Too often, recruiting organisations appear to focus predominantly on the volume of candidate applications as the main driver of success. But in today’s landscape of skills shortages and high employment rates, the volume of ineligible or poorly matched candidates simply creates work for recruiters, not successfully placed candidates.
More successful solutions tend to rely on a range of elements to ensure positive engagement with the right candidates. They also recognise that the attraction and engagement process is two-way. Pro-active search and communications with candidates, tailored messages and emails, a branded application process, rapid response to candidates’ progress within the application process are all important to this success.
The Recruitment Experience
Any recruitment solution is responsible for delivering the entire candidate journey. Raising awareness, changing perceptions, attracting the right candidates, engaging them and managing the process through to a successful placement. This is what we live for! To consider candidate volume as the primary issue, is to miss the point. It’s only one stage, and ironically, not one that can be managed. Rather than viewing total volume of candidates as a measure of success, it’s far more effective to understand and measure the number of applicants that meet or exceed your needs. This is all underpinned by great data and analytics. By understanding potential candidates, their awareness and perceptions, attraction campaigns can be designed to deliver the right applicants, not just any applicants.
Research conducted by Idibu.com placed candidate shortages, administrative overload, outdated databases/contact information and talent pool management among the biggest challenges for recruiters, and this fits in with our experience. Most Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) appear to deliver an administrative platform for recruiters, not a tool to underpin the entire recruitment journey.
Indeed, an outdated or innapropriate ATS can make it difficult to differentiate between activity and outcome. Furthermore, in the world of Early Talent and Gen Z recruitment, candidates who have grown up with technology are pretty un-forgiving when the online and digital experience offered to them isn’t up to scratch.
In addition to candidates’ on-line experience, an ATS where recruiters are forced to create their own shortcuts can undermine this experience further. Cracks in the candidate experience begin to grow and pressure points at certain stages in the recruitment journey draw away from the quality of the candidate experience. It’s also pretty common for multiple systems to be juggled just to get a CV stored somewhere in ‘The Cloud’. Who’s Cloud, and what of the candidates rights under GDPR?
A Single Solution
Recruiters need a solution. ‘A’ – singular. Whilst there may be many routes for attraction, it is vital that one solution is used to manage the process; to ensure that the original sources are tracked, candidates can apply in a streamlined way, their details stored in one place, and communications are tailored and managed. If there is a need to integrate multiple platforms, then APIs can be used to ‘hide the wiring’ to make the process seamless for applicant and recruiter alike.
It’s also important to remember that recruitment is not a purely reactive process. Any solution must offer the ability to manage a talent pool, and pro-actively identify those candidates that are best suited to the role. Some of the most recent innovations use Artifical Intelligence to support this process and make it more efficient.
Our Approach?
Based on this insight, it should come as no surprise that we’ve created a solution that meets these needs. The TalentPortal not only allows highly efficient and effective management of applicants and candidates, but it can be used to create customised and branded recruitment solutions to meet the needs of any brand.
So, if any of the themes of this article resonate with you, please get in touch. Whether it’s about managing applications from multiple sources, delivering a branded candidate experience or simply running a recruitment operation with best in class RoI why not try us out. After all, we built TalentPortal for you.