Technology is woven into everything we do today and recruitment is no different.
Recruitment tools can help to attract, source, and employ better qualified and high-quality candidates. It relieves pressure on recruiters, saving time and money for businesses.
Understanding the different solutions and deciding on the tools you need for your recruitment needs can be a tricky process. Therefore, understanding how to build a recruitment tech stack will aid you in improving your talent acquisition.
In this guide, we’ll go over what a recruitment tech stack is and the steps to follow when building your own.
What is a Recruitment Technology Stack?
A recruitment technology stack is a combination of tools, applications, and platforms used to find, attract, and hire talent. It assists in improving the recruitment process, enabling you to connect with and hire more qualified candidates.
You can compare it to choosing the materials to construct a building. There are lots of options available. The ones you pick will depend on your requirements. For example, some people will need a small tech stack, like a house, while others will need a skyscraper solution.
Choosing the correct elements will give you solid foundations to outperform your competitors and find the best talent for your business. Picking the wrong elements will bring everything crashing down.
For example, choosing the right phone dialer for your business will boost productivity and generate leads, while the wrong one would do the opposite.
Therefore, understanding what a tech stack is and how to build one for your talent acquisition needs is essential to giving you an edge in the competitive recruitment world.
5 Steps to Create Your Recruiting Technology Stack
1. Identify Your Needs & Challenges
The first step in building a recruitment tech stack is to do a self-assessment of your business needs. Consider the recruitment challenges you face and your specific business requirements. Answer questions like—
- How many applicants need hiring?
- Are you attracting the right applicants?
- What are the downfalls?
- What tools do you currently use?
Look at building a recruitment funnel to identify the steps in your candidate journey. Understanding the issues you face and the pain points of your process will allow you to find effective and targeted solutions. Therefore, it’s essential to know your current process thoroughly.
2. Create a Technology Backbone
A technology backbone forms a base with which you can build out your recruitment tech stack. The typical backbone recruiters use is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
An ATS is a software that assists in managing the tasks of a recruitment process from sourcing to hiring. It automates administrative tasks, for example, faster interview scheduling and job advertising.
One key feature of an ATS is integration with other recruitment solutions, such as candidate sourcing or recruitment marketing tools. It’s vital to build and tailor a recruitment technology stack for your needs.
A quality Applicant Tracking System relieves the pain points of tedious manual work and increases productivity and efficiency through automation.
There are several options available. The one you choose will depend on your needs. However, look for mobile-friendly platforms with embedded analytics that can integrate with other solutions.
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3. Research Available Solutions
Every business has unique recruitment challenges.
Here we’ll go through the various types of tools you should consider to manage the different areas of your recruitment tech stack.
I. Recruitment Marketing Tools
Recruiters use marketing tools for advertising jobs, engaging with candidates, and driving interest in the company.
It’s an integral strategy for small businesses to attract top talent. They usually don’t have the same visibility in the recruitment space as well-known, established companies.
Recruitment marketing tools assist in optimizing employer branding on career sites and help to track and organize candidates. It provides better business visibility and candidate experiences through content marketing and social media engagement.
II. Candidate Sourcing Tools
Finding the right candidates is a vital part of the recruitment process. But, it can be a challenge to find high-quality candidates and engage with them.
While marketing tools can drive visibility, you need to ensure you’re sourcing from the best talent pools for an efficient recruitment process.
Candidate sourcing tools open up new talent pools and enable you to reach out to active and passive candidates. It does this by using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the sourcing process, saving you time and money.
From matching candidates to roles to programmatic advertising, sourcing tools ensure you’re reaching the best candidates and are a cost-effective solution to add to your recruitment stack.
Did you know Recruit CRM has a Sourcing Chrome Extension that lets you source candidates, clients, or companies from various platforms such as— LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Xing, and so on with just a single click? Download now.
III. Candidate Screening Tools
Once you’ve sourced candidates, you need to screen the applications for suitability. Sifting through an endless list of resumes, cover letters, and interviews can be a major bottleneck in your process. It causes you to focus time on candidates unsuitable for the role or your business.
Therefore candidate screening tools have become essential to improve the process. They automate CV and cover letter screening to look for important keywords and skillsets. It’s essential for large organizations where hundreds or thousands of applicants may apply for just a few roles.
Video interviewing tools are another way to improve screening, with lots of options, including using a Zoom alternative. It saves time and reduces the overall workload for recruiters, enabling them to focus on the best candidates out of the pile.
IV. Candidate Assessment Tools
Even if you had a year to sift through applications for a single job opening, you would still have candidates that aren’t the right fit.
By using pre-employment assessments, you can improve hiring quality and better match people to jobs. You can additionally use assessments to see if a candidate has the same values as your organization.
Candidate assessment tools employ techniques such as tests or even games to assess a given candidate’s capabilities. These can be tailored for any job role. Some assessments will be more suited to filtering out the most suitable candidates compared to others.
For example, if you’re lookin
g for someone to manage a communication channel, a communications assessment will be more applicable than a technical assessment.
There are various tests you could employ. These include technical, communication, cognitive, or personality assessments, among others.
V. Onboarding Tools
The first day for any new employee involves ID badges, computer logins, security passes, setting up email accounts, going through a ton of paperwork and business guidelines. While it’s necessary, it can tie up new employees and be a significant pain point when easing new hires into their roles.
Onboarding software provides a smooth experience, giving new employees a warm welcome. It allows you to automate onboarding processes, giving employees a structured and seamless start when joining the company. It’s essential when you’re hiring several applicants at the same time.
4. Ask Necessary Questions & Look for Examples
Before you decide on buying solutions for your tech stack, there are some considerations you need to make. A few questions you should ask yourself include—
- Does it integrate with your existing tools?
- Will it address your issues and requirements?
- Is it in line with your budget?
- Will it require training, and how easy is it to use?
- What are the benefits and downfalls of the solution?
- Will it require maintenance?
- What are the business processes you need to address?
Your tech stack focuses on relieving the current pain points of your recruitment process. But, your needs could change in the future, and transitioning between solutions can be a painful process. When deciding on which solutions to purchase, consider how easy it would be to replace or stop using them completely.
Always check that the solutions for your tech stack integrate well and complement each other. It’s a fundamental step to ensuring you build a successful tech stack for your needs.
One way to ensure your tech stack will work for your needs is to look at examples from similar companies. Consult fellow agency recruiters who have built a tech stack and use their experience to construct your own.
By learning about how other recruiters overcame their challenges, you can better understand the solutions you need to employ, or avoid, to overcome yours.
For example, if you’re deciding between VoIP phone vs landline, talking to someone who has experience of both will help greatly.
Look for forums, review sites, or online case studies to power your research into the solutions that will work best for you.
5. Optimise Your New Tech Stack & Let Technology Do the Heavy Lifting
Once you start using your tech stack, you’ll begin noticing issues or areas of improvement. It could be with how a solution integrates or a missing feature you now realize you need.
It’s a normal part of the process. Experimenting with different solutions is the best way to tailor a tech stack for your talent acquisition needs. Regularly evaluate your recruitment needs, challenges, and tech stack to see where you can make improvements to further enhance your process.
An effective recruitment strategy covers every touchpoint in the candidate journey from awareness to onboarding. Using a recruitment technology stack improves the candidate experience, leading to sourcing and employing high-quality hires for your business.
Using AI, recruiters can automate laborious tasks and better target talent pools for active and passive applicants. Unsuitable candidates can be filtered out efficiently with onboarding tools providing structured and welcoming experiences for new employees.
Your tech stack will depend on your business needs and challenges. For example, you might want to attract more Gen Z employees into your workforce.
By understanding your current process, objectives, and pain points, you can choose solutions to build a tech stack for your specific requirements. Periodically going through this process will enable you to assess your new requirements and issues. It allows you to optimize and improve your tech stack for your talent acquisition needs.
Written by—
Grace Lau – Director of Growth Content, Dialpad
Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform that offers AI for customer service. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content.
