How To Choose The Best Recruiting Software For Agencies? (free checklist)

68% of recruiters say the best way to improve recruiting performance over the next five years is by investing in new recruiting technology. More recruiters are relying on recruitment software to improve their productivity, widen their reach to get the right candidates, streamline their hiring pipeline, and save time by automating their tedious, but necessary tasks. 

If you’re looking for a modern recruiting tool, there are a few options available in the market. But the important thing is: that it’s not about the platform you choose; it’s the way you plan to use it. In this article, we’ll dig into what factors you should consider while buying recruitment software, and how specific features can help you accomplish your goals. 

The Problem With Choosing The Best Recruiting Software

Today’s recruitment market consists of talent acquisition suites and recruitment solutions that cater to a wide range of users – in-house talent acquisition reps, headhunters, and recruiters that work in recruitment agencies. 

First, you need to identify which category you fall into and which type of solution is critical to sustaining long-term growth. In the battle for hiring top talent and improving the speed of your hiring process, one of your most valuable weapons is a platform that helps you optimize your hiring pipeline and offers features that help you achieve iterative growth. 

It can be challenging to wade through an array of solutions to decide which platform will work best for your business, so let’s break down the difference between the two types of recruitment software: 

ATS 

• Designed to facilitate and optimize your hiring process
• Helps you create and post job openings
• Acts as a repository for recruiters and hiring managers to collect and organize applications, screen resumes, and evaluate and hire candidates.
• Helps maintain each stage of the hiring process
• The main goal is to streamline the hiring pipeline 

CRM 

• Built to strengthen relationships between recruiters and candidates
• Helps you deliver targeted messaging to candidates and clients
• Automates repetitive, mundane tasks 
• The main goal is to automate tasks to help scale a recruiter’s work 

Why Should You Use a Recruiting Software That Offers Both ATS And CRM?

One of the biggest recruiting trends recruiters will continue to adapt to in 2022 is delivering exceptional candidate experience. Given the fierce competition for top talent, recruiters need to be agile and shift their priorities to be more candidate-centric. 

While it was relatively easy for recruiters to only use an applicant tracking system to maintain their hiring pipelines, it’s a necessity to use a recruitment CRM to nurture candidate relationships today. 

Using a recruitment CRM makes even more sense in a high-volume recruitment situation where finding information in a database of several hundreds of applications, job openings, and tasks feel like finding a needle in the haystack. 

Recruiters rely on automation and artificial intelligence recruiting tools to source, screen, schedule, interview, communicate, and follow up with candidates. A recruitment CRM can help you organize your data better, streamline your hiring processes, and improve candidate experience. 

Moreover, with modern staffing agency software like Recruiterflow, recruiters can manage both candidates and clients in a single platform. 

For example, recruiters can run automated email sequences that automatically notify candidates about the next stage of their application process. Or you can share the latest updates about the hiring process with your clients automatically with a client portal. 

With the right executive recruitment software, recruiters can easily maintain their talent pools and make better, data-driven hiring decisions. As recruitment CRM systems help recruiters nurture strong relationships with active candidates, passive candidates, as well as clients, it translates to higher speed and efficiency in the hiring process when it’s time to hire, making it easier for recruiters to match the right candidates with the right job openings. 

How To Choose The Best Recruiting Software?

Choosing the right recruitment software is crucial to your recruitment business’s growth, but it doesn’t need to be a painful one. We’ve identified these 4 steps to help you find the best recruiting software. 

Step 1: Understand Your Key Recruitment Challenges and Align With Your Goals 

Typical recruitment teams are a beautiful cross-functional mix of recruiters, hiring managers, and clients – all with different responsibilities, perspectives, and priorities. With such a diverse team, it’s no surprise that you may often run into challenges. 

Start by defining the specific recruitment challenges you’re trying to solve. In Q4 2021, we asked a diverse group of recruiters on our podcast Grow With The Flow a simple question: “What are the top things recruiters find most challenging?” 

Their answers highlighted 4 key recruitment challenges for modern recruiters. 

4 Key Recruitment Challenges 

Challenge #1. Recruiters spend a lot of their time on manual, repetitive tasks. 

Tasks such as resume parsing, screening candidates, and manually posting jobs on multiple job boards results in slower hiring processes and missed top talent opportunities.   

Challenge #2. Recruiters often struggle to streamline their hiring process.

When there are multiple stakeholders – hiring managers, clients, recruiters – you need to set up a system that helps you collaborate smoothly, give visibility into each stage of the hiring pipeline, and clearly define the next steps. 

Challenge #3. Lack of automation leads to poor candidate experience. 

To deliver an excellent candidate experience, you need to make sure you update your candidates about the progress of their hiring process. Even if a candidate is disqualified, it’s always a good idea to share the interviewer’s feedback and send them an update instead of going radio silent. 

However, as a recruiter, you juggle between several hundred applications, resumes, phone interviews, and sending offer letters and in between, they are constant calls, emails, and text messages. Nurturing relationships with candidates can become increasingly exhausting for recruiters, if not properly automated.

Here are 7 ways to use recruitment automation for your hiring process. 

Challenge #4. Poor analytics and lack of recruitment data to see the whole process 

You may have important numbers like sourced candidates, time to fill, and recruiters’ performance from your recruitment tool. But do you know which channel gets you the most qualified candidates? Which stage in your hiring pipeline is increasing the time to fill? Which client was the most profitable for you? 

Good recruitment software offers you granular data and automated reports to help you make data-driven decisions. 

Step 2: Identify The Features You Need In Your Recruiting Software 

If you’re a recruiter who is trying to reduce time to fill, eliminate manual, tedious tasks, and scale your business faster, you’ll probably value any recruitment software that:

• Is easy to use and has higher user adoption rates 
• Integrates well with popular job boards and social networking sites 
• Does the heavy lifting by automating your recruiting activities
• Gives you clear and visual data points about what’s happening in your recruiting process 
• Has excellent customer service that helps you solve your issues quickly. 

A good way to start considering a new recruiting tool is by involving your team early on. Talk to them about their day-to-day operations, core requirements, and key features. Buying a bloated recruitment software that’s loaded with unnecessary features will only add to your team’s existing challenges. 

Divide your list of features into two segments:

Must-have features: 

“If a recruitment CRM does not have X feature, we cannot use it to build the hiring process we want to.”  

These features consist of the core functionality and features of your recruitment software. As such, these necessary features are non-negotiable functions. Without them, there’s no point in using a recruitment CRM. For instance, here are a few must-have features for a recruitment CRM:

• Sourcing extension 
• Integration with job boards and social media 
• Talent pools 
• Advanced search capabilities
• Email campaigns 
• Automation
• Analytics
• Customer support 

Nice-to-have features:

“If a recruitment CRM does not have X feature, we can still work with it but might feel the loss of the feature. 

These features come in a close second on the priority list. Nice-to-have features are those that are essential to your business, but not a crucial factor impacting your core functionality. Simply put, your software will work without them, but you could potentially use them to improve your hiring processes further. For instance, having a click-to-call feature helps you make a call directly from your internet browser, CRM, or customer support tool.

Here are a few nice-to-have features of recruitment CRM:

• Career page design 
• Texting 
• Click to call / VOIP calling 
• Resume formatting
• Email templates 

Step 3: Figure Out The Budget You Have For A Recruiting Tool 

How much does recruitment software cost? Typically, most recruiting software offers a pay-per-recruiter model wherein you have to pay per user. This range can be anywhere between $50-$150 per user per month. 

Make sure there are no hidden charges and you’re only paying for the features you’re getting. For instance, at Recruiterflow we offer transparent pricing to our users. Check out our pricing to know more. 

Step 4: Consider Getting A Trial For The Recruiting Software You Want To Buy

If you’re just starting out, or have never used a recruitment tool before, we recommend you book online demos to identify which recruitment software best matches your needs. In a demo, you can ask the salesperson about specific features and a walkthrough of their recruitment software.  

Here are some of the most important features that you should consider:

Sourcing 

• Centralized candidate database 

All candidates are in a single dashboard so you can easily filter and find exactly the right candidates. 

• Advanced search

Find targeted, relevant candidates in your database with an advanced boolean search using various filters like skills, candidate qualifications, education, radius, and location search.  

• Sourcing extension

Source candidates and clients faster by using a universal chrome extension that helps you add profiles in your dashboard in one 1-click. 

• 1-click job posting 

Save time by posting your job on multiple job boards at once with just one click. Choose from multiple free and premium job boards and social media sites. 

• Customizable careers page design 

Create visually appealing careers pages in just a few clicks within the dashboard and accelerate your job posting process. 

• Job board integration

Easily post your jobs on multiple job boards with a single click. 

• Social media recruiting 

Source candidates from leading social media sites including LinkedIn, Indeed, Facebook for your job positions automatically. 

Managing candidates and clients 

• Resume screening 

Screen candidates faster by extracting useful information from candidates’ resumes in a few simple clicks. 

• Automated interview scheduling 

Two-way sync with calendar and email to help recruiters schedule interviews with candidates directly from the software and automatically notify them. 

• Client portal

Make reporting easier and faster with a dedicated client portal that helps them get a high-level overview of the hiring pipeline, and see what’s coming up next. 

• Hiring workflows and talent pipeline 

Customizable hiring and talent pipelines with a drag-and-drop interface to track each stage of the hiring process and candidates’ progress. 

• Bulk actions 

Send bulk emails or text messages to candidates or apply a certain action on multiple jobs with one click. 

• Candidate scorecards

Customize candidate scorecards for each interview to ensure a data-driven evaluation process. 

Collaboration and communication  

• Engaging email templates 

Create and send customized email templates to your candidates or contacts depending on the stage of their journey. 

• Automated email sequences 

Create well-structured, compelling email sequences and send them to the right people at the right time with the right message. 

• Automated triggers 

Use advanced automation triggers to create automated workflows in minutes. Automatically follow up with candidates, move them to different stages, send personalized emails, automate client nurture, and any other part of your hiring process.   

• Reminders and tasks 

Automatically notify your team members about upcoming events, interviews, meetings, or tasks. 

• Tagging 

Make collaboration easier with @mention in notes to add more information about tasks, candidates, clients, and automatically alert team members. 

Integrations

• Integrates with popular apps you use 

Recruiterflow integrates well with all the popular apps recruiters use today. From job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter, to business apps like Gmail, Microsoft 365, Outlook, and others.  

Reporting 

• Recruiting and sales reports

Track important KPIs and recruiting metrics like time to fill, fill ratio, revenue by each user, and conversion rate of your sales pipeline. 

• Sourcing analytics 

Identify the best candidate sourcing channels for your team. See the number of candidates sourced, measure sourcing channel efficiency, no. of screening, submittals, and placements. 

• Hiring productivity

Find out the most productive and least productive stages of your hiring pipeline. Get granular visibility into data to identify metrics and improve your process.

• Sales forecasting 

Get real-time insights to view a high-level overview of your sales and revenue. Improve your team’s performance and modify hiring pipelines based on these insights. 

• Custom data exports

Use filters to get hyper-customized automated reports. Download them in multiple formats in a single click. 

A Quick Checklist to Choose The Best Recruiting Software 

• Define your top recruitment challenges.
• Identify the high-level features that will help address these recruitment challenges.
• Divide these features into two categories: must-have and nice-to-have. 
• Allocate a budget for your recruitment software. 
• Shortlist the top 3 recruitment tools based on features, customer support, and budget. 
• Book a demo of the recruitment software. 
• Get details about the onboarding process. 
• Share helpful resources about the recruitment tool with your team. 

Which is the best recruitment software?

When it comes to using recruitment software for staffing firms, Recruiterflow offers a complete ecosystem of recruitment tools that you can use to accelerate hiring workflows and nurture relationships with candidates and clients. We have a clean user interface, customizable sales pipelines, powerful automation tools like email sequences, triggers, advanced boolean search, etc. 
You can sign up for a 14-day free trial or book a demo with us to learn more about Recruiterflow and see how it fits with your goals.