Recruiters are instrumental to business recovery – but they face a huge challenge. Here’s how to empower them to overcome it.
According to the World Economic Forum, UK unemployment is forecasted to hit 9% by the end of lockdown. In the US, 15%. COVID-19 may cost the equivalent of 305 million full-time jobs globally.
To state the obvious – that’s a lot of people who’ll be looking for jobs soon.
That’s certainly been the case in industries that’ve had to scale-up recruitment, like retail. We handled a 3,900% increase in applications to retail clients in two days recently, and healthcare’s similarly affected.
As industries start to reset, high application volumes will likely be the norm across the board.
And some locations could be hit especially hard. The most recent figures from the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) say applications per vacancy have increased to over 50 in eleven areas of England – compared to around four per vacancy before coronavirus.
That’s a huge challenge. Recruitment teams – often having had to make redundancies themselves – are overrun. Processes are clogged. It’s chaos.
And meanwhile, companies worldwide desperately need new skills to evolve and thrive in this post-COVID world. Or risk going under.
In that context, recruitment are the guardians of business agility – which makes them instrumental to business recovery. Empowering your recruiters to optimise, streamline and accelerate the flow of talent into your business is mission-critical.
Help’s at hand.
How Tribepad Recruitment Software Helps Recruiters Do More with Less
1– Streamlined end-to-end recruitment process
As all recruiters know, lots of recruitment tasks are repetitive, formulaic and manual. That means a) they’re deadly dull and b) they’re not the most efficient use of recruiters’ time. And being more efficient is crucial when you’re dealing with high application volumes.
Tribepad is designed to codify and automate the stuff that can be codified and automated, so your recruiters can get more done in less time.
Here’s how:
- Interview and Candidate Workflows
We configure Interview and Candidate Workflows for as many different roles as you need. Even across multiple brands or sub-divisions in your organisation.
So you could define a three-stage application journey for healthcare administrators but five-stage for midwifes. Or a three-stage interview journey for administrators in hospitals but four-stage for administrators in Head Office. So when a recruiter creates a role, a consistent application and interview process is automatically defined without no time-consuming, repetitive or error-prone manual input.
- Automated Comms
There are hundreds of recurring touchpoints where recruiters need to message candidates, colleagues, team leaders or hiring managers. Like, sending rejection emails or interview requests. Or asking hiring managers to review a shortlist.
With Tribepad, all those moments can be automated with extreme flexibility. And our ATS comes with about 250 email templates for you to customise, so you don’t even need to write them from scratch (although you can!). It means you get a more consistent, reliable process in a fraction of the time.This alone can save your team hours per week.
- Automated Onboarding
Our Onboarding module adds onto our ATS, so the applicant-to-employee journey is completely seamless, consistent and automatic.
Create onboarding workflows that automate the boring bits – like collecting references and getting contracts signed – and prep new hires to thrive – like delivering training, alerting HR to set-up their desk, asking IT to prepare a laptop, and sending a CEO welcome message. So recruiters’ work pays off with a productive, long-term hire.
- Deep reporting functionality
Tribepad comes with more than 60 standardised reports and unlimited customisation options. This robust reporting functionality gives comprehensive visibility over your end-to-end recruitment process, so you can spot your process sticking points and take targeted action to unstick them.
Read more: Data is Dull. Knowledge is Power.
Like… you could see time-to-hire is 45% higher for construction workers for one site and investigate further. Maybe there’s no public transport or on-site parking and the nearest car park is extortionate, for example, and you decide to offer parking as a perk to make the role more attractive.
- User Types and Hierarchy
User Types mean you can set permissions for different people who use Tribepad, like resourcers, recruiters and team leaders. Like, maybe resourcers can’t create new jobs without authorisation but team leaders can.
Then Hierarchy’s an optional add-on that defines who can see what, based on your org chart. So you could define that regional teams only see recruitment for sites they recruit for, the South-East manager sees all South-Eastern sites and your Head of TA sees everything, for example.
So you keep control over your recruitment function, and recruiters don’t waste time with info that’s not relevant to them.
2 – Faster job creation
When you’re handling high application volumes, writing and posting jobs can waste hours. Plus complex authorisation processes are crucial to keep control over your recruitment function but often cause more delays. Especially when everyone’s juggling more plates than usual.
We have loads of features to make creating and posting jobs faster. Like…
- Job Templates
You can create an unlimited number of Job Templates with Tribepad. That’s a huge time-saver if you recruit for the same or similar roles.
Like, say you recruit regularly for healthcare assistants, healthcare administrators, nurses and occupational therapists. With Job Templates, you could create those roles with a couple of clicks.
- Multiple Location Jobs
When you’re posting a role with Tribepad, you can set the location as ‘flexible’, so you can recruit for multiple locations without needing to create, populate or post multiple jobs.
So say you’re recruiting for twenty healthcare assistants in London. With Tribepad, you only need to create one job for all twenty, which saves heaps of time, and also saves you using extra advertising slots up with your chosen boards. Or say you’re recruiting for construction workers across four sites. You could set the location as ‘flexible’ then ask applicants during the application process which site they’re applying for.
- Job Board Integrations
Tribepad integrates with the world’s biggest search engine (Google for Jobs), the world’s biggest social media network (Facebook Job Search) and the biggest job board (Indeed). That means jobs you create within Tribepad can automatically populate to those three places from one dashboard.
Then we also integrate with third party aggregators – Vacancy Poster and Broadbean – so you can post to niche job boards for different parts of your business within Tribepad too. So legal admin recruiters could post to Legal Secretary Jobs, for example, but recruiters for counsel could post to TotallyLegal.
Read more: How law firms can use technology to transform recruitment
- Jobs Authorisation
Flexible Jobs Authorisation maintains control over your recruitment without process delays.
Either auto-populate according to your hierarchy (with multiple authorisation levels if you need them) or get recruiters to add an authoriser themselves; then the system sends an automatic email to whoever’s relevant. Set authorisation so all recruiters have to comply, some recruiters have to comply, or no recruiters need authorisation at all.
3 – Genuinely useful candidate database
A powerful candidate database makes for a powerful recruitment team. But if you’re recruiting at volume, you can easily lose control over your candidate data. And then it’s barely useful.
Maybe your current database is a wasteland because your recruiters see using it as a chore, for example. A mess of strange parsing, duplicate entries and empty descriptions. Or maybe your decentralised recruitment team all use different systems (or worse, spreadsheets) so they’re working in inefficient silos.
The backbone of Tribepad is a super powerful candidate database – called Talent Search – that genuinely makes your recruiters’ lives easier. And saves you money on ad and agency spend.
“We saw a 40% drop in agency costs almost immediately”
Strategic Talent Acquisition Partner, Sodexo
- Simple Migration
However brilliant a new database might be, we know there’s never time for a data migration headache. Especially if your team’s already flat-out.
We make switching to Tribepad easy, with a proven process for simple, smooth data migration. Find out more here – or grab us for a 15-minute call to chat through the process.
- Tags
Tags are customisable labels recruiters apply to applicants when they enter your database, to make candidates easily searchable. Like, you could create a talent pool of #Leeds #SiteManagers with #EngineeringDegrees and #Demolition experience. So recruiters can find relevant candidates faster. And have to trawl through endless applications less.
Sodexo save thousands each month thanks to Talent Pooling features like Tags.
- Suggested Candidates
You might have many thousands of applicants on your database; filtering out the most relevant can be a nightmare. Suggested Candidates helps by automatically suggesting best-fit candidates from your entire database based on your role parameters. So recruiters can build a shortlist faster, often without ads or agencies.
- Multi-branded ATS with unified database
Tribepad’s a multi-branded ATS built on one unified database, so you can support multiple brands (with their own completely customisable processes, jobs, branding, etc) while leveraging the benefit of being big.
It’s a force-multiplier because it means every recruiter benefits from every other recruiter’s work.
4 – Rigorous automated pre-screening processes
When you’re handling high application volume, screening and shortlisting them is a time-consuming nightmare. Especially if you struggle with application quality.
Tribepad accelerates the process to practically light speed, in various ways:
- Killer questions
These are questions you set at the start of the application journey that rule out anyone who’s definitely unsuitable. Yes/no questions like ‘Do you have Right to Work in the UK?’, ‘Do you hold a valid CPCS Card?’; ‘Are you a qualified nurse?
So candidates don’t waste time completing a pointless application and recruiters don’t waste time reviewing them. That’s a better experience for everyone.
- Pre-screening Questionnaires
Create comprehensive pre-screening questionnaires with whatever questions you want (or we also integrate with third-party skills testing providers). Assign scores, then Tribepad automatically scores applicants and ranks them – so your recruiters can review the best, first. You could successfully place a role without reviewing 80%-odd of applications.
- Automatic Shortlisting and Rejection
As well as scoring and ranking, Tribepad can also take further pre-defined actions based on pre-screening scores. Like automatically shortlisting applicants who scored above, say, 25. Or automatically rejecting candidates who scored below, say, 8.
So recruiters focus their energies where it’s most likely to count. And so the best candidates are fast-tracked, so you’re more likely to make a successful hire.
- Automated background, criminal record and financial checks
We integrate with third-party checking companies, so you can add checks into any stage of your process as an automated step. Or send a check manually. Whatever suits, to cut delays.
5 – Better candidate and recruiter interview experience
Recruiters who handle volume typically spend most of their working lives chasing candidates for interviews or asking the same questions 300-times over. It’s not efficient, and it’s no fun.
And tired, disengaged, frustrated recruiters aren’t likely to give the best impression of your business. And they mightn’t stick around too long either, which has a big cost attached.
- Self-Booked Interviews
Self-Booked Interviews mean your recruiters and hiring managers can pre-set availability, so candidates can book straight in for interviews on a first-come, first-served basis. 48% of recruiters say hiring managers are the biggest obstacle to a fast, smooth process. Self-Booked Interviews stop bottlenecks before they start.
You can define group slots too, which makes scheduling assessment days easy. And if candidates are slow to book, they get an automated reminder; it’s not on your recruiters’ load.
- Video Interviewing
Our customers say their end-to-end interview process takes up to 90% less time thanks to Tribepad Video Interviewing.
Candidates love it because they can interview whenever and wherever suits them. And in whatever language suits them, with Smart Translations. Recruiters love it because it’s a way more efficient use of their time.
And right now, when diversity’s rightfully the word on everyone’s lips, Video Interviewing introduces consistency into your processes to make bias less likely.
- Candidate Interview Summaries
Tribepad quickly gives you microscopic detail or the bigger picture, depending what you want to zoom into. So recruiters could watch candidate interviews, score them and add feedback, but team leaders could see an overview of summarised feedback and scores, for example.
That’s ideal if you’re recruiting at volume, because you can get a quick overview in one fell swoop.
Tribepad provide award-winning recruitment software that helps businesses hire the best talent, fast. We’d love to show you under the bonnet. Book a demo here.
I’m interested in managing soaring application volumes
