Headhunter Solutions

Tips on using Technology to improve your Recruiting business

Automate Sales and Placement of Candidates

The central component for automating a recruiting business is an Applicant Tracking System. You can find the other components on this page. You may also see other glorified names for this component like enterprise recruiting application, but I am still talking about the same component.

Spend less time performing administrative tasks and more time doing value added work. After all, as a recruiter, you are paid for placements, not for how well you do clerical work. For this reason I am going to recommend that if you are not using an Applicant Tracking System, you need to get one.

Why?

Following are a few of the obvious reasons you will make extra placements.

1. Details don't fall through the cracks so you don't miss opportunities
2. In the time you spend looking for a single resume in a file cabinet, you could have reviewed numerous resumes in your ATS.
3. Reduced time to fill a position reduces chance of competitor filling the position first.

What about Contact Management programs?

Contact Management Programs or personal information managers (PIMS) such as MS Outlook and ACT are frequently used by recruiters as an inexpensive alternative to applicant tracking systems. While they are better than a completely paper based system, they still fall short of offering adequate functionality for recruiters. They may cost less initial than a system specifically designed for the recruiting or staffing industry, but they end up costing you in the long run due to the cost of lost opportunity. The cost of most applicant tracking systems is from less than one to 2 extra placements. In fact, at least one of these programs, the Recruiting Wizard, guarantees to pay for itself 10 times within the year or your money will be refunded.

No good means for handling Job Orders

While Contact Managers are good for dealing with people and companies, they do not provide a good way to track job orders. With an applicant tracking system, you are able to track people, companies, and job orders equally well.

Poor candidate to job requirement matching

ATSs allow you to define job requirements for job orders and perform numerous searches to define which candidate is most suited to the job. The more advanced systems will even generate a list in order of best match so you can contact the candidates most likely to meet the job requirements.

What options do I have?

When it comes to this critical central component of your recruitment or staffing business you have 3 viable options.

1. Off the shelf applicant tracking systems - These programs have come a long way over the last couple of years. Most of the systems have sufficient flexibility that they will work for almost any recruitment firm and will handle the recruiting end for staffing agencies. Since staffing companies have a huge potential for timesavings on the backend, it is important that they find a package with backoffice functionality or one that they can integrate with their backoffice programs. (At present we are working on compiling a list of the major ATS systems and their functionality. If you would like to be informed when it is ready, please send us an email and you will be added to our Recruiting Technology Newsletter and will be one of the first to get this information)
2. Custom program - This approach will be much more costly than either of the other options. Not only will you spend a lot of time determining and explaining what is needed; you also run the risk of developing a program that doesn't do what you really want. Since most recruiters don't know the technical details of programming and most programmers have no clue about how to run a recruiting business, the odds of success are slim. Even if you end up with a functional program, it will only have a fraction of the functionality that goes into the major ATS. After all, these programs have many man years of development in them.
3. Customize an existing ATS - Some of the applicant tracking systems will either sell you the source code or will make custom changes to the program for a fee. This is a good option if you have specialized needs that can't be met by any of the systems. The main disadvantage of this is that you lose the ability to upgrade to new and improved versions when they are released, unless you are willing to pay for the custom changes again.

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