Only about twenty years ago, the recruitment process was strikingly different from what we experience today. No one in the 90s would have to worry about applying for a job online, or having a robot call you and ask you questions like “What do you think your weaknesses are?” or “Define the term leadership without using the word ‘lead.’” Things such as these would have been unimaginable and anyone bringing it up in the conversation would have been laughed at and ridiculed as lunatic. But look at us now, comfortably sprawling in our snug ergonomic office chairs, clicking on “decline” buttons next to the resumes, checking updates from colleagues in real time, or telling a robot to do a job for you. It’s all now possible thanks to the technology that automates and speeds up more and more tedious processes that used to take months somewhen thirty years ago. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the top-notch and cutting edge software in recruitment that helps automate a portion of hiring procedures and make a life of an average recruiter a lot easier and much more productive. In particular, we’ll talk about some of the bestselling applicant tracking applications, video and audio recording software, general purpose recruitment management systems, and finish with innovative artificial intelligence solutions as a cherry on top.
What is a recruitment facilitator or hiring application?
Recruitment facilitator is an application or software that’s built to automate a certain procedure in the hiring process, like screening or sourcing, or facilitate and standardize employee management.
Why do you need to automate hiring procedures?
These are just a few reasons why you might need a hiring application or software:
— If you’re dealing with a large volume of applications and resumes, the hiring process can become super labor intensive. Automating at least half of these processes will save you time and money.
— Screening candidates and testing their skills across the same criteria for the same position will create consistency in the hiring process with less bias and subjectivity.
— Tracking is easier with special software designed specifically for tracking and maintaining a clear-cut database of prospective candidates.
— Automating processes makes the data available for all concerned parties. A manager can log in and see the progress of the hiring process or answers of a particular candidate to screening questions, etc.
Types of recruitment applications
Applicant Tracking Software
Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) helps to manage job postings, screen and track applications, follow the recruitment process, and check the team’s progress. The number of features in software will depend on what type of ATS is used. According to Capterra, a website that helps analyze the existing software on the market, there are currently twenty best selling and popular ATS on the market, if judged by the number of customers, overall users, and followers on social networks. We’ve chosen the TOP 3, which we’ll describe in a moment.
Commonly available features:
— Assessments
— Background screening
— Candidate tracking
— Internal HR
— Interview scheduling
— Job board posting
— Onboarding
— Resume search and parsing
— Workflow management
Bullhorn is currently a market leader among ATS. The system tailors its products specifically for recruitment agencies; however, they do offer smaller packages for businesses of all sizes. Bullhorn, in itself, is a combination between Applicant Tracking and Customer Relationship Management, with features ranging from candidate management and sourcing to tracking activity goals and sales quotas. The pricing is determined by the number of people who’d like to have access to the system, and of course, the number of desirable features in a package. And it’s usually pretty expensive, which, of course, is one of its drawbacks.
Workable occupies a solid second place on the best ATS list, and it’s, in fact, a very powerful tool that sets itself apart from many of its competitors by offering a set of outstanding features for a relatively tiny price tag.
And while the general feedback from consumers is extremely positive, many complained about a lack of proper customization, like not being able to remove certain stages of the hiring process for different positions or change reporting options. Among other concerns raised by consumers were social media part not being entirely accurate, the system’s inability to recognize duplicates, and problems with syncing.
Greenhouse positions itself as an applicant tracking software for growing companies. It also packs a wallop in terms of features and a degree of automation it’s able to provide for its users. <However, on the downside, the reporting can’t be fully customized, the workflow can appear messy, and prices spike if you want to add more people to the software.
Video Interview Software
Video Interview Applications are powerful tools to schedule, conduct, record, maintain, and playback interviews, take notes, prepare questions and share them with the interviewee, as well as collaborate with other team members to reach a decision in terms of that candidate. Now, if you have an opportunity to conduct interviews on site, you would not obviously want to invest in something like Video Interview Software, but if you’re hiring remotely, then one of the following exemplary applications would be absolutely necessary.
Commonly available features:
— Archiving
— Candidate portal
— Feedback management
— Invitations
— One-on-One interviews
— Panel interviews
— Practice sessions
— Question bank
— Recording
— Scoring
EasyHire is a cloud-based interview software that enables both on-demand and live interviews, skill assessment, analytics, and collaboration with team members. The software allows its users to create job postings with descriptions, determine a critical skill set (as part of a scoring card), and schedule interviews for that particular position proposing multiple time slots for the candidate to choose from. The user can also create a number of questions to ask an applicant and record the candidate’s answers for further evaluation with other team members. A lot of testers praised the customer service team who was always eager to help out with any technical issues, some of the others though, complained about the interface being a little less intuitive than desired.
RecRight offers panel interviews on top of the same set of features as EasyHire, but it’s also pricier. However, a lot of respondents reported their ultimate satisfaction with using RecRight praising how fast and efficient their hiring process has become.
Montage, as one reviewer has put it, is definitely an investment, since it’s particularly suited for organizations who are recruiting or interviewing a large pool of candidates.
Recruiting software
Recruiting software is a little more than ATS since it automates more than just hiring processes, but employee management as well. The features of good recruiting software usually include performance management, reporting, CRM, internal HR, job requisition, onboarding, and new-hiring transitioning.
Commonly available features:
— CRM
— Internal HR
— Self-service portal
— Absence management
— Calendar management
— Timesheets
— Vacation/leave tracking
— Employee database
— Budgeting & forecasting
— Performance metrics
— Strategic planning
— Compensation statements
— Employee guides
— Feedback management
— Health & wellness programs
— Surveys
BambooHR is one of the best recruitment applications currently on the market. Apart from having features inherently present in other applicant tracking systems, it allows collaboration between hiring managers and communication with candidates, stores all candidates’ data in one place, allows employees to see, checks update requests, and change their information on demand, complete and submit forms electronically. Users are also able to track such things as job benefits, raises, time-off calendars, assets tabs (which employee holds which equipment) etc. Consumers who complained often mentioned the integration difficulties they experienced while using BambooHR, such as an inability to seamlessly integrate data from other systems.
UltiPro is a recruitment solution for companies with over 100 employees. The platform is really powerful in that it has plenty of features across multiple dimensions of the recruiting process and employee management: from attendance tracking and maintaining employee databases to engagement (like feedback management or surveys), payroll features and performance appraisal, etc. Among the drawbacks of the platform, testers mentioned the difficulty of transition to the system, slow learning process, the unwieldy presentation of material, and lack of proper usability and intuitiveness.
Zoho Recruit is another popular and affordable option for automating and standardizing some of the recruitment procedures, both applicant tracking and CRM. Among the drawbacks, users mentioned some of the rigid functionality that couldn’t be changed, lack of radius search, and unintuitive skilling/capabilities section.
Testing and Assessment
Testing tools help standardize recruitment process and increase candidate quality by assessing the required skills for the job. We’ve specifically chosen two best platforms for technical talent and checking developers’ knowledge across a multitude of languages and variety of technical tracks.
HackerRank is a technology hiring platform that is used by 1,000 companies globally. The platform allows to choose from a set of pre-defined challenges for both junior and senior developers, as well as customize and create your own challenges to screen in the best candidates. HackerRank automates code reviews, prepares reports with scalable metrics identifying strong and weak points in candidates’ answers and solutions. There are three main parts to HackerRank: CodeScreen, CodePair, and Insights. CodeScreen sends coding challenges to candidates, CodePair schedules and conducts interview and checks how applicants tackle coding challenges in real-time, and Insights, as the name gives away, provides data-driven actionable insights into candidates’ performance scoring them individually and against each other.
Pymetrics uses assessment tools based on neuro- and data science evaluating both cognitive and emotional functioning, profiling people according to their behavior. As the company’s website explains, pymetrics has custom, cross-validated profiles for each role based on top performers, and these complex algorithms are also dynamic which means they are updated on a regular basis as soon as new data shows up or performance metrics becomes available. According to an article in the New York Times, the idea behind Pymetrics is to eliminate bias in the hiring process and make it nondiscriminatory.
Artificial Intelligence and Robot Recruiters
Most probably we would not live to see the world ruined or reigned by robots or any other creature of artificial intelligence. However, we are lucky enough to see how the technology evolves into a complex phenomenon. One of the examples of such a transformation happens in a recruitment world, where animated chatbots begin to be extensively used for automating some of the routine screening and scoring procedures. We’ll look at two prominent precedents from Russia and Australia below:
Robot Vera is an animated chatbot that makes a selection of appropriate candidates from job boards or a company’s database; can call candidates and answer their calls; conducts video interviews with short-listed candidates (either in English or in Russian), recognises their emotions during the interview, records their answers to interview questions and can answer their questions in return. Robot Vera has been already successfully employed by major corporations, like IKEA and Pepsico, to fill the diverse range positions from cashiers to leading IT-developers. The startup behind Vera, Stafory, has been featured in major publications from Bloomberg to ComputerWeekly. And although the interviewing process, from what we have seen, feels a little weird and rigid, we can totally see how bright future unrolls in front of Vera making her in the epicenter of revolutionary innovations.
Matilda is a little more than an animated chatbot, in a sense, that it’s a completely physical toylike tiny robot that was first developed to help elderly patients with dementia problems and now has been tested to conduct interviews for sales jobs. Just like Vera, it’s able to read and recognize human emotions and respond to them accordingly. The developers behind Matilda say it can analyze and process people’s answers and emotions and make a certain decision based on their qualifications, which (is believed) would ultimately free the recruitment world from bias and prejudice.
Are we headed to the future of robotics in recruitment? That’s a difficult question. Being interviewed by a tiny toylike robot might seem awkward and bizarre at first, but it certainly can be regarded as a small step in machine-learning automation of the recruitment process. As for now, the available software, CRM, hiring, screening, and sourcing tools can definitely make a life of an average recruiter or HR manager easier and more efficient. If you used any particular software to automate the hiring processes in your workplace and had great success (or difficulty), please, let us know in the comments.
