10 Types of Recruitment Tech to Look Out for in 2021

Recruitment tech is becoming an increasingly important part of every business. The right tech stack can be the difference between a great candidate experience or a poor one. A poor experience means candidates are less likely to accept an offer. They may even drop out. This prolongs the hiring process and makes it more expensive. It costs an average of $4,000 to replace an employee, but the more senior the role and the longer it takes, the more expensive this becomes. You then have less money to spend on growing the business and investing in the right software.A great hiring experience means that you always attract the top talent and can hire faster. This makes a huge difference to productivity in the short and long term. Attracting the top talent also helps your business to grow faster.Here’s a list of some of the recruitment tech that you can leverage to provide a better candidate experience and save your hiring managers hours every week.

Writing assistant software

Using the wrong language in a job advert can prevent the right candidate from applying for a role because they – consciously or subconsciously – will be led to believe that the role isn’t the right fit for them. Without realizing it, we use gendered language all the time. ‘Manage’ is seen as masculine, for example, while ‘nurture’ is feminine. However, these are both words that can be used to describe a managerial role.Writing assistant software helps to remove unconscious bias in job adverts. It ensures that language is gender-neutral and adverts are therefore more likely to appeal to a wider range of candidates.Tools like Textio analyze job descriptions to find gender-neutral language that can be used in place of gender-specific terms. This means that candidates will focus on the tasks that they have to complete in the role and not the gender fit.

Chatbots

Chatbots can be used at every step of the hiring process, but they’re most useful at the start. They can be used to answer prospective candidates’ questions. They can also be used for the application itself, asking candidates filtering questions about their previous experience in a similar role.PhenomPeople's Phenom Bot, for example, asks candidates qualifying questions to save recruiters time. It then offer successful candidates the opportunity to schedule an interview from within the chatbot itself.Scheduling solutions can also be embedded on job boards or company websites to make it easier for candidates to connect with you. Scheduling links can be generated and used by candidates once they’ve passed the filtering questions.Unlike a human recruiter, a chatbot can talk to candidates 24/7, meaning that they can answer their questions and filter candidates much faster. This helps to reduce time to hire and cost to fill by up to 50%.

Recruitment marketing software

Recruitment marketing is a huge part of developing your employer brand. It builds the know, like, and trust factor that’s vital to build a talent pipeline. It also ensures that you’re at the front of candidates’ minds when they come to apply for a role. They then apply with a higher level of awareness about your company and what you do, reducing your time to hire.Recruitment CRMs help you to keep track of candidates that have applied for roles in the past or that have shown interest in working for you. You can then use this information to keep candidates engaged until you’re ready to hire. You could send them emails about what you’ve been up to, or details on the latest job openings.Your CRM has information on all past and present job applicants. It has details of active and passive talent, making it easier to engage the right person at the right time.Social media integrations also exist so that teams can manage social media accounts as part of candidate marketing campaigns. As the face of your company, it’s an important way to keep in touch with candidates. The kind of content that you post reflects your company and the culture within it. It’s the perfect way to engage with passive candidates.70% of recruiters also check social media to screen prospective hires. This shows the important role social media plays in hiring processes for all types of roles and businesses.

Resume screening

It takes a human an average of two minutes to screen a resume. A resume screening software can do this in seconds. This can dramatically reduce your time to interview and time to hire, especially for high volume hiring.Applicant tracking systems (ATS) can be set up to ask candidates mandatory questions alongside the rest of their application. These eligibility questions help to filter candidates further, getting specific information that’s required for the role. These could be basic questions about how long someone has worked in an industry, or more complex questions like how they’ve handled a particular situation in the past.Once the application has been received, the software can filter the resume based on criteria specified by hiring managers. They can input keywords or phrases that indicate a person’s eligibility for a role, such as ‘SEO’ for a marketing role.Anyone that fits the criteria can progress to the next stage of the hiring process.Any that are unsuccessful can receive a rejection faster – sometimes in a matter of hours or even minutes. This allows candidates to move on sooner. Timely communication improves the hiring experience. 75% of candidates never hear back from a recruiter after applying for a job. 60% never hear back after an interview. While this is understandable for busy recruiters, it creates a poorer candidate experience and makes them more likely to leave a negative review and not apply for future roles.

Assessment tools

Assessments and tests are common ways for companies to assess a candidate’s skills or cultural fit. They test a candidate’s skills, knowledge, performance, and behavior. These are a useful way to filter candidates before a face-to-face interview, or during it to test a particular skill.Questionnaires and interactive tasks measure candidate’s soft skills. These are particularly important in industries such as call centers and retail.What soft skills really tell an employer is how much potential a candidate has to excel in the role they’ve applied for. However, every role requires different skills. This is why assessing them can make a difference to a person’s success. For example, an accountant needs to be risk averse, while a salesperson is risk taking.Cognitive reasoning tests measure how candidates think. The most popular versions are verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, and general cognition. They predict a person’s success in most roles, but can work against people who come from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds as education is often a factor in passing these tests.Hiring managers can then analyze the results to see if the candidate could be the right fit for the role and move them on to the next stage of the hiring process.

Interview scheduling

41% of recruiters take more than three days to schedule an interview. This is valuable time that could be the difference between a candidate taking one job or going with another company that has a more streamlined interview scheduling process.More and more companies are embracing interview scheduling. It provides a better experience for everyone involved in the hiring process. Hiring managers don’t need to constantly consult their schedules to find a time that works for them. Interviewers can connect their schedules to the software to offer candidates a real-time view of their availability. They then don’t have to spend time coordinating schedules. Once their schedule is synced, the rest is done automatically.Candidates can book an interview at their own convenience instead of needing to take phone calls or respond to emails during working hours. It provides a better candidate experience that can help to boost your employer brand in the short and long term.Everything from simple one-on-one interviews to complex multi-part or group interviews can be scheduled quickly and easily with the right tool, making it a seamless process for candidates, recruiters, and interviewers alike.

Video interviews

Video interviews are a faster way to filter candidates than in-person interviews and a useful alternative to phone interviews. They’re also embraced by teams that work remotely. They’re less costly when it comes to resources for both parties.Many initial video interviews are short videos where candidates answer a few questions. The interviewer pre-records the questions then sends them for candidates to answer. Candidates record their answers in video format then recruiters can watch the video in their own time. Live interviews are sometimes organized using Zoom, GoToMeeting, or Skype.However, some ATS have built-in video calling – pre-recorded, live, or both – to ensure that everything is kept in one place and information doesn’t need to be updated manually. Candidates don’t need to travel to the venue, which means that they have more time to prepare.It’s also useful for hiring managers as they can read a candidate’s body language as well as hearing their voice, which can help them to make a better judgment on the type of person they’re hiring.

Interviews with artificial intelligence

Video interviews – and sometimes in-person interviews – can be taken a step further with artificial intelligence (AI) interviews. As AI becomes more advanced, it’s getting better and better at mimicking how we speak. Robots of various kinds can therefore be used to conduct interviews with candidates. It’s been developed to measure the language, tone, and facial expressions candidates use when they respond to questions. These help to filter candidates out before they speak with a hiring manager. According to The Telegraph, some of what it measures includes:

Facial expressions assessed by the algorithms include brow furrowing, brow raising, eye widening or closing, lip tightening, chin raising and smiling, which are important in sales or other public-facing jobs.

AI interviews focus on measuring a candidate’s extraversion, emotional intelligence (EQ), and communication skills. These are all vital parts of a many roles, meaning that hiring someone who fits the criteria is imperative. However, judging these skills can often be subjective.This is something that Tengai – the world’s first interview robot – wants to change. It’s a physical robot with expressions that mimic ours. It’s designed to ask neutral, non-leading questions that accurately assess a candidate’s skills without any form of bias. The main aim of these is to measure a candidate’s soft skills in an unbiased way. As time goes on and this software is used more and more, it will continue to learn from interviews and get even closer to speaking how we do and offering better judgments about candidate suitability.Conducting interviews using AI is another way to save hiring managers time. It ensures that only the highest quality candidates go through to in-person interview stages.

Virtual reality

This is a rapidly growing area of recruitment tech. Companies like Actiview use virtual reality (VR) to measure candidates’ problem-solving skills, motivation, creativity, leadership skills, and more.Tasks can be set up to mirror what someone would face in the day-to-day role, offering a better way of telling how a candidate will think and behave in the workplace. It’s a more advanced version of psychometric testing that’s more immersive and therefore more accurate.The idea behind this is to make recruitment more engaging – and fun – for candidates while still being scientific.VR can be used in other ways, too, such as to provide a company tour to show candidates what it could be like to work there.VR could also be used to interview remote candidates. This is a more immersive experience for candidates and interviewers alike, potentially providing a more interactive experience and therefore more accurate results.It’s still in its infancy right now, but there are lots of companies emerging that offer VR for recruitment, so it’s worth keeping an eye on as this technology continues to evolve.

Applicant tracking systems

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) can combine some or all of the features mentioned above. They help companies to track candidates from the start of the hiring process right through to the end. They’re the primary tool used by recruiters to manage the application process. Some are generic HR tools, or included in HRMS software, while others are industry-specific to cope with the needs of a particular industry. They can also post on job boards, saving the need to share the same role individually to dozens of different sites.Interviewers can also add notes to the software alongside candidates’ resumes, highlighting any questions they have about it, or any potential discussion points.

Conclusion

New technology is emerging faster than ever. It’s disrupting every stage of the hiring process, and it’s imperative that businesses keep up to date with the innovative solutions that are emerging. Choosing the right tech stack is a key decision and can be the difference between building a strong employer brand and jeopardizing future hiring processes.There’s a lot of competition out there for top talent, so you need to find the right hiring solutions for your business. In competitive industries like software development and graduate hiring, this is more important than ever.Technology helps teams to do more with less. Even small teams can achieve great things with the right recruitment tech.The more features a tool has, the easier it is for you to manage. It becomes overwhelming to learn to how to use multiple different programs and constantly have to switch between the two. That’s why Cronofy integrates with many popular ATS. The more steps you have to take to do what you need to do, the more frustrating it becomes and the more time it takes up.The right tech stack helps you to hire more diverse teams. This has been shown to improve employee happiness and company profits, meaning it’s something that should always be top of mind for any business. Diverse companies outperform non-diverse companies in every way. Embracing the most innovative recruitment tech helps you to stand out from your competitors and attract top talent. It also builds a strong employer brand, which helps you to attract the best talent and fill roles faster.To find out more about interview scheduling for your recruitment tech, check out our interview scheduling use case.