Any employer trying to recruit in the current hiring market knows that their recruiters/sourcers have their work cut out for them. National unemployment rate is low — and even lower for many professional-level roles. More than 5.5 million jobs were waiting to be filled in the United States at the end of 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Low unemployment rate isn’t the only reason businesses are struggling to hire. Employers create a barrier to hiring success by focusing only on filling open roles instead of developing their “long game” recruiting strategy.
“Staffing professionals are beginning to realize that they need to have access to advanced data-driven solutions that are designed for today’s recruiting environment”
An organization’s ability to recruit the talent it needs to succeed hinges on its foresight to build and maintain a healthy talent pipeline of engaged passive candidates, which describes 75 percent of today’s fully employed workforce.
To keep this pipeline fresh and filled with qualified leads for employers, recruiters/sourcers must:
• Be prepared, at all times and in all places, to identify and engage promising candidates
• Employ an efficient and effective process for nurturing prospects into viable leads
• Access real-time data and insights that will help them know when the time is right to reach out to a potential hire
Hiring professionals who are uncertain about the value of leveraging these tools need only consider how similar technology innovations are transforming the sales industry. You’d be hard-pressed to find a best-in-class sales organization that isn’t using a Customer Relationship Management system to be more efficient, productive, and successful. If you want to win the game, you need the right equipment.
Staffing professionals are beginning to realize that they need to have access to advanced data-driven solutions that are designed for today’s recruiting environment. Best-in-class recruiting organizations are 21 percent more likely to keep their recruitment technology up to date to ensure that they are using more data-forward and powerful solutions. These organizations are also 2.7x more likely to increase their budget for talent acquisition technologies in the coming year to help hire best-fit candidates.
Following are some of the specific advantages that recruiting tools and innovations, like candidate relationship management systems, can deliver to recruiting organizations:
1. Support Development of Healthy Talent Pipelines
As mentioned earlier, pipelines help staffing professionals to proactively cultivate candidate leads and access qualified talent faster than ever before. When recruiters can create a single, dynamic repository of all their candidate leads, they can then organize and categorize them into distinct talent pipelines that are much easier to monitor and manage.
2. Increase Team Agility
Platforms that can pull in candidate details from any type of file, feed, site, or source (including mobile devices) will help recruiters to become more productive and nimble. They also reduce the risk that recruiters will miss opportunities because they don’t move fast enough on a lead, or are unable to capture candidate details when recruiting on the go.
3. Provide Insight into Candidate Engagement
Staffing professionals who have access to relevant, real-time data insights about candidate engagement can nurture their leads more effectively across multiple channels — from email to social networks to live events. They can also improve their relationship-building with passive job seekers.
4. Improve Collaboration
Best-in-class recruiting organizations are 57 percent more likely to enable their hiring teams to collaborate on candidates. This is smart: When sourcing teams can collaborate effectively on candidate searches and coordinate activities, they save time and avoid duplicative efforts. Better collaboration also decreases the risk that a hot lead will go cold (or be missed altogether). Candidate relationship management systems support more efficient sourcing by making it possible for teams to view, search, and analyze engagement activity and share information at any time, from anywhere.
5. Enable Teams to Measure their Success
The ability to track recruiting success in real time helps sourcing teams to identify which tactics and strategies are resonating with candidates, and to refine and scale those best practices. They can also use candidate relationship management systems to track candidate interaction across channels, so they know when to reach out to a potential hire and when they should move on.
Ultimately, the main benefit of leveraging these technologies is accelerated time to hire. Organizations that employ candidate relationship management solutions — one that includes analytics, career sites, talent communities, mobile-optimized recruiting tools, and more — improved their time to hire by 3.5x, compared to all other organizations. In a hiring market where top candidates know that they’re in the driver’s seat, staffing teams cannot afford not to be equipped with the tools that will help them tap in to a qualified and engaged talent pool!
Dice specializes in technology and engineering recruitment solutions. Headquartered in California, USA, the company generates opportunities for a large number of professionals in technology-from software engineers to project managers and mobile developers.
