Wonolo
It’s a quest you all probably know quite well by now. You’re in hot pursuit of the best of the best talent to flesh out your team’s staffing needs. Whether it’s for a full-time, part-time, or temp job, it doesn’t matter. There’s always pressure to make the perfect hire – that is, the hire that helps everyone do their jobs better.
But at the same time, like everyone else, your time (and dollars) are at a premium. How can you find and manage top-notch candidates, while also maintaining your sanity?
Like many things, it’s a balancing act. So how do you balance being overzealous in your recruiting approach with being more choosy in your outreach? Fear not. We’re here to help and have pulled together this handy digest of some of our favorite tools to make sourcing and managing candidates easier than ever.
Though there’s a wide array of tools out there, they all serve the same purpose of making the job of a recruiter much easier by helping locate and pick applicants, pre-screen their resumes, and track the progress of their applications as applicants complete them and go through the interview process.
Ready to see what tools can make all the difference? Depending on what you’re looking for, we’ve broken them down into four core buckets: applicant tracking and sourcing, job posting sites, compensation information and networking tools. And, because we’re all about adding that extra bit of value, stay tuned for a bonus must-have tool at the end. Ready to learn more? Let’s jump right in.
Applicant Tracking and Sourcing
1. Jobvite
Think of Jobvite as a “social recruiting” platform for sourcing candidates, essentially empowering everyone within a company to become a recruiter with the ability to share job posts via their own social media networks. That’s right. With its core Jobvite Refer function, you have your very own recruiting army. In addition to this, Jobvite offers other valuable tools like applicant tracking and video interviews.
2. Greenhouse
Greenhouse is another great recruiting platform that gives companies all the tools they need for different steps of the hiring process. What we love most is its data-driven bent. It uses A/B testing to let different teams in the company know what type of job posts help garner the best candidates, and the platform encourages current employees to help in the recruiting process by allowing them to submit referrals and share job openings on social media.
3. Bullhorn
Bullhorn offers the core functionality you’d expect in a platform of this type, including applicant tracking and onboarding. The standout here is the “Reach Radar,” which alerts recruiters when potential hires update things like their LinkedIn job status, which signals a time to reach out about a position. It’s like you have an extra set of eyes on the lookout for prime candidates at all times.
4. Lever
Lever is a great recruiting technology that brands itself as a “collaborative applicant tracking system.” This removes the siloed approach to recruiting, allowing the entire team at any company to help choose new job candidates instead of leaving all the work to recruiters or HR reps. It values teamwork in making new hires and has helped the growth of major companies like Netflix, Quora, and Lyft.
5. TalentBin
Created by recruiting behemoth (and newly acquired by Randstad) Monster, the secret sauce of TalentBin is that it often highlights job seekers’ “hidden talents.” This means that it can track if a jobseeker has posted any kind of specialized work such as design, coding, or other highly prized skills anywhere on the internet and shares it with recruiters. The major benefit here is that you gain access to sourcing skills that potential hires may not necessarily publicize on forums like LinkedIn.
Job Posting Sites
6. Indeed
You probably know all about Indeed, which is essentially the Google for finding jobs that aggregates results from job boards and company pages all over the internet. But because of this exceptionally wide reach, it’s worth a mention here. For those moments where you feel absolutely stuck and aren’t sure where to turn, it can deliver a lot of value, as it provides access to a huge base of job-seekers and specific talent.
Like Indeed, Glassdoor is another “bread and butter” part of the talent sourcing world. If you’re not regularly checking out the reviews of your company (and your competitors), then you’re missing out. Because current and former employees are rating their companies à la Yelp, potential candidates can take a peek at these reviews on the site and get a real sense of the actual corporate and office culture at the company…beyond the stories of sunshine and rainbows that companies typically portray on their websites.
You don’t want to get caught off-guard here with what people are saying on this powerful forum – the last thing you want is for a candidate to inquire about a Glassdoor comment during an interview, and you have no clue what they’re talking about. And if your company has a string of negative reviews, it could be a major turnoff for drawing in future applicants. As you can imagine, we recommend taking an active role with this platform, as it offers the opportunity to keep tabs on your brand vis à vis the competition, while simultaneously conveying the values and mission of your company in a meaningful way.
Glassdoor also offers detailed compensation information for different positions at companies; read on for other platforms that also offer this service.
8. AngelList
If you’re recruiting in the startup world, then you need to be on AngelList. Angel investors use the platform to find startups to invest in, and startups use it to find potential investors, as well as potential hires. Candidates on the platform can create specialized profiles for themselves to help give recruiters a deeper level of insight.
Compensation Information Platforms
9. Payscale
Great for competitive intelligence, Payscale is a platform that allows businesses and individuals to view the going market rates for different roles (a.k.a. how much people should be paid). They boast a massive database of over 40 million individual salary profiles. This website is great to have in your arsenal to ensure that the salary you’re offering is enticing enough to get the talent you’re looking for in the door.
It’s always good to have multiple points of comparison for salary data. Like Payscale, Salary.com offers compensation data for employers and individuals that can be used as a baseline for offering competitive salaries. Salary.com also comes with Compensation Analytics, which helps companies ensure competitive pay compared with market rates.
11. Salary Expert
Let’s go global. Born out of economic research giant ERI, Salary Expert analyzes salary data for companies and individuals from all over the world. Of particular note is Salary Expert’s Cost of Living Data, which allows individuals to see the level of compensation they need to make to live in a certain area. What might have people living like kings in Nebraska might mean living in a shoebox in New York, so it’s important to have this perspective, particularly if you’re working with someone to relocate.
Social Media and Networking Tools
12. LinkedIn
Yes, we know. Talking about LinkedIn isn’t that earth-shattering, given that everyone these days, particularly those in the recruiting domain, seems to be on this platform. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is using it to its full extent. Besides the core ability to search for candidates, it offers the opportunity to join valuable groups to network and thereby subtly promote your company. For more on this topic, stay tuned for a future blog post about the top LinkedIn hacks for recruiters.
13. MeetUp
MeetUp touts itself as the “world’s largest network of local groups,” with 27 million members and nearly 600,000 monthly meetups. MeetUp is great for you to see what kinds of professional groups potential hires may be a part of, and this gives you the prime opportunity to join these groups and network with potential candidates at group events. On the other side of the coin, you can also leverage MeetUp to sync up with local recruiters and talk shop about what’s working for you…and what’s not. You never know – you might even get a choice referral for a candidate out of one of these networking events.
14. Facebook
While it might not have the professional veneer of LinkedIn, Facebook offers the widest audience (1.7 billion users, to be exact) and has the potential to attract a large pool of talent. Though you may not be initially inclined to use Facebook to directly source or contact potential hires, your Facebook game needs to be on point. Here’s why. Job-seekers have the opportunity to find the Facebook pages of companies they’re interested in and “stalk” them (in a friendly way, of course) to get a sense of the company culture and see if it might be a good fit. In fact, this “stalking” is not uncommon at all; a survey from Jobvite showed that 83% of job seekers use Facebook in their job searches.
This is where you have to think like a marketer. Be in close contact with the team within your company (likely someone in Marketing or Corporate Communications) that oversees your social media presences like Facebook and make sure they paint an image of a vibrant, exciting company that people would line up to work for. Your page should have a mix of images that show how awesome your culture is while also keeping a steady stream of news about what’s going on at your company, such as that choice media placement in TechCrunch.
By the way, that friendly Facebook “stalking” is a two-way street. It can be useful for getting a more realistic feel for a candidate that’s applied for a job with your company, beyond what’s being shared on their resume.
15. Twitter
Like Facebook, consider Twitter a “storefront” for your business and attracting quality candidates. In 2015, the potential for employee referrals on Twitter rose to 93%. With the rapid-fire nature of Twitter, potential employees can turn to the platform to see real-time updates and content from companies they’re interested in. Because of this dynamic, take note – simply posting once on Twitter every so often isn’t going to cut it. Candidates are expecting to see a vibrant, active feed of information at a cadence of a few tweets a day. Plus, the ability to tweet at anyone on Twitter makes communication between individuals and large companies way more accessible so don’t be surprised if a candidate tweets at your company or starts following it on Twitter. (If anything, this should merit them bonus points! It shows an active level of engagement with your company.) From a recruiting standpoint, Twitter is a huge stage, with a whopping 313 million monthly active users on the platform.
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A Bonus Tool: Staffing Goes On-Demand
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tools. Even with all of these amazing tools to make life as a recruiter infinitely easier, let’s be honest. The sourcing process is still a drag for businesses with all those resumes to sift through and interviews to schedule. One solution to help increasingly alleviate-and even almost eliminate-this pain point, and one that has become very prominent today, is on-demand staffing. At the touch of a button, businesses can put the call out for any number of workers for a certain job to a wide-reaching network of freelancers who are eager to work. With platforms like Wonolo, all job candidates are pre-vetted and ready to work, so the background-checking, interviewing, and application part of the hiring process is gone in an instant. Save time. Save money. And save your sanity in finding the right talent in a matter of minutes, as opposed to days or even weeks.
Some of the world’s biggest brands have already embraced this model, so why haven’t you? If you’re not quite sure where to start with this exciting model for solving this age-old business problem, don’t worry – we have you covered.
Download our newly released eBook, New Economy New Rules: Your Roadmap for Navigating How to Work with an On-Demand Staffing Provider, to learn how to:
- Scope the business need internally to make sure you look for the right type of on-demand staffing provider
- 7 questions you need to ask to find the right on-demand staffing platform
- Roll this out at your business
- Benefits of an on-demand staffing approach
