Comparing E-recruitment tools

The E-recruitment sector is evolving. In recent years many E-recruitment tools have emerged that claim to help recruiters and to “revolutionize the recruiting sector”.

Cataloguing these platforms is not easy: there are many options and often, in a desperate search for originality, each platform creates its own definitions despite the functionality being more or less equal. There are several categories that appear frequently: Recruiting Software, Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Recruitment Platform, Social Network, Social Network for Jobs, innovative systems to do recruiting, Social professional network, Digital Headhunter, Employer Branding platform etc.
We’re convinced that technological innovation in recruiting will make a difference: 81% of recruiters are in fact convinced that in the next 3-5 years recruiting will be made easier thanks to modern technologies that attract candidates in a faster and more efficient way (source: Kelly Hiring Manager Survey). Considering the high number of options on the market, it’s increasingly important that a recruiter is able to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of each technology.
It’s common for recruiters to feel let down by specific platforms, especially if they have invested in a new, fancy system rather than selecting a technology that is perhaps more basic but better fulfils their actual business requirements.
To make this journey easier, we’ve started off by micro-categorizing the different E-recruitment tools:

1. Job ad websites (Job Boards): a “classic” tool, directly evolved from daily job ads in newspapers. You can publish your job ads and candidates can apply online. Some also allow candidates to build a profile so that you can scroll through a database of profiles and CVs, and in recent years some sites have added functionality for Employer Branding so that you can create a page linked to adverts throughout the site.

2. Professional Social Networks: these emerged in the 2000s with the objective of developing and consolidating professional contacts, and allowing members to share content or interact in themed groups. These subsequently evolved to include new, paid for, functionalities such as viewing the whole database of member profiles, accessing the ad serving functionality, or creating a company business page.

3. Employer Branding platforms the most recent form of E-recruitment platforms. They have functionality similar to job ad websites, (publishing ads, and a visible database of candidates), however with more emphasis on Employer Branding: you can create a multi-media company page (with photos and videos) and integrate with Social Networks, with the possibility to publish ads and content also on these channels.

To help recruiting & HR teams, we’ve prepared a list of the key differences between these types of tools and an excellent recruiting software like an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Here are eight keys to understanding which E-recruitment tools are best suited to your needs.

1. Who owns the CV?

Data ownership is the first thing to consider. The majority of platforms listed above (job ad websites, Social Networks, Employer Branding platforms) do not transfer the ownership of all the candidate data to the recruiting company: they only give you temporary access to the profiles in the database.
The platforms acquire the candidates’ profile whenever they respond to an ad and only later does the platform make it available to the recruiting company. The latter will be able to search and contact some profiles but they will always remain the property of the job ad website/ Social Network/ Employer Branding platform (in some cases you can channel them into a proprietary company database or recruiting software when this option is granted).
This way of managing “on demand” recruitment could bring results in the immediate term but runs the risk of turning out worse in the medium-long term because it establishes a relationship of dependency between the company and the data owner who, at any time, could change their policy or rates, leaving you in a difficult situation. Also, using only externally managed data means you miss out on the chance to build a proprietary database of candidates, which you can continue to mine and market to for future roles.
By using an Application Tracking System instead it’s possible to create a proprietary centralised database where you can collate all the applications from multiple channels. An ATS is configured as the core of a recruitment strategy, with other tools such as Social Networks and the company career page, feeding into the ATS. This means you not only answer your immediate resourcing need but also build a talent pool and pipeline for the future.

2. Can you personalise the fields on the registration form?

How much can you personalise the registration form that the candidate has to complete with their data? These three E-recruitment tools – job boards, social networks and Employer Branding platforms – have more or less the same, standard, pre-defined registration fields. This limits the recruiter who may prefer to set their own custom fields for each new search thereby profiling for their specific purposes and saving time in the next stages of screening. Using custom fields generates a stream of better quality applications because the screening criteria are already defined at the recruiter’s end. Also, in the most advanced systems (such as In-recruiting) fields are automatically evaluated: the recruiter gives a weight (from one to ten for example) to each field and the system will perform an automatic ranking of the candidate, providing automatic management of the first phase of pre-screening.

3. Do candidates also see your competitors’ jobs ads?

Social Networks provide the functionality to publish job ads (like a Job Board), which is beneficial for increasing ad visibility but also has a downside: when a candidate opens your company’s ad they will also see other ads, potentially also those of your competitors (because the algorithm is set to suggest ‘similar vacancies’). Conversely, the Applicant Tracking System is the most innovative structure to ‘protect’ candidates from your competitors because it brings the candidates to a landing page where they will only see your company announcements, or even better to the careers section of the company website. Because these are private sites you can better control the ‘external stimuli’ that could distract your potential candidate.

4. Does the platform communicate or disperse the Employer’s brand?

According to the most recent statistics in Italy, Employer Branding has the highest influence on whether to send an application to a company (source: Recruitpedia Italy). Many social recruiting platforms position themselves as tools that can communicate Employer Branding with spaces for company information in a standard form (e.g. the company’s history, the number of employees etc). Unfortunately, this form of communication contradicts the most bask law of Employer Branding: differentiation. To position yourself as an industry leader and a desirable workplace you need to distinguish yourself from competitors – something a ‘standard’ system cannot achieve, rather it helps to standardise your brand.

Our advice is to focus first on the career page on your company’s website because it’s the core of any Employer Branding campaign. In fact, despite the multiplication of communication channels, 86% of candidates still go to company career pages to learn about the company, while 51% use professional Social Networks and only 32% use ‘other Social Media’ (source: PotentialPark).
Your career page should answer these essential questions:

– Why should I work for your company?
– What is the best role for me within your company?
– What’s it really like to work in this role, in your business day-to-day?

5. Don’t build your house from the roof downwards

It’s easy to be dazzled by the latest technological offerings and fall into the trap of ‘buidling your house from the roof downwards’, thereby forgetting the foundations. For example, professional Social Networks are a great complementary tool to an Applicant Tracking System but by themselves are not an adequate recruitment tool. They can support an advanced Talent Acquisition strategy in the short term (the latest In-recruiting edition even has a Social Recruiting function integrated) but they should not replace a high-quality system for screening and tracking applicants.

6. Do you have a dispersed recruiting team?

The recruiting team can often be numerous to incorporate HR and functional heads. The recruitment team can also often be dispersed geographically and with varying priorities. This can lead to disarray in managing the candidate pipeline as feedback, notes and communication can become jumbled in emails and various note forms. Using a comprehensive Applicant Tracking System (ATS) provides a simple, centralised dashboard where all of the recruitment team can see the progress of the pipeline, make comments and take responsibility for actions.

7. Do you have both immediate and long-term sourcing requirements?

There’s a difference between filling an existing or impending vacancy, and a Talent Acquisition strategy that seeks to identify, capture and nurture the best possible executives for the growth of your business. For the latter, you need a sophisticated presence in the market, a position as a superior employer, the ability to re-evaluate candidates within your database, and a communication strategy with candidates that maintains your high-end profile. All of the platforms described above can feed into an overall Talent Management strategy: you need exposure & visibility, plus high-quality branding & profiling, and varied communication channels to share updates about your company. An ATS rolls all of these together and adds seamless back-end management to support effective Talent Management.

8. Would you like to dedicate more time to high-end recruitment needs?

High value tasks such as interviewing, setting assessments, researching to create quality job ads, and headhunting is often given less attention than they are really due because the ‘small’ tasks have an immediate priority. Pumping ads out onto different channels, inputting data from multiple applications and managing scores or feedback from your recruitment team are all tasks that add value to the process but which are essentially administrative, low-value tasks. If your recruitment process and recruitment or HR team would benefit from the removal of those tasks, thereby freeing time and resource for the high-end activities, your overall recruitment performance could improve.