Finding a suitable employee can be a pain in the neck, especially in IT, where skilled developers rarely seek for new job opportunities on their own and screening less experienced ones is a must. But can it all be simplified? Apparently, yes. There are dozens of useful recruitment tools that can help you, as an HR department representative. Let’s find what they are and how they can make your work more effective!
There are a number of steps you take when finding and hiring a new IT specialist. After specifying what set of skills are needed in a project, you probably post an ad in a job board, collect resumes and analyse them manually before passing them to a project manager or anybody else for whom you are working. However, oftentimes it’s either hard to find even one suitable candidate or there are too many of them. At Code & Pepper, we are perfectly aware of it all, since our recruitment process is very strict and our recruitment success rate is only 1.6%. Is it low? Not necessarily – we just pick only the best candidates.
But how to avoid problems generated by these situations? Smart recruitment tools come to the rescue.
What are recruitment tools?
There are quite a few types of recruitment tools, each devised for solving a different problem. Let’s break down the categories.
- Job aggregators
- Testing and assessment systems
- AI based automation tools
- Candidate tracking systems
- Video interviewing software
As mentioned above, they all have different purposes and serve HR departments in different ways. One may think that using dedicated recruitment tools is only practical in large scale companies, however, sometimes it’s quite the opposite. After all, smaller and less recognisable enterprises tend to struggle when looking for experts and need help reaching them. They can do it on their own, using dedicated tools, or decide for a Team Augmentation service.
Job aggregators
Posting an ad only on a company’s website careers section is completely ineffective if your company is not a giant that everybody knows. Job boards are obviously better, but what if I told you that you can use aggregators to reach an audience of dozens job boards without actually posting on each of them manually? The only problem is that after being present on all of the job boards in the country, you will definitely receive duplicate applications. However, it can be solved with the complimentary AI based recruitment tools.
Definitely the most popular aggregator is Indeed.co.uk, which lets you reach 250 million unique monthly visitors worldwide and has a base of 175 million CVs. Besides the basic functionality, the platform offers a number of services that increase the efficiency of a recruiter’s job. One of them is Indeed IQ which uses machine learning to optimise campaigns in real-time. It adjusts your spending levels and bidding across jobs, so you can receive just the right number of applications, instead of being overwhelmed by them and wasting money at the same time.
Testing and assessment systems
An HR employee should know some basic terms connected with the industry they work in. It’s necessary to quickly assess whether a candidate is promising or it would be a waste of time to continue with them. However, it’s virtually impossible to know enough about an unlimited number of technologies. To avoid wasting time on manual applicant assessment, you can use dedicated recruitment tools.
Probably the most mature of such systems is HackerRank. Its Remote First Screening service lets you create testing tasks for the candidates, which they can solve remotely and under conditions that you set. Then, the tasks are scored automatically, so your company’s internal experts don’t need to waste their time checking them manually. Moreover, the challenges can be built from ready-to-use blocks. HackerRank has a huge library of such questions (over 2100), supports over 40 languages, frameworks, job roles and experience levels, so it’s definitely a go-to tool!
AI based automation tools
AI is a hot topic and it is used everywhere nowadays, from solving logical dilemmas , through upscaling video resolution in games (DLSS) to fighting financial crime. Why not find a way to utilise it in recruitment tools?
One of the craziest facts about people picking a job ad worth considering is that when we are presented with two similar positions, we tend to choose the one which is described in a more attractive way – words matter. Textio recruitment marketing experts have discovered that designing ads with their AI based tool results in up to a 30% increase in the resume flow. The augmented writing tool effectively measures the literary value of text and suggests changes that make it better in all ways.
An above-average Textio Score will bring us about a 30% increase in the number of people qualified for an assessment.
Brad Mille
Site Director, P&G Smart Lab
Another great example of AI used in a recruitment tool is ideal. This complex solution is dedicated to make candidate screening as time-effective, as possible. Ideal’s researchers have found that manually screening resumes takes even up to 88% of the recruiter’s time and in order to change it, they created the Screening recruitment tool. Its AI algorithm not only selects the most qualified candidates, but also learns basing on the user’s feedback, chatbot conversations and manually entered, external data. When recruiting for Team Augmentation we always choose the screening method with our client, but it’s always the most vital step of the cooperation. We even described how it worked with the Smart Pension project on our blog some time ago.
Candidate tracking systems
Candidate, or applicant tracking systems (ATS) are quite similar to CRMs in their role, but instead of helping manage customers, let recruiters automatically organize the information based on keywords which describe skills, former jobs, experience or education. There even are dedicated apps to do it! GoHire is the probably most popular ATS in the UK. It’s an end-to-end solution that lets you manage your ads, post them in a number of different platforms and aggregators (including Indeed), then organize the whole hiring workflow from one dashboard, create a database of candidates for later use, promote jobs on social media and even automate messaging.
GoHire helped us avoid the dreaded spreadsheet to manage our applicants. It’s reasonably priced for its features instead of being priced because of the industry.
Clement Debiaune
CTO, Wolt
Video interviewing software
Zoom or Skype are definitely recognizable video conferencing apps, but what if I told you that there are recruitment tools which are better suited for the job? There even are some which use AI to track facial expressions, patterns of speech or choice of words. Saves a lot of mistakes, when it comes to assessing soft skills.
VidCruiter lets you create a base of questions that you often use in interviews, so your whole team can work in a unified way. It displays a Rating Guide which lets you assess the candidate in real-time, store your scores and automatically calculate the results, so you can easily compare candidates later on. Obviously it can record the meetings, share documents or screen during the interview, but most importantly – it just works in the browser, so the candidate does not need to install anything on their computer or smartphone. Another feature that makes such recruitment tools useful in the hiring process, is a private chat box visible only for the recruiters, so you can communicate with your colleagues discreetly, without the applicant knowing.
Are recruitment tools worth your attention?
If you’re still wondering – the simple answer is yes. Whether your company is just a startup or it’s scaling up quickly, there are reasons to use recruitment tools, because they solve so many problems. You just need to identify the issues your HR team is facing and choose a tool that solves them! Or – you can build your team with help of experts who know everything about the IT recruitment industry – Code & Pepper.