Recruiters Spend Hours Every Day on Admin Work. These Tech Tools Can Lighten the Load.

It’s an open secret that recruiters and HR professionals spend a significant amount of their time on mundane and repetitive tasks. But do you know how much? Up to 86 percent of the workday, according to research from EY.

That’s an eye-popping number, but luckily, we live in the automation era. More and more HR pros are turning to cutting-edge recruitment technology solutions to optimize their processes, reduce inefficiencies, eliminate bias, and engage with the right talent at the right time.

Here’s a look at some of the exciting tools talent acquisition teams are leveraging today:

Crafting Great Job Descriptions

Job descriptions play a bigger role in attracting talent than you might think. These are your candidates’ first points of contact with your company. A great job description can broaden your talent pool and attract more candidates to your opening, while a poorly written one can narrow your appeal and leave you with an unsatisfying selection of candidates.

Creating job descriptions that attract and resonate with the right talent can be tough, but new textual analysis tools like Ongig have arrived to make recruiters’ lives a little easier. These tools check your job descriptions, identifying segments that may be dull or discriminatory and helping you replace them with more inclusive and engaging language.

Sourcing and Screening

Sourcing would be so easy if you could simply turn to a reliable, go-to channel to always find candidates who match your exact needs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Talent pools are scattered across various social media platforms, job boards, and other sites.

Some tools, however, allow you to scour multiple talent sources at once. Solutions like Upsider.ai and SeekOut pull candidate data from various sources to create a single, unified talent pool. These tools also leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to match candidates against your job descriptions. Other tools, like Clearbit  and Hunter, can help you unlock contact information for hard-to-find candidates, allowing you to reach out to almost anyone.

Diversity and Inclusion

Bias is real, and it often impacts the recruitment process in negative ways. Once again, tech solutions are arriving to help solve this difficult problem. For example, a tool like GapJumpers helps companies analyze their existing hiring processes, identify opportunities to eliminate bias, and even conduct blind interviews that lead to more inclusive hiring practices.

Scheduling

Many professionals already use tools like Calendly  and TimeTap to schedule meetings with colleagues and clients — but these calendar apps can be just as helpful in scheduling interviews with candidates. Instead of the usual back-and-forth, candidates can just pick a time that works.

Assessments

There are skills and personality tests aplenty, but which ones actually help you hire better?

Athena Assessment offers a test called the Athena Quotient, which aims to help employers make better hiring decisions by measuring candidates’ judgment. The decisions a candidate makes in both everyday and exceptional situations can tell you a lot about how they’ll perform on a team. Another example is McQuaig, which allows companies to compare a candidate’s personality traits and cognitive abilities against pre-set benchmarks to better determine their fit for a role.

Virtual Interviews

Interviews have gone virtual thanks to the pandemic, and they’re likely to stay that way for some time. There are plenty of video conferencing platforms available, but it’s important to choose one designed for hiring.

Platforms like Talocity support live, two-way video interviews, using AI tools to evaluate candidate voice and body language cues. Other tools, like Recruiter.com Video, support pre-recorded interviews that allow candidates to answer your questions on their own time.

Selection and Onboarding

Reference checks are crucial but time-consuming components of the hiring process. Tools like Checkmate can help with online reference checks, background verification, and pre-employment screening.

Onboarding is also crucial: Employees who participate in structured onboarding programs are 54 percent more productive than employees who don’t. That said, onboarding can be hard to do in the current climate, where most teams are working remotely.

Checking in with new hires regularly before and after their start date can go a long way in making an employee feel welcome and supported. Considering using a tool like Sense Engage to automate communication workflows that consistently ping candidates with necessary information, like what to do and whom to talk to on their first day. Tools like ChiefOnboarding are built specifically for virtual onboarding processes, leveraging digital resources like Slack bots to guide employees through the onboarding journey.

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These are just a few of the hiring tools that are currently available. I could go on and on, but ultimately, the right choice depends on your company’s particular needs. With a little research, however, you should be able to find the tech you need to stop spending 86 percent of your time on rote, repetitive tasks.

Anil Dharni is the cofounder and CEO of Sense.