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We can all agree on one thing: recruiters have never been busier.
Company structures and priorities are changing pace following the pandemic, employees are frequently quitting, and huge skills gaps are opening up in every industry. With 1.26 million job vacancies in the UK alone, hiring managers have the challenge of finding high-quality candidates to fill every role on their books.
This guide breaks down how recruitment software is the best way to source your company's next generation of talent and the specific benefits this technology offers.
How does recruitment software work?
Recruitment software is a solution that handles any or all of the hiring stages. An all-encompassing solution is designed to:
- Source candidate leads for your hiring funnel.
- Attract talent to complete a job application using engaging language in the job description.
- Nurture talent by providing a smooth candidate experience, so they don’t lose interest in the recruitment procedure.
- Select the most suitable candidates for the role.
Online recruitment software automates many tedious and time-consuming hiring tasks such as background checks, candidate screening, applicant tracking, managing and scheduling the interview process, handling communication, and more. Think less paper, fewer phone calls, enhanced candidate relationship management, and zero chaos.
Top 14 benefits of using recruitment software
Although each tool has its own set of appealing features, some of the main advantages of using recruiting software include the following:
1. Reduced time to hire
In today's resignation-driven job climate, companies are racing to fill open roles before the next wave of departures. The average time to fill a single position is 42 days, although this increases up to 49 days for more technical research and engineering roles.
And if the seat is already vacant, this puts pressure on internal teams to cover the open role. There's a risk of existing team members becoming burned out, resources stretched too thin, and poor quality output if you don't quickly refill the seat.
Our data reveals that recruiting technology maximises efficiency during the hiring process. In fact, Applied customers spend up to two-thirds less time filling vacancies, freeing up valuable hours to spend in other profitable areas of their businesses.
2. Better retention rates
Employees have increasingly itchy feet in today's job market. During the Great Resignation, we've seen workers quitting their jobs in droves, with 57% of knowledge workers open to seeking a new position in the next year. High employee turnover is an expensive problem for companies, with Gallup research estimating the replacement cost of each worker at 1.5-2x their annual salary.
Recruitment software can radically improve job retention rates by carefully matching the right candidate with the right role to supercharge employee satisfaction. While 1 in 5 UK workers will quit within a year, Applied customers report that 93% of employees hired using our recruitment software remain in their role after twelve months. This beats the national average considerably.
3. Enhanced candidate experience
Once you've received dozens of candidate applications for your job ad, the next step should be simple, shouldn't it? You'll select the most qualified person and fill your role quickly. Wrong!
Today's job seekers are in the driving seat. Your job is one of many they've applied for, and as many as 20% receive 2-3 job offers to consider. The 5% who are the real crème de la crème juggle 4+ job offers, according to ZipRecruiter data.
Your choice of recruitment software could help set your company apart by providing a more streamlined and positive candidate experience. For example, across 500,000 Applied applications, we have a 9/10 candidate experience rating.
Job seekers love open communication channels and detailed updates on their progress and application status. This positive impression means your high-quality applicants won't lose interest and head to your competitors instead.
4. Deeper pool of qualified candidates
There's nothing worse than receiving tons of applications from unsuitable candidates. You'll waste valuable time sifting through them all, and it reflects poorly on your company if you don’t reply to them individually.
But why aren’t you attracting the right people? The problem could be anything from the quality of your job description or where you're posting it, to your reliance on qualifications and employment references over skills.
Recruitment tools provide access to 3x more suitable candidates by using AI to review skills and competencies. This will cut time sorting through irrelevant CVs and help you make more informed decisions.
5. Future-facing pool of talent
How about staying in touch with rejected candidates? Rather than file away all applicant details, never to be looked at again, recruitment software allows you to build a database of passive candidates.
That way, you can contact high-potential candidates and let them know if a relevant role matches their unique blend of skills.
This is especially important for companies that want to stay ahead of industry trends. By keeping a finger on the pulse of future talent, you can be ready to pounce when the right opportunity arises.
6. Increased ethnic diversity of candidates
Unconscious bias gets in the way of hiring candidates from diverse backgrounds. 28% of employers admit they rely on "gut feeling" when making hiring decisions. Unfortunately, this psychological shortcut often comes down to affinity bias when we're naturally inclined to work with people who are "just like us."
Unless you already have a wealth of diverse talent in your ranks, a gut-driven approach will exclude diverse employees from receiving job offers at your company. But recruitment software can help you overcome unconscious bias by anonymising the data used to make hiring decisions.
The result? When you hire on merit alone (and crucially, clarify this during the application process!), expect to attract 4x more ethnically diverse candidates.
| Mission / Values Alignment | Culture Fit Alignment |
|---|---|
| Passion for your company’s missionA shared approach to working/collaborating | A shared educational, cultural or professional backgroundSimilar demographic (age, social class etc)Mutual hobbies/interests |
| Mission / Values Alignment | Culture Fit Alignment |
|---|---|
| Passion for your company’s missionA shared approach to working/collaborating | A shared educational, cultural or professional backgroundSimilar demographic (age, social class etc)Mutual hobbies/interests |
| Mission / Values Alignment | Culture Fit Alignment |
|---|---|
| Passion for your company’s missionA shared approach to working/collaborating | A shared educational, cultural or professional backgroundSimilar demographic (age, social class etc)Mutual hobbies/interests |
7. Easier collaboration
How many people are involved in your recruiting process?
Generally, a hiring decision includes a candidate, recruiter, and line manager. But may also include senior management or directors, senior team members, HR, or even customer contacts depending on the nature of the role.
That's a lot of interview scheduling, feedback sessions, and email communication bouncing back and forth between multiple people.
Recruitment software simplifies the collaboration process by providing a central dashboard for all stakeholders to access.
This allows each person to view the recruitment timeline, provide feedback, score SIFT answers and keep track of their involvement in the talent acquisition process. No more paperwork, no more confusion over task completions — everything's laid out in front of you on the same page.
8. Speedier job postings
It could take ten minutes or more to register for a job board, fill out a single job post and publish it. But if you want to attract a wide range of job candidates, you'll likely need to post the job on multiple sites. That adds up to a lot of time spent creating identical job posts for each platform, only to have the majority of applications come from unsuitable candidates.
Recruitment software cuts down on this manual labor and helps you craft an engaging, inclusive, and unbiased job description to win the attention of high-calibre candidates. Applied will close your gender and racial talent gaps by identifying any coded language in your job posts that skew your applicant quality.
A gender decoder will filter out masculine-coded language like "competitive" and "ambitious," suggesting neutral alternatives while using plain language that’s more accessible for potential applicants who don't have a college degree.
9. Greater focus on skills
Skills-based hiring moves away from depending on b*llshit-ridden resumes and towards assessing whether someone has the specific skills and competencies required for their daily tasks.
A candidate's educational background is one of the least reliable predictors of their abilities. The same is true for the "years of experience" metric that's also popular in traditional hiring. Both open up the floor for unconscious bias, if a hiring manager attended the same college as an applicant, studied the same degree subject, or knows their past employer.
Thankfully, some large employers are changing their approach, with only 26% of Accenture's job listings for software quality assurance engineers now requiring a college degree and only 29% of IBM postings for a similar role.
Using recruiting solutions with in-built skills assessments gives you a more practical way to measure candidates and predict future job performance.
10. Simpler tracking
Cloud-based recruitment software means candidates and hirers can easily log in and access the necessary details. When your recruitment software connects to external data sources, like job boards and social media platforms, you can track application rates to measure the success of your recruitment campaigns.
That's not all: web-based recruitment software gives you real-time insights into which job boards and locations provide the best quality candidates.
11. Improved data security
It's essential to securely store and protect all hiring data to ensure that individual candidate information is never exposed. GDPR requires hirers to:
- Ensure candidates have consented to the collection of data
- Only collect data related to your purpose
- Only collect data for legitimate reasons
- Disclose the use and handling of their data to the candidates through privacy policies
- Have data protection measures in place.
Without recruitment software, it's too easy to leave sensitive data vulnerable as multiple email chains, paper records, and different software programs handle the same data.
Recruitment software stores all candidate information in a secure and encrypted database and provides a secure login procedure to access the data.
12. Easy to meet company culture goals
ADP Research Institute reveals that workers with a strong connection to their employer are 75 times more likely to be engaged than those without that connection. This strengthens the case for developing a company culture that aligns with your organisation's mission while attracting the right people. Some 46% of job seekers say company culture is an important consideration in accepting a job offer.
Recruitment software can help you attract potential employees with values that match yours. For example, suppose you're looking for family-focused candidates or those committed to sustainability. In that case, you can use the software's search filters to narrow down the field and find those who match your criteria.
13. Increased productivity
Recruitment software is incredibly user-friendly and intuitive, providing quick access to candidate information without searching through the paperwork. This helps both recruitment agencies and individual hirers with the burden of manual data entry and document storage.
The software will also provide automated reminders for upcoming deadlines or key dates, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. Automating your tedious tasks will provide more hours to spend on other areas of recruitment, such as improving onboarding processes or identifying current skills gaps in your org chart.
14. Smoother onboarding
Only 12% of job candidates consider their employer did a great job with onboarding, and some reports suggest it can take up to 2 years for new joiners to be fully up to speed in their roles. Hiring the right person can accelerate the onboarding process significantly, as they’re more likely to hit the ground running.
Incorporating real-world practical and cognitive tests throughout the application means new joiners have already experienced elements of the job, know what to expect, and will acclimatise quickly.
Choosing your recruitment software: the takeaway
Your final task is to select the best recruitment software for your hiring needs. Based on the key benefits of using this technology, zone in on the following features as must-haves:
- All-in-one ATS with in-built assessment tools to predict job performance
- Job description tool with gender decoder to ensure inclusivity
- Real-time candidate tracking with automated notifications
- Secure data storage, encryption, and login procedures
- Skills-based shortlisting that relies on data over gut instincts
Applied is the best recruitment software for fair, unbiased hiring. Purpose-built to ensure ethical and predictive hiring, our platform depends on anonymised applications and skills-based cognitive and practical assessments to boost diversity and identify top talent.
Start transforming your hiring now: book in a demo.
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