Recruitment and Applicant Tracking Solutions Blog

When you purchase a gadget like a smartphone, tablet or even GPS, you likely change at least some of the factory settings. You change ringtones, customize alerts, etc., to suit your preferences and needs. So, why is it that most people don’t bother to make these same customizations to software? Specifically, enterprise software solutions?

When you are searching for recruitment applications, you aren’t likely to find a solution that will meet all of your needs straight out of the box. With enterprise software, the settings are made to be generic in order to meet the most basic common needs for a wide customer base, which is why a customized solution should always be a preferred option when it comes to recruitment applications.

Why you need customization

There are many benefits to customization, but these are my top three:

1)     It works for your business — you decide which recruiting solutions work for your business and not the         other way around.
2)     Make your HR recruiting process more efficient — customize the process to better serve your clients           and candidates.
3)     Create dashboards and reports based on your requirements to help you better manage your business.

What to look for in an ATS

Using a customized recruiting solution that fits your business is a worthwhile investment but you need to make sure you find the right product for your business. Here’s a checklist when considering a customized recruiting solution such as an applicant tracking system.

- What are the set up costs? Are they one time or multiple?
- How much time is required to integrate into your existing system?
- Is the system easy to understand?
- How much support does the ATS offer with the initial set up?
- How much ongoing support do they provide?
- Are the fees monthly or based on a per user fee?
- How often does the ATS update their software?

Aside from these questions, the most important thing to consider is the level of customization the ATS will provide for you. Think about your unique business needs and look for something that will allow you to add or change the features that you need the most. Once you’ve found the right solution, make sure to make the customizations to get everything set up the way you need it to work.

Do you customize your software? What benefits have you experienced from customization? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

Unemployment at 9.0% – a gain of 0.1% employment was an indication of a slow recovery but vulnerable to global shocks.

An interesting observations from some of the leading economic reports show the following trends

• Private sector adding jobs including manufacturing which indicates a healthy trend to economic growth
• Services industry gains as we move towards a service economy. Professional Services and Healthcare jobs growth increases
• Business holding cash will need to spend it as shareholders require more returns. While M&A like Google acquire Motorola provide the use of cash, would also add more people off jobs as companies consolidate operations.
• Younger people are giving up on job search (41% 16-19 year employed in 2008 vs less than 35% employed in 2011)
• Older people are finding that they are in need of continuing with their current jobs
• Many developed countries under pressure with labor participation like (in 2010) Italy (48.2%), US & Sweden (64.7%) to Australia (66.5%) and Canada (67%)

Today there are numerous solutions available for managing your recruiting process, but choosing the right solution that fits your model can be a challenge. There are many factors that influence the buyer’s decision in picking the applicant tracking system (ATS), such as budget constraints, ease of use, and compatibility with existing systems. With so much to consider, how do you find a system that will be right for your business?

Company Requirements

Every company is unique and therefore will have a unique recruiting process, which means there’s no one system that will work for everyone. A good place to start is to talk to your recruiting team to find out what they want/need from an ATS that they currently don’t have. Once you have created your wish list, you can start looking around at different vendors.

Customization

Since your wish list is highly specific to your company’s needs, you aren’t likely to find a solution that fits all of your requirements right out of the box. This is why it’s important to look for a solution that allows for customization. This will allow you make additions or enhancements to the system to ensure that you have something that does everything you need it to do.

Business Impacts

You also need to think about how the system will impact your business during the implementation process. How much time and effort is required to learn the program? What is the turnaround time for your queries from the vendor? How long will it take to set up the system? Are there enough valuable features to justify the cost? These are some important questions you need to ask any vendor you are considering.

Determining what is most important to your staff and your business is the best way to find an ATS that will be a good fit. There are many great quality systems around, but not all of them will work for every business. If you are in the market for a new ATS, what criteria are you using? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments, as we would love to hear from you.

October 2011 employment numbers indicates a improving market, atleast as of now !!!

ADP announced today that Private sector business have added 110,000 jobs in october up 10,000 jobs than earlier estimated.

Here are some of the highlights

• Job numbers up at 110,000 for the month
• Fed report was not encouraging for 2012, indicating slower growth.
• The October unemployment rate is expected to remain at 9.1%. The U.S. jobless rate has been 9.0% or more since April, a sign of how weak labor markets are.
• The latest ADP report showed large businesses with 500 employees or more cut 1,000 employees from their staffs, while medium-size businesses added 53,000 workers in October and small businesses that employ fewer than 50 workers hired 58,000 new workers.
• Service-sector jobs increased by 114,000 last month, and factory jobs fell by 8,000.

ADP is one of the largest payroll processors and a leading economic indicator provider in the private sector.

Recruiting trends should favor looking for job opportunities in small to mid-size companies while looking for candidates from large companies.

If you’re a small to mid-sized employment or staffing agency, you might not have a staffing process. Instead of using an applicant tracking system, you might be relying on emails and excel spreadsheets to manage your hiring activities. Is a system of post-it notes and handwritten reminders the most effective way to deal with the workflow, or could you benefit from creating (and sticking to) a hiring process?

The easiest way to create a process is to break the whole thing down into steps. By doing this, you are creating a checklist for you to follow from beginning to end. Here is an example of the steps you would find in a typical hiring process:

1) Determine your recruiting target.
Who do you want to see in this job? Think of your ideal candidate.

2) Learn your target’s job search process.
Where would this person go to find new opportunities? What would they search for? Think about these things and incorporate them to make your posting is visible to the right people.

3) Post positions for active candidates.
Once you know where your target is looking, post the positions where people are going to go looking for them.

4) Directly sourcing for “non-active” candidates.
Your ideal candidate might not be actively looking for a job. Figure out where they currently are and how to best approach them about a new position.

5) Screening of applicants and resumes.
The person responsible for this should know exactly what requirements to look for, whether it is being done manually or within an applicant tracking system.

6) Phone interviews.
Develop a standard set of questions to help you better determine each candidate’s experience level and fit beyond what is on their resume.

7) In-person interviews.
The goal of the interview is to help you rank the candidates and also to sell the candidates on the position.

8)Reference checking.
This step is essentially just validating the information you’ve already collected about each candidate.

9) Offer.
Putting together an offer that meets the needs of both the company and the candidate.

The goal of the hiring process is to make sure you have all the information you need to hire the best candidate for the job. Can you continue to get by with piles of paper and spreadsheets, or would you be better off having a system where you can have access to all your information in one place where you can also manage the process? Tell us how your hiring system process works. Feel free to reach me at

Reena dot Gupta at avankia dot com

Recruiters today recruit with multiple intentions. The first one is to fill positions with any available candidates and thereby close their targets. However the real challenge comes for them when it comes to source, recruit and hire Achievers. They are the tough kind and have a lot of expectations which have to be catered to before joining a company’s talent bar.

Hiring achievers is a challenge for any recruiter as they are very hard to find. They Have more counteroffers and have a higher expectational demand before joining. However to break the Achiever recruiting pattern, there are a few strategies which are to be borne in mind by the recruiter himself, if he is to placate him in a new position.

The first step that goes is to understand the Classic Achiever Pattern and differentiate his skill set pattern, and how he reacts to situations which are suddenly given before him to comprehend.

Based upon the circumstances, the achiever can either go the extra mile or get it resolved or either makes excuses and backs out.

As a result of the above, the Achiever tends to get promoted more quickly, gets formal recognition, and typically earns more in comparison to the 75 percent not in the top cadre.

Interestingly, in the first 5-10 years of their careers, Achievers tend to have less practical experience in work than their peers, due to their rapid promotions. So if a company screens on years of experience, they’ll tend to eliminate many of the high-potential candidates from consideration before they even have a chance to evaluate them.

From an assessment standpoint, it’s pretty easy to recognize the Achiever pattern, if you don’t first get impressed by the candidate’s first impression and presentational skills. I suggest that during the first phase of the interview. Try to spend at least 20-30 minutes on the work-history review as you go through the person’s resume, look for evidence of his Achiever pattern which consists of things like

• Rapid promotions or assigned to bigger projects at quality organizations.
• Higher compensation, including extra bonuses and bigger raises.
• Assigned leadership positions for a variety of projects consisting of multi-functional groups.
• Formal recognition for exceptional performance, including awards, honors, and letters of re-commendation.
• Technical recognition including patents, white papers, presentations, and industry acknowledgments.
• Strong academic background, academic awards, and strong institutions.
• Mentoring skills.
• Subject matter expert in his area.
• Displays a pattern of self-development, especially during gaps in his employment.

Identifying Achievers is actually far easier than finding and recruiting them. The key idea to remember here is that Achievers don’t look for new jobs or accept one the same way as everyone else. Keeping this objective in Mind, make sure that the next recruitment you plan to do is a combinational mix of an achiever and a non achiever for an organization to achieve.

The Encore Fellowships Network launches EFMatch, an online recruiting system Powered by TargetRecruit. http://ping.fm/BFwnJ

Recruiting as people say is an art than a job. Many recruiters still underperform due to improper ineptitude errors. This not only causes improbable mistakes in the recruiting process, but also maximizes the Organizations hiring metric capability.

Hence to succeed in Recruiting, Any organization should make sure that they have a Sourcing Checklist ready. This not only helps them source top talent easily, but also handle complex recruiting procedures.

Using a checklist in recruitment search, results in great success. The reason being the recruiter works upon the competency skill map ratio as per the checklist, which can help the organization to get top-notch successful placement ratio.

Top Strategies to be included in a Successful recruiting Checklist:-

1. Use Key metric tools to stay on top of all recruiting assignments and make sure that you keep the ATS (Applicant tracking system) up-to-date.
2. Define top performance indicators, by asking the hiring team to define their Work Success quotient, the person needs to handle.
3. Create an Employee Value proposition statement as to why would an employee want this job.
4. Prepare a channelized sourcing channel plan, which covers all channels of recruiting from social media, Blog sites, Career sites, groups, and even references. This helps in getting the best talent from multiple sources.
5. From this build your recruiting pipeline of prospects for the future as well as for the current projects.
6. Track the Objective metric of the Candidate as to the Hiring Objective of the department, and only when they match go ahead with the hiring process.
7. If you feel the candidate is potential enough recruit, negotiate, and close the offer.

Talent retention and acquisition is increasingly becoming popular in organizations. Companies to ensure that the best talent acquisition happens insist on using employee referral programme to poach the best talent available. However many internal employees are of just one perception, does it always really work.

However the trend happening in companies is that employee referrals are preferred for only experienced roles and hire on an average ten top potential referrals for every hundred interviewed for multiple reasons. So we can infer that referral hiring is an average medium to bring in top quality talent, as compared to job board search and social recruiting via the ATS (Applicant tracking), which continue to be the hot pick.

We have a perception that external hiring always holds good, as they produce good results in terms of hiring, but recruitment analysts opine that social media hires or job board recruiting is better when it comes to an efficient external hiring policy. It all comes down to not just hiring through a referral programme, but making sure that the “Referral programme” becomes a “Best Practice” and should focus on making the referral program more visible among remote positions.

Employee referral in certain situations breeds ego – slates between present employees and the new employees, as they presume that project-management roles will be taken over by the new hires. Hence Organizations are a bit apprehensive when it comes to Employee- referral programme.

Lastly but not the least, If you want a successful employee referral program, accept responsibility for managing the performance of the program. Never try to act in influencing factors and do what works best as the organizational climate varies from company to company. It has also been proved that a well-managed employee referral program can accomplish higher employee productivity and greater organizational profits. It’s all about implementing it and accomplishing it successfully.

Recruiting is growing at a tremendous pace. What job board and referral search activity was before is now being aggressively replaced by Social Media Recruitment. Industry Experts predict that the next vertical to be aggressively placated in recruiting in the coming days is Mobile Recruiting.

Recruitment experts say that The Mobile is becoming an important tool in recruitment with each passing day. With users becoming tech-savvy at an increasing pace, Recruiting Organizations are trying to segment and leverage the usage of mobile space as a niche recruitment channel. However a mobile recruitment strategy should outline the following objectives if it’s to outlive its predecessors.

1. Use Promotional messages as a Premium Recruiting Channel: – SMS or short messaging service, WAP, Server messages should be used as a recruiting channel by recruiters to attract talent. The reason being Users are more accessible in their mobile than online networks.
2. Use Mobile as a Candidate Sourcing Channel: – With GPRS, Internet as an open source tools on the Mobile. Recruiters can now provide real-time job updates and thereby source qualified candidates into their CRM. This helps them to grow their recruitment database and thereby close more candidates as compared to other channels. Phone applications enabled in 3-G phones are the best tool for a successful mobile recruitment strategy.
3. Enable RSS updates in your Mobile for Live Job updates: – Recruiters can go a step ahead to enable RSS (Syndication updates of New Job openings) to attract top quality candidates via mobile. The reason being Phones are becoming more impressive in the browsers to view web pages and receive spontaneous updates.

Mobile Recruiting is a must to include in your recruiting strategy as the future of recruiting is going mobile. With Social media supporting Mobile, We can say that the future of recruiting is going to witness a dramatic change in terms of recruiting efforts.