviews can be as simple as getting the candidate and the hiring manager to dial in, moving the standard face-to-face format online.
And the beauty is that the participants can be anywhere, which helps connect candidates and interviewers separated by large geographic distances. That said, this method still requires them to be in the same room at the same time, even if only virtually.
Better still is to use a specialized platform like the one offered by LaunchPad Recruits. With LaunchPad’s software, you can set your video interview questions ahead of time and send them out to any number of applicants.
Once each has completed their portion of the interview, you can review the video, send it to colleagues, add notes, and plug it into your existing applicant tracking system. Imagine a world where pre-screening doesn’t require lengthy phone calls or coordinating diaries! It’s the future, and it’s happening now at LaunchPad.
It’s all about LinkedIn, right? Well, not so fast. As technology marches on, a wider range of players are coming onto the scene. Built on the Facebook platform, the professional network BranchOut has proven a worthy competitor, allowing users to utilise their Facebook community to make inside connections.
Facebook, although not a professional network by any means, is still a great tool in its own right. According to The Next Web, a study by Jobvite indicates that 18 million of their users secured jobs through Facebook connections. All this means that your company’s presence on these sites needs to be friendly, inviting, and inspirational.
In a clever move, LinkedIn recently began sending emails to its members highlighting potential new employers. This kind of outreach to a passive audience is something we can expect to see more of in the coming years, and its automation provides a great example of how recruitment technology can pull in great results without costly human input.
The process is powered by the data held on each person, so it can be effectively targeted with very little effort.
All things considered, recruiters should always be looking to find the candidate that shines most brightly, and that’s a task that pretty much always requires a face-to-face meeting. The recruitment technology used to get to that point is just a tool to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Nothing can recreate that feeling when you just know your interviewee is “the one.” But to get there, enlist the help of a video platform like LaunchPad to streamline your interviewing process and bring on great talent.
