Recruitment technology: what is it? By this term, we indicate a group of tools and platforms that can help recruiters and HR specialists in their pursuit of better results.

In this article, we will list some of the best tools and platforms on the market. Those that will shape the future of Talent Acquisition.

But first, let us explain why these instruments will be more and more important to your career.

If you work in TA, you may be familiar with names like Olivia Bland or Lisa Smith, both of whom went viral for sharing their awful Candidate Experiences online. Recruitment technology has multiplied candidates’ voices.Candidates are no longer powerless, waiting to hear if you chose them for the role. The internet arms them with information and the opportunity to bring transparency to the recruitment process. 

To learn more about Candidate Experience and how to perfect it, we recommend you to read our Ultimate Guide to Candidate Experience Feedback.

Just as it presents threats, the digital world can also aid Talent Acquisition (TA). And savvy employers know it. The market is getting extremely competitive. A whole new host of recruitment tech tools help companies compete for the best candidates in the market. The tech sector is the epitome of this problem. Imagine: there are something like five job openings for each available software developer.

There’s also an increasing drive towards automation in HR. This process offers the chance to save considerable amounts of time and resources. Talent Acquisition Directors are able to focus on more value-adding activities. The vast majority of the recruitment tech tools across the TA landscape are geared towards this. The increasing sophistication of AI and machine learning means we’re still scratching the surface, and new tools are springing up all over the place. 

The whole process of TA is becoming publicly visible. Social media, including specialist sites like Glassdoor, allow for interviews and other assessment processes to become almost reality-TV fodder. Interviewers are in the spotlight like never before.HR managers are rapidly investing in both the quality of their Candidate Experience as well as their team’s overall tech stack and efficiency. This is another area where new digital tools and platforms are offering potential.

The previous elements have combined to create an incredibly complex TA landscape. We will list the nine main types of recruitment tech tools and software every Talent Acquisition Director should have on their radar below.

Applicant Tracking Systems

TA isn’t something that only kicks in when you have a vacancy. Smart recruiters now understand. A plethora of recruitment tech platforms now allows HR executives to use a far more strategic approach to attracting the best people.

Sophisticated Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) tools have emerged in recent years, and the vast majority of TA teams make extensive use of these platforms They help organizations streamline and automate their recruitment marketing activities. This saves teams huge amounts of time and resources previously spent on admin. The benefit is that TA teams can now focus their time on the ‘human’ jobs requiring judgment.

The best Applicant Tracking Systems are sufficiently flexible and intuitive that they can form a solid basis for your overall HR tech stack. Good options include Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Lever, Workable, Recruitee, and Bullhorn. Workday and iCIMS are particularly well suited for Enterprise teams, who often deal with thousands or even tens of thousands of candidates at a time.

Candidate Relationship Marketing Platforms

Then we have Candidate Relationship Marketing (CRM) platforms for recruiters.. They post job listings on the most relevant sites or social media platforms. They also track ad views, clicks, received applications, and generally help you foster a larger talent pool of primed and interested candidates.. Good examples are Gem, Avature, Beamery, Jobvite, Yello, and TalentLyft, all of which specialize in building long-term relationships well before a specific role might exist. This allows recruiters to keep a watching brief on candidates that might be a good match in a few years.

There is also Guide and Meet & Engage, both of which focus on nurturing a company’s relationship with existing candidates while they’re in the funnel, rather than priming them beforehand. 

ATS Solutions with CRM Modules

There is an alternative to using dedicated CRM platforms. In recent times, many ATS’s have begun to offer their own in-house CRM solutions, offering native integration with their software. Examples include SmartRecruiters’ SmartCRM, Greenhouse’s Greenhouse CRM, iCIMS’ Talent Cloud. There is also Lever’s LeverTRM, which is not a separate module, but rather an element of their core product. 

Candidate Sourcing Software

HR has moved on from the days when you posted a job ad and hoped the right candidate would spot it. Competition for the best candidates means teams are employing a range of recruitment tech tools. The latter helps them proactively search and analyze a potential employee’s suitability for a role.

Digital tools can search thousands of databases, and millions of candidate profiles. The purpose is to find the right person and get in touch with them. The best candidate may well be someone who isn’t necessarily looking to switch jobs. But they could spot your opportunity on their LinkedIn feed and change their minds. Recruiters have picked up on this, and, on average, reference 7.8 different social media sites to source candidates. 

But there are also dedicated sourcing platforms that can help TA teams quickly locate qualified candidates. Tools like Woo, HireEZ, Eightfold.ai, SeekOut, or Visage can help recruiters automate outbound sourcing and shortlisting candidates. 

There is also Terminal, which specializes in building a database of developers and software engineers, helping recruiters fill roles that are notoriously difficult to find qualified candidates for. 

Candidate Screening Software

If you’ve faced that pile of CVs you know how it feels. Finding the perfect candidate in a sea of applicants is time-consuming and difficult. Digital tools nowadays take over the more rational part of the screening process. 

Solutions like Talogy, Trakstar Hire, or Ceridian leverage AI to remove repetitive administrative work from the screening process, aiming to work out candidates’ suitability for a particular role. 

Interview Software

A new generation of platforms and communication media are transforming interviews. These offer increased efficiency and better evaluation.

Scheduling interviews is a time consuming process, and doing this manually is not tenable for most teams. Using a general scheduling solution like Calendly is a good option, as is using a more advanced interview scheduling solution like GoodTime or Paradox.

Rather than meeting each candidate face to face, companies could access VidCruiter, Spark Hire, or HireVue. Platforms like these set up asynchronized, one-sided video interviews. The potential employees can record their answers to interview questions. This gives them the flexibility and freedom to complete this at a time and place of their choice.

Pre-recorded video interviewing also saves recruiters a lot of time. This allows them to see many more candidates than they’d otherwise be able to.

There’s also Sapia.ai, which uses an AI-powered virtual recruiter to rapidly screen, interview and assess candidates, and is particularly useful for volume hiring. It supports both chat and video interviews, and can be used to fill a wide variety of positions without compromising on Candidate Experience.

Reference Checking Software

Reference-checking is a fundamental yet tedious part of the recruitment process. Luckily, it is now ripe for automating.

Companies including Zinc, Xref and Crosschq contact referees by email. They direct them to a website to anonymously answer questions about the candidate’s skills level and conduct. These answers are then cross-checked to give you a holistic view of how the referees found the candidate, and is especially useful when a candidate has a large number of references. 

Candidate Experience Analytics Platforms

As detailed at the start of this paper, it is now easy for disgruntled candidates to share details of their recruitment process online. This presents a real danger to the company’s brand. It makes it much harder to recruit in the future and could also impact sales.

Recent years have seen TA professionals investing in measuring their Candidates Experience. Candidate Experience covers every single facet of the process, from the second that a candidate interacts with your company or views a listing. Tracking it and understanding it provides multiple benefits to your operations, branding, and bottom line. 

Tech help has also emerged in the form of Candidate Experience analytics solutions. Many companies use general survey solutions like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to get an understanding of how candidates feel. Companies can unveil their mistakes, and act upon it before they create a public problem. 

However, the analytics provided by these solutions can be limited. Using a dedicated solution, like Starred, takes the measurement of Candidate Experience to the next level. It also features Hiring Team Experience, Quality of Hire, and dedicated DEI metrics measurement to enable hiring teams to get an understanding of how recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates all felt about their experiences with the process.   

Candidate Assessment Software

Recruiters use aptitude testing to derive more dynamic information on candidates than they say about themselves, and it is one of the simpler TA tasks to automate. Testportal, Tazio, and Toggl Hire offer a range of different types of tests for recruiters to send their candidates. TestCandidates is particularly useful to pre-screen candidates before they apply.  Recruiters who are dealing with heavily technical roles would benefit from taking a look at HackerRank, Codility, TestGorilla, and CodeSignal. 

Equalture has an interesting twist on the testing format. They created games that also test candidates on a variety of metrics. This makes the assessment process much more engaging.

Harver also offers tests as part of their suite .Harver’s tests range from language and personality to cultural fit and situational judgment.

Software for Diverse and Inclusive Hiring

The economic case for a diverse workforce is now well-acknowledged, if not universally acted-upon. Companies feel the scrutiny from employees, customers, and other stakeholders more and more. For this reason, they’ve sought ways to erase unconscious bias from recruitment practices.

Many recruitment technology tools employing AI are currently helping anonymizing applications as a basic. Without names, ages or pictures, recruiters can only judge on a candidate’s skills, knowledge, and experience.

Gap Jumpers and Beapplied offer the facility to analyze companies’ recruitment practices. The purpose is to work out where the particular biases happen. One of the easiest targets is often to take a fresh look at the language used in job ads. Is it only appealing to one gender?

Onboarding Software

Research from Bright Network found 88% of graduates would reject an offer they have already accepted for a better one.

So it’s not surprising that recruiters now invest significant resources into ensuring they won’t get ghosted. Recruitment technology  like Appical help companies to keep candidates engaged during the ‘pre-boarding’ phase. They do so by connecting them with current employees. This gives them an insight into how it feels to work at the company. 

The ‘on-boarding’ phase is the process by which the new employee is actively introduced to their role. Digital platforms like Eloomi, Enboarder, Kallidus, Coassemble, Innform, and Leapsome can now be a great help in planning training. They also manage introductions to key colleagues and tech support, and can help with upskilling existing employees.

These platforms can also manage communications with the new employee and beyond. They aid managers to keep eliciting and responding to feedback from them. This is where tech can really help improve relationships and raise retention rates.

Recruitment Technology: Looking ahead

It’s clear that no recruiter with a reasonable budget for recruitment technology now needs to be doing any of the admin.

The past few years have yielded plenty of useful recruitment tech tools for automating the more routine TA tasks. The many that use complex AI tech also help with decision-making.

Many of the tools and solutions I outlined in this article have been trending towards covering one or more of the areas they were mentioned in. Oftentimes, as they grow, HR software tools will branch out to cover aspects that are adjacent to their core product. This trend will likely continue, and software solutions will become increasingly complex. 

Move forward a few years and the digital possibilities will multiply. The opportunities will benefit both recruiter and candidate. Let’s consider the case in which a candidate applied to multiple positions. AI could scan a CV, compare it to the available positions and suggest an even more suitable role. These new insights delivered from AI and Machine Learning will also change the nature of TA. It’s possible they’ll make the job much more strategic in its improvements to candidate experience.

It won’t all be plain sailing. The more information about candidates that is available online and accessed by TA teams raises the chances of overstepping the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations. Keeping an eye on how this regulation is applied and altered will be a key task for recruiters and their tech partners.

Finally, as TA teams add more and more tools to their armory, the need to integrate them into one system will only grow. This will let recruiters select a few different systems to use together, and easy integration will be increasingly prioritized. Building a successful tech stack will mean carefully balancing useability and efficiency, since many dedicated tools will offer superior results to all-inclusive suites, but often at the cost of integration.