It’s easy to lose focus on being productive when we’re so busy being busy. When you reach a point when your 40-50 hour workweek is no longer sufficient to get your job done, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate—not what your workload is, but how you’re doing your job.

I took a break from being busy to reach out to several experts in recruiting and talent acquisition (and some of the busiest people I know) to ask about their favorite productivity tool, hack, extension, or software and they gave us some great answers.

I’m already using a Chrome extension that I hadn’t heard of before (I’m not a recruiter, but I spend a lot of time working with them!). Read the responses below and feel free to share your own favorite productivity tools with us in the comments!

As a Recruiter for J.Crew’s Distribution Center and Call Center in Lynchburg, VA, my “go to” tool is LinkedIn (Recruiter version). I search for passive candidates, join groups, create projects, and post positions. I’ve been quite successful in filling many high level exempt/salaried positions.

Renee Draney, Recruiter, J.Crew

I feel that Hiretual is the best tool in the market right now for sourcing and recruiting. To begin with, it works on Linkedin, Facebook, and Github. Secondly, it provides contact details for the candidates (email, phone, or both). Also, it has a built in Boolean Builder where you can put in your job description and it will automatically convert it to Boolean. Finally, Hiretual just launched a web based version, so if your company won't allow chrome extensions you can use the desktop version.

Jason Vogel, PHR, PwC, Experienced Recruiting Sourcing Manager

And a second mention for Hiretual!

Hiretual is a sourcing, scraping and contact finding tool that allows you to do sourcing, scraping, and contact  finding task up to 10x quicker than other tools. You can quickly find candidates, find their contact info and put them into a nice list that is downloadable all from one place.

Dean Da Costa, SP, TSIS, STL, The Search Authority

My favorite recruiting productivity tool is Buffer. I use it to post content relevant to passive candidates on various social media accounts. The end result? Passive candidates follow me for similar content and every now and again, I share job descriptions with a targeted audience. Easy.

Jim Stroud, Global Head of Sourcing and Recruiting Strategy, Talent Innovation Center @ Randstad Sourceright

For me, for RecruitLoop, and for hundreds of the recruiters in our global recruiter marketplace, a favourite productivity tool for recruiting is definitely Outreach. It's an amazing tool that recruiters can use for the sales/business development side of their job as well as for candidate outreach and engagement. It allows you to send carefully crafted and perfectly timed email sequences to attract prospective customers, as well as emails to engage passive candidates once you've sourced their contact details (using any of our other favorite sourcing tools!)

Outreach will help you track open and response rates; it will remove prospects from sequences once they reply to you; and most importantly it can allow you to hyper personalise your copy to attract that next big client or purple unicorn! We rely on outreach; many of our recruiters rely on outreach; so it's definitely one of my personal favorite recruiting tools.

Paul Slezak, RecruitLoop Cofounder and Head of Marketplace, RecruitLoop

One of our favorite productivity tools for recruiting is Mixmax. It’s like a productivity suite for recruiters. Some of the features that make it a great are tracking email opens, clicks and downloads, scheduling meetings, creating templates and automating outreach. The free version is pretty generous, and the clean, intuitive design makes it easy to use. Our favorite feature is how easy it is to send calendar availability to prospective candidates.

Jordan Wan, CEO, CloserIQ

Read the rest of the experts' advice on productivity tools here.

We all have our favorite tools to make us work smarter. Feel free to share your own favorite productivity tools with us in the comments!