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The top tech you need to know about in 2019 (and how it will help you hire great talent)

Allen Associates, News & Blog

The jobs market is competitive, and for good reason – there is top talent to be had, and only a limited time for you as an Employer to secure it. So, how do you make sure you do just that, using the technology that will work for you?

We have worked with thousands of Candidates in our 20 years. Whether they are Permanent or Temporary, we know the value the right hire can bring to a business.

The year 1998 was a landmark year for the recruitment industry, and not just because it was the year we were founded! In this year, Google was launched as was PayPal, the world’s first memory stick was manufactured by Sony, and the original Apple iMac went on sale for the first time. Each of these technologies has advanced and evolved in line with increased consumer expectations, and it the same when it comes to recruitment.

Twenty years ago, Employers and Recruitment businesses like ours took a very traditional approach to sourcing, attracting and hiring talent. We ran adverts in the local jobs pages and relevant trade magazines, kept roladex’s (remember those?) and housed large metal filing cabinets that served as a ‘database’.

But technology has enabled us all to move on from such antiquated practices and become more streamlined and efficient in our approach. Trouble is, with so many advances taking place and new systems and applications being introduced to the hiring market all the time, it is a task to decipher which ones should command your attention, and those that can be allowed to slip by.

Over the course of the next few pages, we’ll walk you through the technologies that have proven time and again to maximise the Candidate attraction and management strategies both for us as a recruitment business and those of the Employers we support.

LinkedIn RPS (Recruiter Professional Service)

As of December 2018, over 9 million people in the UK have a LinkedIn account. That’s one-third of the entire working population, which makes this unquestionably the most indispensable tool in a recruiter’s armoury.

The key to any hiring strategy is ensuring that we get your vacancies seen by more of the right people in the right way and at the right time. With 80% of LinkedIn users stating that the professional networking site is key to their job search success, this is a place where you need to be ‘hanging out’ too.

What makes this more effective over any other recruiting platform, is its search function. This enables recruiters and hiring managers to zero in on those users whose skills, experiences and attributes best match the requirements of the roles that our Clients are hiring for. For example, this can range from job title, level of seniority or years of experience, to how active they are on the site, if they have updated their career profile, size of company they work for, location and what they’re interested in.

Another high impact tool that comes with LinkedIn RPS is InMail. This is a great way of approaching those prospective Candidates who are most likely to engage with you, based on the results generated from your searches.

However, a word of caution – there is a limit to the number of messages you can send each month (max.100), so you need to maximise the impact of each one and be mindful that Candidates receive a plethora of unwanted emails every day.

By making your emails personal and relevant to the individual you are approaching there is a good chance that your email will be opened. In fact, this increases your open rate by 26% and click-through rate by a staggering 130%. So, it pays to take your time in getting it right. But to stir a reaction, the message needs to address that all-important what’s-in-it-for-me question. After all, you’re not there to make friends – your job is to ‘sell’ both the role and the company to a great Candidate.

Recruiting on LinkedIn is just one platform that should form part of your hiring strategy, albeit an extremely powerful one. Take a look at some of the others below.

Social media

The impact that social media can have on your ability to attract both active and passive (the Holy Grail) Candidates cannot be understated. And the great thing is that so many companies get it horribly wrong, which means that by doing it right you immediately stand out from the crowd!

The trap that Employers and recruiters alike fall into is that they treat social media as a free advertising platform to showcase their latest roles. Instead of driving applications from the right people, such posts either attract unwanted enquiries or simply alienate those Candidates who could be a good fit but don’t like having the latest vacancies rammed down their throats.

Social media – or ‘social recruiting’ – is more effective when there is a rich mix of give-and-take content. There are a number of ways in which you can do this. First, share news articles that will be of interest to the people you wish to attract. This will raise your profile as a business with their finger on the pulse of what is happening in your industry.

Second, produce blog content on your website that resonates with job seekers and can be shared across each of your social media accounts. For example, you could create a behind-the-scenes short-form video that gives prospective Candidates an insight into what it is like to work in your organisation.

This could include vignettes (vox pops) of current Employees sharing their experiences of the application and process and what they enjoy most about their jobs. The list of possibilities is endless, but content of this nature has a high impact factor – people buy from people and selling ‘stories’ is more powerful than pushing job listings on your social channels of choice.

Thirdly, there is a lot of ‘noise’ out there and to get your role seen requires a little creative flair. There is a plethora of great (many free) online tools that enable you to quickly create images to accompany your social media posts, and you don’t need to be a graphic designer to do so either! Take a look our Twitter feed for examples.

Research conducted by HubSpot found that 80% of marketers always use an image with each social media post. What’s more, 65% of people state that if the image is relevant to the message then the information contained will be remembered up to three days after it was first posted. Put another way, a good image makes for more engaging posts which in turn increases the likelihood of your vacancy attracting more of the right people.

Pay per click (PPC)

Let’s say you are based in the capital and are looking to recruit a new marketer, have you ever Googled ‘Marketing jobs London’? We did and over 433,000,000 results were generated. That’s far too many zeros in anyone’s book and it highlights the point that getting your vacancy into the first page of Google is nigh-on impossible. Well, not unless you have a recruitment advertising budget that equates to the GDP of a small country.

This is where pay per click – or PPC – comes into play.

Job boards dominate the organic search rankings online and the only way to leapfrog them is to pay for the privilege in the firm of advertising. But unlike traditional formats that can be rather costly, PPC is more costeffective as it enables hiring managers to essentially ‘sponsor’ or ‘bid’ on specific key words. The notion being that when a job seeker enters these words into a search bar your recruitment advert will come up.

Of course, there are certain factors that will determine the frequency of when your advert will appear such as the audience you have selected, the day or time of the week you have stated you want your ads to come up in searches, and the amount you have bid on these keywords in the first place. The great thing is that you only pay when someone clicks on your advert, so your budget is only used by those who are genuinely interested in the role you are advertising.

Rather than being viewed as an added expense, the return on your investment in PPC is extremely good when compared to traditional advertising formats. It is not uncommon for recruitment agencies and Employers to draw as many as 15-25% of all Candidates from their PPC campaigns.

There are other benefits to running a PPC recruitment marketing campaign. Indeed, research has shown that visitors who come to your site via PPC spend more time on it, view a higher number of pages on average, and are new, rather than returning, visitors. Put another way, these people show higher levels of engagement with your site, are more likely to register and apply for jobs and sign up for email alerts.

LogicMelon

When you’re managing a number of roles at the same time, posting them to the relevant job boards one by one can be a laborious task. For this reason, recruitment agencies and many high-volume Employers will utilise the services of a multi-posting platform that combines applicant tracking and Candidate attraction functions.

Typically, recruiters will use one of Broadbean, Idibu or LogicMelon. Each work in very much the same way and integrate with your existing website or careers pages, but for us the platform of choice is LogicMelon and the primary reason for this is time.

As a business, we have seen strong growth in recent years. There are many factors contributing to this but the primary reason is the upturn in the economy – Employer hiring intentions have grown steadily and that in turn has seen a greater demand for the services we provide.

It’s a similar story for many Employers, too. As the sectors in which their organisations operate perform well, this, more often than not, results in the creation of new positions – sometimes numbering in their 10s or even 100s. This is where streamlining the recruitment process moves from being a nice-to-have idea, to a business necessity.

Using a platform such as LogicMelon enables users to post all their jobs across those job boards of most relevance to them, gather and parse CVs which makes the shortlisting process faster and smoother, and track the effectiveness of their recruitment advertising – all from a single cloud-based dashboard.

This is great in that it is easy to see what job boards are delivering the best ROI, but it also enables users to better manage their online budget due it its quota management tool that can prevent overspending.

Bullhorn CRM

When it comes to CRM’s, the market is quite simply huge. But Bullhorn’s offering is the stand out, especially for those hiring managers and recruiters handling multiple vacancies at any one time. As a cloud-based platform, Bullhorn is easy to implement without the need to for costly add-ons to your existing systems.

Indeed, if you operate across a number of different locations, the platform’s adaptable solution will link each one together to ensure the organisation’s HR function is truly integrated. So, someone managing the recruitment in one office can have access to the same information as their colleague based elsewhere. This makes for greater internal communication as well as better relationships with Candidates.

It also enables users to quickly react and respond to Candidates while providing both recruiters and Employers with instant access to the information they need on each applicant. These insights can be invaluable. Because it automatically analyses all data that has been captured, Bullhorn CRM can help hiring managers and recruiters to make key hiring decisions in real time.

Conclusion

The world of recruiting has moved on at pace in recent years, and some HR and recruitment industry observers argue that we’re all techies now. While we wouldn’t necessarily claim to be such ourselves, we do get the sentiment of such claims – we are all becoming increasingly reliant on technology.

But this is a good thing. After all, few can deny the cost and time savings at be gained by adopting the right platforms for their businesses. The year ahead promises to see even greater strides in this field and by the time we come to updating this Guide in 12 months’ time, it will likely include technologies such as blockchain, augmented reality (AR), and answer engine optimisation (AEO). You may not know what any of these are now, but the rapid rate of technological advancement will mean the chances are high that you will by the time we next address the subject.

All of the platforms above have their merits, and all have been proven to deliver the results that are needed to maximise your recruitment investment. However, let’s not forget that recruiting is a people business and the more personal your relationship with Candidates, the more profitable your hiring process will be.

Can we help you? Click here for more information or contact us on:

Oxford: 01865 335 600

London: 0203 8001920

Email: jobs@allen-associates.co.uk