The HR Professional’s Guide to Recruiting Software

What Is Recruiting Software?

Recruiting Software, sometimes referred to as an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), is a tool that enables HR professionals to source more qualified candidates for their talent pipeline. Their basic functions should include:

• Job Post Creation: Simplifies creating job listings.
• Job Post Sharing: Allows job posts to be shared across various platforms. 
• Position Details Hub: Enables candidates to review benefits and other need-to-know info depending on company needs. 
• Collaborative Candidate Review: Enables team collaboration in reviewing candidates.
• Applicant Communication: Centralizes communication with applicants. 
• Qualification Testing: Collects information pertaining to skills and experience.   
• Application Organization: Keeps previous applications to contact candidates if a role reopens or a better opportunity arises. 
• Job Offering/Rejection Tools: Facilitates extending job offers and sending mass communications once a role has been filled. 
• Onboarding: Turns a job offer acceptance into a new hire with one click.

The tools vary depending on the software vendor. Many recruiting platforms focus on managing talent pipelines or streamlining the interview process. These variations and others determine whether a recruiting platform is more of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or if it is a true recruiting solution.

What Is the Difference Between Recruiting Software and an ATS?

The biggest difference between a true recruiting platform and its cousin, the ATS, is if it solves a critical recruiting problem all businesses face:  

Does the platform increase how many qualified individuals apply to posted job listings?  

Recruiting Software does more legwork to increase the volume of qualified candidates than a traditional ATS, which focuses on what happens after applicants enter your pipeline.  

ATSs usually focus on streamlining the process of moving candidates from the initial screening call through interviews, communications, tests, reference checks, and job offers or rejections. While these factors are important for small—to midsized businesses (SMBs), they are more of an organization tool than a solution to hiring woes.  According to CareerBuilder, up to 74% of SMBs feel that they have hired the wrong person for a position. The problem can be broken down to the ultimate, foundational issue of not having enough qualified candidates to choose from. If SMBs have shallow talent pools, then the likelihood that a new hire will be less-than-ideal for a certain role increases exponentially.

However, deepening the talent pool is much more challenging for SMBs, particularly HR Parties of One, which have limited time and resources for recruiting. HR professionals know the difficulties of reaching broader audiences and then funneling applicants into a hiring pipeline. BerniePortal’s recruiting feature enables HR professionals to source the best candidates and enter them into a customized hiring pipeline. This results in hiring more qualified people and onboarding them into your organization quickly and efficiently.

The biggest hurdle to hiring the best person for your team is deepening the talent pool. However, there are other ways a recruiting feature can make recruiting easier, faster, and more effective at improving the bottom line.

Why Do Small to Midsized Businesses Need a Recruitment Platform?

1. Increase Applicant Volume Exponentially: Integrate with job boards to immediately place open roles on the largest websites for people seeking new opportunities. Some platforms, like BerniePortal, also auto-generate a job posting link that hiring managers or HR pros can post anywhere, putting open roles in front of thousands of more people who may be a perfect addition to the company.  
2. Present Cohesive Branding: Host open roles in one organized place, branded to your company’s specifications. Applicants or interested job-seekers can easily associate their next opportunity with your organization.  
3. Identify Qualified Candidates Sooner: Include knock-out questions to ensure your hiring pool contains only qualified candidates. Don’t wait until a screening call or interview to discover someone isn’t a fit, wasting your time and theirs.  
4. Enhance Candidate Experiences: Many candidates cite bloated interview processes as the main reason for their discontent with certain companies. BerniePortal’s recruiting feature removes common roadblocks that normally prevent people from finishing their applications or moving forward.  
5. Gain Candidate Insights: Gain insights into candidate behaviors and preferences, allowing you to tailor your recruitment strategy to attract the right talent. Not all positions pull from the same audience, so a recruiting solution develops more robust hiring pipelines stacked with people curated toward your vacant roles. 
6. Identify Areas of Improvement: Recruiting solutions can provide analytics to help make informed hiring decisions, increasing recruitment efficiency by 30%. Identify the spots where candidates often get stuck to soften any rough edges in the recruiting process. Pull reports to share with hiring managers to improve the process on all levels so you can focus on other high-impact projects. 
7. Improve Compliance and Documentation: Ensure compliance with employment laws and securely store candidate information. Information is never deleted without your permission, and records and documents are retained per federal and local guidelines. Also, a recruiting solution can increase overall compliance in your organization by ensuring each applicant has the correct qualifications needed for security clearance, HIPAA licensing, and more.
8. Onboard Talent Immediately: Once a candidate accepts a job offer, it’s time to onboard them. If your recruiting feature is one part of an all-in-one HRIS, which contains the entire employee lifecycle within one simplified platform, new hires can fill out onboarding documents, read handbooks and Culture Guides, elect benefits, submit payroll information, and more—all before the first day.

Why Do Job Seekers Prefer Companies that Use a Recruiting Solution?

• Simplified Application Forms: Many candidates abandon lengthy or complex applications. A recruiting solution can simplify this process, allowing candidates to apply with just a few clicks, which increases the likelihood of applications. Some recruiting software solutions can use applications to auto-populate employee files, so new hires don’t need to submit information again. And, you can onboard them without guiding them through complicated forms. 
• Mobile-Friendly Applications: With more candidates using mobile devices to search for jobs, mobile functionality ensures your application process is optimized for easy applications, making your vacant positions accessible to a broader audience. 
• Efficient and Timely Communication: Using our recruiting system, applicants and hiring influencers can easily chat about the hiring process, which benefits your organization and interested candidates. Job seekers rank communication as the one thing they desire most from a hiring process, and it goes a long way toward securing future talent and building good relationships with current applicants. 

Are There Any Cons to Using Recruiting Software?

The pros outweigh the cons, but there are some drawbacks to using recruiting software solutions. These cons vary by vendor, so choose wisely.  

Cons:

• Training Requirements: A recruiting platform should be simple enough for anyone to use, but many software solutions become burdensome. They require more maintenance or expertise than an HR Party of One should have to provide.   
• Faulty Integrations: Some recruiting platforms offer integrations with benefits administration systems or payroll solutions as a selling point. However, more often than not, the integration is faulty and results in unhappy employees, non-compliance, and frustrated HR professionals. 
• Keyword Knowledge: Understanding keywords and how various job boards’ algorithms filter jobs is complex. Effectiveness depends on clear job descriptions and titles, but a good solution should have your back with informative articles and instructions on how to format a concise, attractive job description. 

Common Recruiting Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

1. Not Using a Recruiting Solution: Small businesses often do not use recruiting software, missing out on hundreds of applicants, streamlined hiring, and better candidate experiences. 
2. Skipping Job Boards: Failing to post on job boards like Indeed can limit your reach. Indeed attracts over 350 million unique visitors monthly, and BerniePortal’s Indeed integration streamlines this process for you exponentially. BerniePortal also auto-generates job posting links to enable you to post your open roles anywhere on the web so you can more easily and efficiently gather applications.
3. Ignoring the Full Employee Lifecycle: A recruiting solution should be part of the larger solution, an HRIS with onboarding and benefits enrollment to provide a seamless experience. When you find a great hire, getting them up to speed is critical to organizational success. BenriePortal allows you to automatically turn candidates into new hires with one single click, as our all-in-one HRIS transmits applicant data to their new hire profile so they can begin onboarding immediately.

Where to Find Recruiting

• Standalone Solutions: Focus solely on recruitment.

Standalone Solution vs. HRIS:

• All-in-One HRIS: Offers comprehensive HR solutions, including recruitment, onboarding, benefits, payroll, time and attendance, PTO tracking, compliance, performance management, 1094-C/1095-C filling and e-filing, offboarding, and more.

Cost Considerations:

• Flat Fee: Pay a fixed monthly rate.
• Variable Monthly Cost: Pay based on factors like the number of job listings or employees.

Costs can range from $27 to over $250 per month. Some HRIS platforms, like BerniePortal, offer integrated ATS solutions that provide better value.