How to choose the right hiring tools to find qualified candidates

It’s a candidate’s marketplace. And conventional tactics won’t cut it anymore.

To reach talent in today’s competitive landscape, infusing technology into your hiring strategy is essential to find, engage, and close candidates – faster and more effectively. To get started, try these tools for improved productivity through every hiring stage.

Hiring Stages: Sourcing, Assessing, Engaging, Tracking, Onboarding

Learn how tech can help you through each hiring stage – sourcing, assessing, engaging, tracking, and onboarding.

First, understand your core hiring challenges

Finding and retaining qualified candidates is no easy feat – and can directly affect your company’s bottom line. Pinpointing where your hiring can be boosted will help strategically speed up the process.

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Here are eight questions to help you identify which stages of hiring require the most attention:

What are your biggest recruitment obstacles?
What frustrates you most in the hiring process?
What do you obsess about when filling open positions?
What part of the hiring process takes the most time?
What’s your team’s average time to hire?
What are hiring problems that might reveal deeper issues?
Why are good employees disengaging early?
Why is talent turning over?

Next, learn how tools support each stage of the hiring process

Finding candidates

Assessing candidates

Engaging candidates

Tracking candidates

Onboarding candidates

Finding candidates

Use sourcing tools to reach and find more candidates

Rather than passively waiting for the perfect match, sourcing tools help you proactively identify candidates that fit your search criteria.

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Discovering great talent is a quest and using the right sourcing tools is one of the most essential steps of finding the right person for your open role. Sourcing tools support your candidate search by:

Connecting you to more candidates and recruiting channels to increase the potential of finding the best hire

Providing deeper insight into candidates’ skills and experiences to gauge their fit for the role

Automating the search process for improved productivity and more time to focus on other areas of hiring

Examples of sourcing solutions:

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is an all-encompassing platform that helps companies find and engage the right candidates, build their online brand, and make even smarter hiring decisions with data and insights.

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Assessing candidates

Use assessment tools to align on candidates’ skills and experiences

Candidate assessment tools help companies target candidates who have the hard and soft skills to be successful in a role.

Judging if candidates are fit and qualified can be challenging, time-consuming, and costly if you get it wrong. Good in person or on paper only tells half the story. Candidate assessment tools add value by:

Providing greater insight into candidates’ skills and weaknesses – and how they fit the job requirements

Establishing a method for objectively measuring candidates, sans personal bias

Testing for specific competencies or how applicants might handle real-life work scenarios

Examples of candidate assessment tools:

Koru assesses and ranks candidates’ soft skills against other candidates and the company’s top performers

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Applied anonymizes and reviews candidates’ fit for your role, preventing biased hiring

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Pymetrics uses interactive games to identify candidates’ top strengths and weaknesses

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Engaging candidates

Use engagement tools to connect with candidates and develop rapport

Stay in touch with candidates, shape your company story, and build lasting connections through engagement tools.

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From the messaging in your email to the company identity portrayed online, candidate communication and engagement – at every point – must be spot on to keep candidates interested in your company. Engagement tools can help:

Keep candidates in the know about their progress in the hiring process

Shape your company’s story and inspire interest with potential applicants

Spotcheck for spelling or grammar errors so you can focus on nurturing great candidates

Examples of candidate engagement tools:

Mya is a dynamic chatbot that answers common candidate questions through the full hiring experience

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Textio uses data to improve your job descriptions and engage more candidates by eliminating gender-coded language

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Grammarly automates email proofreading to nix off-putting errors (e.g., misspelling a candidate’s name)

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Tracking candidates

Use applicant tracking systems to organize candidates and know their status in the hiring process

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a software that manages the entire recruitment process – from receiving applications to hiring employees.

A superhero of productivity, it collects and organizes candidates’ information, and also tracks which sources are driving candidates to your job posts. ATS’ streamline your hiring by:

Tracking every candidates’ real-time hiring journey, organizing and updating their information and progress

Surfacing applicants best-suited for the role based on how their resume aligns with the job description

Identifying which online channels drive the highest number of qualified applicants to your role

Examples of applicant tracking systems:

Greenhouse gives a holistic view of candidate activity and allows hiring teams to collaborate on candidate feedback

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Cornerstone keeps hiring teams in the loop on candidates they need to review, interview, and share feedback on

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JazzHR builds custom candidate workflows for each role, triggers emails, and assigns recruiting tasks to hiring team members

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Onboarding candidates

Use onboarding tools to set up employees for success and improve retention

Onboarding tools help companies facilitate a smooth transition for new employees.

Smiling woman sitting at a desk and writing with a pencil and ruler.

The first days matter; 22% of turnover happens within an employee’s first 45 days on the job. A critical point in the candidate lifecycle, onboarding bridges the gap between the candidate and employee experience, and acts as a catalyst for employee satisfaction and retention. Onboarding tools benefit companies by:

Fostering early employee engagement, which builds rapport, and drives productivity and business growth

Effectively setting up employees with tech, tools, and processes so they can seamlessly transition into their new role

Increasing the likelihood that employees will stay at your company by providing a strong foundation that helps them thrive

Examples of onboarding tools:

BambooHR has a self-onboarding system that guides new hires step-by-step through their first day with customizable checklists of people to meet and tasks to complete

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Namely virtually manages new hire documents and also allows teams to recognize colleagues, facilitate employee feedback, and report on employee performance

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Built for Teams personalizes the onboarding experience for every new hire, and also manages other HR functions like tracking time off, updating organization charts, and centralizing employee records

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