The unemployment rate sat unchanged at 4.1 percent in March 2018, moving the U.S. into a six-month stretch of the lowest unemployment numbers over the past 17 years. Then on May 2, Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told CNBC that he believes the unemployment rate will drop into the 3 percent range sometime in the next few months — remarkable.
And you know what that means for recruiters: It will continue to be a candidate-driven market. In fact:
- 90 percent of recruiters in the MRINetwork 2017 Recruiter Sentiment Survey said the current labor market is candidate-driven, up from 86 percent the year before
- In a recent CareerBuilder survey, 58 percent of hiring managers reported they’ve had positions open for 12 weeks or longer, because they can’t find qualified and motivated candidates to fill them
In such a market, you must stay on top of the tools and technology that enable you to work smarter and be better at your job. From sourcing and tracking to help with emails and scheduling and more, here are the six tools everybody in the recruiting industry should be using.
1. LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn Recruiter is the name of the group of sourcing tools LinkedIn provides with its paid subscription. Why is it on this list? Well, because it’s LinkedIn. With 562 million users, it is the world's largest professional social network, and recruiters can’t afford to ignore it. And they don’t; according to SocialTalent's 2017 Global Recruiting Survey, 98 percent of recruiters use the platform as a sourcing tool.
So what do we like about it:
- Spotlights. These are search filters that identify people who are likely to respond, who are open to new opportunities, have engaged with your brand, are past applicants, and more.
- InMail Analytics. This reporting feature shows you who’s responding to your InMail, how your templates are doing, and how your InMail performance stacks up to the rest of the industry. Managers can also compare their team members’ InMail response rates, thereby identifying star players so you can find out what they’re doing right and share it with the rest of the team.
- Pipeline Builder. This tool enables you to search for niche talent at scale. The rich media page engages them with sponsored updates and then sends them to a landing page. Once they click “I’m Interested,” they are added to your pipeline via an integration with LinkedIn Recruiter.
2. ContentApp
If you’re charged with managing your firm’s social channels and using them to build brand authority and drive traffic back to your site, then ContentApp is for you.
The app serves as an automated social media assistant for anyone who’s too busy to scour the internet for relevant content to share with their audience and build followers. Content will find relevant articles among thousands of publishers, which you can then schedule and share. You can update all your social media accounts with the platform, and it even integrates with Alexa.
There’s no free version, but there are pricing tiers for small, medium and large businesses.
3. Calendly
Calendly is a scheduling app that eliminates the back-and-forth emailing and running around that comes with trying to find a meeting time. It’s user-friendly and intuitive, it integrates with Outlook, Office 365, iCal and Google Calendar, and it’s especially helpful in scheduling recurring events.
Here’s how it works: You set your availability for various meeting types, and then you send candidates, clients or coworkers a personalized URL with your availability. Your invitees view your page and select a time, and the confirmed appointment will then populate everyone’s calendar.
There are free, premium ($8/month) and pro ($12/month) versions. Customizable email notifications and reminders are worth the price of the paid versions alone.
4. Clearbit Connect
Clearbit Connect is a fantastic tool that quickly finds email addresses for you to use in your own prospecting. It comes as a Gmail or Outlook extension — just type the name of the company at which you’re looking for email addresses, and it scours the web for available information on people there. It usually returns contact info (including email address, job title and social profiles) at the company in under five seconds, which is a huge time-saver over doing your own internet sleuthing one by one.
Whether you’re searching for hiring managers, candidates with a certain title, or simply trying to generate new leads, this is the tool for you (Rapportive who?). There’s a free version that offers 100 free lookups a month, and a paid version at $6K a year for five seats and 1,000 lookups per month.
5. Textio
Have you ever struggled to write an effective job posting? Of course you have. Every recruiter has. Textio to the rescue. Billing itself as an “augmented writing platform,” Textio is a writing tool in the same vein as Grammarly and Boost Editor, with one huge bonus: It was created specifically for recruiters.
Textio’s machine learning algorithm analyzed real-world hiring outcomes from millions of job posts and recruiting mails. It uses this data to predict how well your own postings and emails will perform and gives you real-time suggestions for improvement. It also identifies biased language and suggests alternatives, and if you’ve ever been dinged on this in the past, you know how much of a lifesaver this is.
This is a paid service that comes with a free trial period.
6. TrackerRMS
Yes, of course we put ourselves on our own must-have list; we know that TrackerRMS is the best recruiting agency software out there today.
We were recruiters long before we were a software company, and TrackerRMS was born out of our increasing frustration with existing CRMs. They didn’t give us everything we needed to successfully run our own firm. So, we built what we needed.
Today that product is the leading cloud-based, end-to-end recruitment, applicant tracking and CRM software provider. With a full suite of customizable capabilities, Tracker brings all your sourcing efforts, relationship management, and pipeline activity into one platform.
One of the best things about TrackerRMS is their commitment to client success. Customer support should be the number one factor you consider when selecting recruitment agency software — after all, all the other features are useless without it. TrackerRMS provides quick and comprehensive support in migration, training, setup, and customization.
What are your favorite tools? Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments below.
