If you’re wondering how recruiting companies can seem to find candidates when you can’t, there is a secret to their work. The secret is recruitment CRM software. Recruiting software for staffing companies enables these firms to automate critical but tedious tasks while helping organize the thousands of candidate profiles in their database.
We started to see recruitment software solutions come to market in the 1990s. Over the decades, these platforms have improved their user interface and leveraged clever artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to make these
tools more efficient. Today, recruiting software for staffing companies serves as the backbone of the entire business.
Recruitment CRM software touches every part of the staffing process, including:
- Sourcing by promoting job ads and conducting candidate searches.
- Applicant tracking that conducts keyword searches of resumes for faster screening and interviewing.
- Analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) encompassing the application and recruiting process.
- Pre-hire assessments and background checks.
- Offer letter generation, secure signing, and storage.
- Onboarding, training, and orientation.
This article will help you understand exactly why staffing agencies depend so heavily on recruitment CRM software to give them a competitive edge that reduces your time-to-hire. If you’re looking at seasonal hiring or recruiting in the New Year, this blog will help.
What is Seasonal Hiring?
Let’s lay a baseline for what we consider seasonal hiring. Considering this hiring process, you may think seasonal hiring is only for the Christmas season. That makes sense because there are expected to be around 680,000 jobs added in November and December 2022. Retailers are on a big seasonal hiring push but also eCommerce companies fill their warehouses with additional temporary helpers during this time.
But remember, we have four seasons, so seasonal hiring could be tied to summer landscaping companies who need workers or winter snowplow drivers. The tourism industry has a peak hiring season, and there’s always a need for teachers in September. The point is that seasonal hiring is more about hiring temporary help to fill a need and less about the time of year when it occurs. Companies may require seasonal help because sales and production ramp up during certain times of the year.
Staffing agencies are an essential part of the seasonal hiring push. These recruiting firms start their efforts well before the seasonal push starts. Key to their efforts, however, is the recruitment CRM software that powers their business.
What is Recruiting Software for Staffing Companies?
Recruiting software solutions platforms are the bread and butter of staffing firms for finding, managing, and organizing thousands of job candidates through the hiring lifecycle. Before this software, paper resumes and manual processes led to lots of human error and inconsistencies in our approaches to contacting job candidates. Today, this type of innovative, intelligent software manages and tracks every interaction between a recruiter and a candidate, whether it’s a text, on social media, by phone, email—or any other communication.
Recruiting software for staffing companies combines many of the standard features you use in digital products daily. These tools combine the best features of customer relationship management, allowing recruiters to automate interactions with candidates to improve communication. They’re perfect for helping agencies and employers meet compliance rules about storing candidate data. Some of the benefits of these tools include the following:
- Automates mundane tasks.
- Helps build qualified talent pools.
- Advertises and fills job orders quickly.
- Improves communication between the hiring team and candidate.
- Improves hiring decision-making.
- Stores candidate data in one place.
- Systematizes candidate communications.
- Increases productivity of the hiring team.
- Speeds up the hiring process.
- Delivers analytics and reporting on KPIs.
Recruiting software for staffing companies is the one tool that most of these professionals say they simply can’t live without. But how does recruitment CRM software impact the seasonal hiring process?
How Recruiting Software Can Solve Seasonal Hiring Challenges
Seasonal hiring has big challenges. In this market, there aren’t enough candidates to go around, so recruiters must work quickly to find qualified candidates and get them hired. It’s a lot of work with many moving parts, but recruitment CRM software can help with these challenges.
Four perfect examples of how recruiting software for staffing companies can help improve the seasonal hiring process include:
- Source qualified candidates more quickly.
- Improves candidate communication.
- Increases schedule efficiencies.
- Organizes a high volume of job candidates.
1. Identify Qualified Candidates Faster with Resume Parsing
Perhaps one of the most challenging parts of recruiting is reviewing resumes. It’s a tedious job that can take hours. As a result, most recruiters spend just a few minutes reviewing resumes. This could end in the recruiter skipping a candidate that, on the surface, doesn’t look like a fit.
Anytime you conduct tasks manually, human error is a factor. Add to that the tediousness of resume reviewing and it almost certainly guarantees good candidates are missed. Now though, there’s a better way to handle this.
Today’s recruitment CRM software uses resume parsing, an AI-enabled function that helps scan, screen, and shortlist resumes against the job description. This feature eliminates the manual screening processes that have been so time-consuming for recruiters.
Resume parsing features start even before the screening process, however. As recruiters drag or upload a resume into the platform, data from the document is captured and populated into the staffing software. This also eliminates the need to type in candidate contact information by hand, something that inevitably leads to typos and manual errors.
2. Recruitment Software Improves the Candidate Experience
A tight labor market requires a better candidate experience with your brand if you want to attract the best talent. The candidate experience is what sets your business apart from the competition. A good candidate experience will help you land the new employee over companies that can afford to pay more.
Communication is essential to the candidate experience. If candidates don’t hear from you regularly, they are likely to turn to another recruiter. After all, we live in an employment culture where ghosting is a normal part of the hiring process. Timely follow-ups and clear and concise instructions on the next steps in the interview process are key to improving your candidate experience.
How often should you be in contact with the candidate? That answer varies, but if the candidate hasn’t received something from you in two or three days after an interview, they’re likely to go elsewhere.
Recruiting software for staffing companies automates many of these candidate interactions. You can set up emails and texts that go out just after the candidate submits their resume. But you can also automate other steps in the process, such as the background check, interview scheduling, or a simple thank you for taking the time to interview message.
One thing you don’t want to automate, however, is the “ding.” Sending an automated message to a candidate that interviewed is considered rude and doesn’t leave a positive impression of your company. The general rule of thumb is; if the candidate interviewed, but didn’t make the cut, you must call them. Otherwise, from the candidate experience perspective, recruitment automation software can work to your disadvantage.
3. Automated Scheduling Tools Accelerate Hiring Process
Automated scheduling is a kind of computerized miracle. It’s a self-scheduling feature that emails invites to candidates to select from calendar availability. Ask any HR team member, and they’ll tell you it takes a massive amount of time to coordinate calendars and schedule interviews manually. Then recruitment automation software takes over, populating calendars, sending meeting invitations, and more. You can configure the workflows that tell the software to do this on your behalf. It eliminates the back-and-forth emails for scheduling that are so frustrating to candidates and hiring teams.
4. Manage Large Number of Applications with Recruiting Software
More than 50% of talent acquisition professionals say making their way through a high volume of candidate applications is their biggest challenge. But recruitment automation software automatically scores and ranks the resumes in a way that sifts the best matches to the top of the pile. This saves all the time that a recruiter spends manually reading each resume. These tools also allow your hiring teams to rank candidates as they interview them, funneling all that data directly into the candidate record.
Boost Seasonal Recruitment with COATS Staffing Software
A 2021 study showed that most Fortune 500 companies need to start using AI in their recruitment CRM software. Most of them are probably using some of the older CRM platforms to handle their candidate interactions. If this is the case, these companies have already fallen behind.
Recruiting News Network states, “One of AI’s contributions to the recruitment world is effective decision-making through predictive analysis.” Today’s recruitment automation software can crawl the internet to find candidates who seem like a good fit for your job description. This is in addition to analyzing candidate profiles to predict how they’ll fit the job.
Coats Staffing Software is on a mission to change how companies handle recruiting and hiring. Our subscription-based, customizable software helps automate manual processes and improve the candidate experience. Coats recruitment CRM software helps your hiring team work smarter while reducing their time-to-hire.
Isn’t it time you embraced the latest evolution in recruitment automation software? Contact us today to check out a demo of COATS Staffing Software.