From paper resumes, file cabinets and phone books to video interviews, auto-response emails, and real-time dashboards; recruiting strategies have evolved massively in the past decade.
While the use of technology has revolutionized every aspect of hiring, the following 5 traditional recruitment tactics still hold relevance and have benefits when implemented in a modern-day HR setting. Integrating these classic approaches with an ATS can help businesses hire better and bring stability to the workplace.
Record Keeping
When old-school HR comes to the mind, most people imagine a pile of paper resumes and huge filing cabinets. HR departments still maintain manual records of leaves, benefits, and attendance.
Recruitment programs are still managed using complicated spreadsheets and excel files with searchable fields. While record keeping is an excellent way to staying organized, increasing copies of paperwork and tedious data entry tasks can leave you lost in the process as your company grows.
Keeping pace with the rising HR demands can get difficult with manual record keeping as it consumes a lot of time and effort. There is a fast and easy way to store and share recruitment records – ATS. An applicant tracking system offers a centralized source for storing all the information in an easy-to-read, accessible format where making modifications is fast and simple.
Collaborative Recruitment
Since every company has unique hiring needs, some recruiters simply need to screen candidates and coordinate with department managers while others have to handle the entire process from start to finish.
Fundamental recruitment techniques haven’t changed much over the time but with an increasing attrition rate, handling hundreds of resumes leaves little time for managers to meet their potential co-workers and share their reviews with the HR department.
Today a recruitment team comprises of multiple people who may be geographically dispersed and this makes collaboration essential to hiring success. An ATS helps you stay connected and updated with co-workers anytime, anywhere. You can also share candidate reviews across all company locations to make informed hiring decisions.
In-House Recruitment
The simplest and the most successful hiring method of all times that will never go out of fashion. Hiring internally makes perfect sense for every company that wants to cut down on recruitment costs, improve the quality of hires and accelerates the time to hire. Earlier this was the only resource that companies relied on to convert names into conversations and conversations into candidates.
Outsourcing the recruitment process does save time but it comes at a huge cost and you may not get the right candidates that fit your budget and fulfill the requirements of your position at the same time. In-house recruitment allows in-person discussions which make it much easier to identify and hire the right fit at your desired budget.
To save recruiting time and effort, you can deploy an ATS that automates your entire sourcing funnel and reduces your reliance on expensive external agencies.
Personalized Communication
Personalized communication formed the core of recruitment processes and procedures in the olden days. Today responding to hundreds of applicants and keeping them informed of their progress at every stage leaves little scope for personalization due to time constraints.
When handling a huge volume of applications, you can count on an ATS to ensure that all your prospective candidates receive personalized messages even if they are meant to say, “thank you but maybe later”.
Feature-rich applicant tracking systems don’t compel you to standardize your processes and procedures. They enable you to add a human touch to everything whether it is personalizing your emails or adding a conversational tone to your job descriptions.
Follow-ups
You may have ditched your paper resumes and phone calls but follow-up is one tried and true old-school approach that can dramatically improve your conversion rate. But for any follow-up to be truly effective, it must take place in real-time which may seem difficult when handling multiple candidates for different departments simultaneously.
Today recruiters follow up only when time permits them to do so and this leaves the applicant clueless. Every prospective candidate deserves a timely closure but if staying on top of every candidate in your pipeline feels challenging, you can rely on recruiting software. Leveraging an ATS instead of manually managing communication would ensure that you deliver a positive candidate experience from start to end.
An ATS adds efficiency to your old school recruiting strategies to save tremendous time and effort. So automate your time-tested recruiting tactics with an ATS and humanize the whole process.
