This is a guest post by Nadiia at the Chanty team. Read more about her at the bottom of the post.

Team communication is important for a reason. Everyday conversations help team members establish healthy relationships and streamline information sharing while improving the way people collaborate.

Today employees interact with each other both in-office and remotely via technology. Unfortunately,  teams often underestimate the power of team communication tools. Employees don’t know about their valuable features or just can’t make them work. As a result, communication issues arise, making successful team collaboration impossible.

Also, see 5 Reasons You Need a CRM For Recruitment

Working in a recruitment team? Take a closer look at the team messenger you’re using. If you don’t have a clear understanding of your responsibilities as a team or fail to stay organized while multitasking, chances are you are not using the team chat to its full capacity.

In this article, we’ll give our best advice on how recruiters can make the most of team communication tools. Well, here we go.

The watercooler for departments

Any team is bound to fail until its members are working in silos. This is particularly true for the hiring process, as it requires making collective decisions and involves collaboration between different team members – from recruiting managers to higher-ups. The question is how to always stay in touch and keep everyone on the same page. 

Phone calls are too time-consuming, and emails ­­– are too passive. One way to do that is to use robust and collaborative recruiting software for agencies along with team chat apps with instant messages that are like a fresh wind when it comes to streamlining internal communications in recruitment.

You may also check our Recruiting Email Templates for Recruiters

Team communication tools help to connect employees and thus to avoid the silo approach which hampers effective hiring. It’s like a big virtual room where every worker has the possibility to talk and be heard.

Dialogues, where people share company news and general updates, are important, as they tell team members about what is going on in the company now. However, employees shouldn’t forget about ‘cup of tea’ conversations too. As J. Samoilenko points out: “Informal conversations are more difficult and important than you might think when it comes to colleagues’ communication. Most teams use communication apps for water-cooler conversation, where off-topic jokes, banter, and chatter can take place in addition to the work-related discussion.”

Single notification center for HR tools

Successful recruitment requires staying up to date all the time. It’s easy while using two or three tools but may become a pain for the recruiter drowning in notifications.

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Hiring top talents is a battle, and modern companies understand it. To win and hire the best, recruiting managers strive to follow trends, and use technologies, and software that has emerged in recent years.

Applicant tracking software, emails, and recruiting tools accumulate incoming information. Does it take a tremendous amount of time to keep everything on track?

Take a deep breath and start using team communication tools as your notification center. Business messengers like Slack, Chanty, Flock, or other Slack alternatives get you covered offering numerous integrations with third-party apps.

Every update from online employment resources, the latest changes made to Google Docs by your colleagues, or task management notifications are sent to a single place, so it’s easy to catch up or find the necessary files if needed. If you want to have a moment of peace, you can always set ‘Do not Disturb’ mode and choose a time when nothing will distract you from focusing on what’s really important.

Team communication 101

Want to keep track of your dialogues, job applications, work documents, and business phone numbers in the team communication tool, but feel overloaded and miss out? Probably, it’s time to figure out how conversations are structured in modern team communication tools.

Team chats usually divide communication into public, private, and one-to-one conversations. Let’s consider the benefits of the first two types for your recruiting team, based on Chanty’s best practices and personal experience.

Communication within a recruitment team via Chanty team messenger

Public conversations are visible to all employees of the company. Any teammate can join them and access the message history. At Chanty, we have around 40 public conversations that help teams and departments to stay on the same page. Check out the way we handle our public conversations at Chanty.

‘General’ is the company-wide conversation where we discuss the most important information, share updates and reports, and schedule team meetings. It includes all employees so that everybody stays informed on the latest company news.

‘Recruitment’ organizes discussions or processes that relate to the various aspects of the hiring process. Here people develop effective recruiting plans and strategies and share timely reports on current recruitment activity. Besides, every team in our company has its public conversation called ‘Marketing’, ‘Design’, ‘Support’, etc. so that employees of any department can join them and take part in discussions if necessary.

Apart from work-related conversations, informal communication takes place in public dialogues too. E.g. in ‘Random’ team members feel free to send funny jokes and share cute cat pics. At this stage, our team chat tool helps break down the communication barrier between departments and individual employees.

Tip: Pin important messages or files to find them in one click.

Private conversations are more project-specific. They keep focus on the particular tasks and include only those employees who work on them.

As recruiters are responsible for developing and updating job descriptions, private conversations like ‘hiring-dev’, ‘hiring-qa’, and ‘hiring-marketing’ help them with this task. It’s a perfect place to create a well-crafted job specification for each vacancy, defining job-related skills, desired experience, and responsibilities required for an open position. Having a clear understanding of who your recruiting team is looking for, it takes less time and more fun to find stellar candidates who match best for the position open.

In ‘CVs’ recruiters share applicants’ documents and discuss who is the top talent. Every recruiter explains why this or that candidate should be invited for an interview, and it allows to avoid unconscious bias, which can be a problem in the recruiting process.

Tip: Use a system of star ratings to vote for the most promising candidate.

Tired of switching multiple apps and want to get the updates ASAP? Integrations in your team messenger help to connect multiple services in one place, automate tasks, and benefit from trigger-based notifications. All employees need to do is connect third-party apps they use daily to any conversation in the team chat app.

Our recruiters integrate their Chanty accounts with different additional tools like applicant tracking systems, task managers, or Giphy-like services. As a result, connecting apps allows them to stay in one place while getting all the important information and status of their hiring tasks.

Tip: Integrate your team chat app with a video conferencing tool to hold video interviews right in the messenger.

Conclusion

Recruiting employees is a hard and time-consuming task. It requires members of a recruiting team to always stay in the loop and keep in touch 24/7, operating seamlessly and as quickly as possible.

One of the best ways to boost efficiency in your recruitment process is to start using a team communication tool. Team chat apps help recruiters keep all the parties in the hiring process informed, updated, and operating efficiently. Moreover, they ensure seamless collaboration from anywhere in the world, serving as the center of a team workflow.

What team communication tool does your recruiting team use? How does it facilitate the recruitment process in your company? If you have some actionable advice you want to share, feel free to drop a comment.

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