Over the last 20 years, technology has completely changed the recruitment industry, with the introduction of mobile, big data and social media all influencing the way recruitment agencies operate. In fact, the recruitment technology industry is expected to grow to £5 billion by 2015 (Tower Watson, 2013), highlighting how valuable technology has become in recruitment. This article looks at some of the most useful tools and technologies recruiters can access to make their lives easier.

Instant messaging

With instant messengers such as Skype, recruiters can message each other for internal communications allowing them to quickly and effectively converse within their agency. They can also share their screen with clients to discuss documents such as CVs or invoices, which means they can discuss documents together with their clients online rather than having to meet face to face, therefore saving time. Video interviews can also be conducted with their candidates, which removes the need for the candidate to visit the office, again saving both the candidate and agency time. For these purposes, it’s completely free and just requires an internet connection. Subsequently, Skype is an essential technology for recruiters and with 600 million users (BBC, 2013), they can’t all be wrong!

Email campaigns

Need to mailshot your clients or candidates? MailChimp is a great tool for email campaigns, allowing you to simply create attractive emails even if you don’t have expertise in HTML or design. You can also use MailChimp to send mailshots to hundreds or even thousands of contacts which means that you do not need to waste time emailing each of your contacts individually. MailChimp even lets you measure with analytics how successful your campaign was, for example you can check your average open rate and click rate, which allows you to see how your contacts are interacting with your emails. For startup recruitment agencies, if you only have 2,000 contacts or less then you do not even have to pay for an account. In 2014, 90% of job applications were sent via email, therefore this shows how significant your email marketing campaigns are. Using the right tools such as MailChimp for your email campaigns will enhance your email marketing performance.

Social media dashboards

86% of job seekers have at least one social media profile (Link Humans, 2014) so it’s essential that you’re using social media effectively as a recruitment agency. To manage all your social media profiles, using a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite can be very useful. It allows you to add all of your social media profiles, schedule your posts for the week and publish your content. This is useful because if you have several profiles it can be time consuming to manage, therefore Hootsuite allows you to handle multiple social media profiles quickly and efficiently, saving you time and money. With your social media profiles scheduled and organised for the week, you’ll have more time on social media to focus on attracting and interacting with new candidates, improving your recruitment efforts. Hootsuite also allows you to create analytics reports, where you can measure mentions of your recruitment agency, whether these mentions are positive or negative and how many clicks, likes and retweets your social media posts received. All of these factors allow you to measure the success of your social media activity and what your candidates or clients are saying about your brand, which means the visibility of your social media efforts is increased.

Recruitment software

Recruitment software is absolutely vital technology for any recruitment agency. Without recruitment software, recruiters would lack visibility over their candidate database, therefore making it difficult to identify any compliance issues which could eventually lead to legal penalties. There are a lot of recruitment software providers in the industry, so it’s important to make your choice wisely. Some key ways to differentiate between software providers are to analyse pricing packages and whether they’re tailored to your business, understand if the software is cloud based so that you can access it on the go and identify whether your data is secure and backed up regularly. These factors will help you to choose an effective recruitment software provider.

Overall, technology has really changed and assisted the way recruiters work today. With the sector expected to grow over the forthcoming years, new technology will continue to innovate the recruitment industry. With the help of Skype, MailChimp, Hootesuite and recruitment software, your recruitment agency will be using the full potential of recruitment technology, allowing your business to be more effective.

Julian Goldie writes for Flo who provide cloud based recruitment software to temporary recruitment agencies.