Using Recruitment Systems to Improve Your Hiring Process
Leverage recruitment systems to move partial applicants through your hiring funnel.
The latest jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an uptick of hiring. While that’s a positive step forward for the U.S. economy, the country is still facing labor shortages. Companies across industries are looking for ways to optimize hiring and solve gaps in scheduling related to employee shortages, including outpacing inflation with wages to attract candidates. Recruitment systems can help optimize your hiring process – and all applications.
What is a partial applicant?
In TEAM’s recruitment system, Kwantek, we classify partial applicants, or prospects, as an individual who has given us some information, but hasn’t completed a full application. At minimum, this includes first name, last name, phone and email.
Traditional recruiting practices (especially those bogged down beneath manual processes to collect, sort and store information) may stop considering these individuals as candidates for employment. That could be a big misstep, especially in a competitive (for employers) hiring environment. In such a competitive environment, speed is a huge factor in converting a potential job prospect to an applicant. Prospects are a pool of candidates who could be converted to applicants quickly. You can’t waste time dragging on the application process — or that candidate is already lost.
Don’t let an entire pool of potential candidates go by the wayside.
It’s easy to let partial applications (or less) go by the wayside, but by doing so, you could be leaving an entire pool of potential candidates out of your hiring funnel.
The fact of the matter is individuals are called away from a job application for a variety of reasons. Usually, it has nothing to do with their qualifications or ability to perform the required tasks of the job opening well. With recruitment system software, you can leverage what information you do collect to push those candidates forward through your hiring process, even without a completed application.
“We hire from our prospect pool enough that we didn’t want to lose any data visibility over those candidates. We needed…to accommodate hiring a prospect, instead of having to revert to manual processes.” – Allison Richars, ABBCO Human Resource and Safety Manager.
It’s also important to note that partial completion of an application isn’t the only way someone could be classified as a prospect. The most common way is actually when an applicant has applied through a job board like Indeed, Zip Recruiter or Joblink Quick Apply. It’s common to see individuals drop off the application for reasons like:
- Too many questions in the application process
- Lack of clarity in the application questions
- The candidate not having a resume handy
- The candidate not wanting to manually enter their experience
To shorten the process and make it more appealing to a potential applicant, make sure you’re only asking questions that are important and relevant to the criteria you need to hire.
Read ABBCO’s case study optimizing digital end-to-end hiring practices. (link via graphic?)
Keep engaging prospective candidates in a tight labor market.
As a leader in the applicant tracking system space, we know that even those who have implemented technology in their recruiting and hiring practices don’t always pursue prospect candidates. As we mentioned in this blog (for cleaning contractors) and this blog (for security), we discussed how a concentrated effort should be placed on the first half of the recruitment funnel – awareness, consideration and interest.
How, may you ask?
Easy. Turn back to your recruitment system software, and have it do the work for you.
In Kwantek, we make this step easy. For partial applicants, you can configure a reminder email to send to those who have stopped the application process mid-way. If that individual stopped applying, say, because they ran out of time on their meal break to complete the application, you can include a one-click easy apply link within that email to lessen the investment they have to put into the application phase. By generating partial applicants from even the most minimal information, you’re building your network of potential hires. Kwantek’s joblink feature also captures partial information jobseekers provide and create them as partial applicants in the system. Meaning, those applicants won’t get lost in the system and your recruiters can work with them to submit a full application and be considered for hire.
Looking for related content?
Stop your job listings from being removed on Indeed
Are you Seeing Fewer Indeed Applicants?
Wage Growth vs. Inflation (and Recruitment Systems)