CATS Applicant Tracking System

For recruiting, you always want to make sure you’re attracting and retaining a certain number of candidates ready to place. In the meantime, you also want to make sure that this talent is the best of the best and will make a great fit for a client.

The best kind of recruitment allows for the most candidates to be coming through a pipeline, all qualified for job orders and hard working individuals. Finding the combination of candidates can feel like the ultimate task at times, and can be really hard to keep up over time. Especially through hard times, it can be really difficult to stay consistent and focused on the goals you are trying to meet.

In order to help your recruitment efforts, a simple structured method of recruiting is often either a good place to start or something to fall back on if business is taking a hit.

Here is what a successful recruitment process looks like according to a new study:

Planning

This beginning stage of your recruitment process begins with figuring out what your current situation is, and where you have to go. This means taking possible job orders that are currently in place and making goals and sticking to them to get those placements handled in a timely manner.

This process depends entirely on your ability to know how many candidates you have sitting in your pipeline and the job orders you have waiting as well. In keeping up with these demands from organizations hiring needs, more often than not, the amount of candidates that come flooding in will be more than enough. However you have to ask yourself: are they really interested? Are they unqualified or overqualified?

So figuring out the number of candidates that are needed to fill those positions is the first step of successfully making your placements.

Strategy Development

Once you know how many candidates you need, you’ll need to develop some sort of a way to attract them and get engagement. Sometimes, if a candidate is reached out to from a random person - namely, a recruiter - the engagement is pretty low and there is no chance for a conversation, let alone an interview.

This can depend on the organization’s situation and whether they want to invest in a younger candidate to grow their skillsets, or go for a higher skilled professional who knows the ropes a little bit better. So whether they would have a long run-way or a shorter run-way to getting immersed in the new role.

Selling the job is typically done at the organization's discretion and left up to the recruiter to find the right messaging and way to reach out. With regard to how you approach candidates, it is always best to not oversell the job. Staying on the more conservative side, sharing the position with candidates and getting the idea in front of them is the main goal. The process of crafting this message and having this shown is something that needs a lot of attention in this process.

Searching

This of all the stages is probably the area that leaves most recruiters so lost and having a hard time. Some days it can feel like there are too many possible candidates out there, and others it probably feels like there are not enough. Well, successful searching involves two steps: Sourcing and selling.

Sourcing is the process of finding those hotspots where you are able to reach out to candidates consistently and have constant interactions with them. Making sure that you have a place to go in order to find a constant source of potential candidates is the most important thing. Places such as LinkedIn, Indeed and Handshake are examples of some places where candidate information is usually available. Using an Applicant Tracking System is also recommended when keeping track of the candidates you’ve sought out - making it easier to keep a tally of how many you’ve tracked down.

Selling the job is typically done at the organization's discretion and left up to the recruiter to find the right messaging and way to reach out. With regard to how you approach candidates, it is always best to not oversell the job. Staying on the more conservative side, sharing the position with candidates and getting the idea in front of them is the main goal. The process of crafting this message and having this shown is something that needs a lot of attention in this process.

Screening

This step requires some extra careful reviewing when going through because unlike searching, these candidates you screen will either ensure your success or deny it. When you are making it through your longlist of candidates and reviewing them, screening makes sure that they are properly vetted and the right experience and intent is there. With additional paperwork, interviews and materials to go through, it can be a painstaking process.

With several different subsections of interviews, there could be a phone screen interview, preceded by a video interview, followed by a face to face and so on. This is where you are weeding out the candidates that don’t quite make the cut for what you are looking for. Whether it is a lack of skills, experience or otherwise - they will need to meet all of your requirements in order to get to your shortlist.

Making sure this is done correctly and efficiently is an important step in ensuring that your recruitment process is done well. Taking that extra care into account during each stage of an interview process will make all the difference in the end. Using some sort of recruiting software could be really beneficial in this stage in making sure that your workflow is streamlined. By keeping track of each individual's place in the process, you can be sure you’re keeping all your ducks in a row.

Evaluation

Though this step often gets overlooked in the end, evaluation can be crucial in your decision making process. After you complete the majority of your process, it is very important for recruiters to know what they could do better or differently next time around.

Saving time or extra money in searching could save you or your agency could be a huge benefit and would end up being a valuable return due to this evaluation step.

Some things to measure when it comes to evaluation are:

The number of applications received

The number of qualified applicants who applied

Comments on your job outreaching or advertising

The retention of your candidates at their positions

The performance of the candidates who were selected overall

The costs of your recruitment process

Conclusion

Overall, these five steps can come in really handy when you’re finding out what to do in your recruiting efforts. Whether you do something resembling this already, or need something to base your process off of, these steps will help you keep consistent and make sure there are no pitfalls in your recruiting.

While each step can be gleaned over, taking each of them seriously is what will really be key in order to benefit your process.

 

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