The world of recruiting has been altered radically over the last few decades. Today, we rely on laptops, mobile phones, and the internet rather than Rolodexes, business cards, and lined paper notebooks. Pretty much everyone would agree that all these changes are for the better; who really wants to go back to the days of huge, overstuffed file cabinets?
No doubt the decades to come will bring further developments—and we can only guess at what form these innovations will take. In the meantime, recruiters can keep themselves busy with meeting the challenges of a rapidly evolving job market. How? We have a few suggestions.
Take Advantage of Technology – We’re not just talking about upgrading to Windows 10. You need to be sure that your workflows benefit from cutting-edge software and related aids. For starters, this means using mobile apps (so you can check email and perform other occasional tasks on the run) and cloud storage (so you can keep all those resumes and applications in a secure area). If you’re not using time-saving high-tech resources such as these, you can rest assured that your competitors are.
Explore Niche Job Sites and Forums – In a social media world where resumes are freely posted on LinkedIn and all manner of personal confessions are publicly broadcast on Facebook, business managers searching for candidates may reasonably ask themselves why they need recruiters. There’s a lot of information out there that is only a Google search away.
As a recruiter, how do you justify your paycheck? One way is to become adept at finding candidates in obscure corners of the internet, like job boards dedicated to specific industries and message boards about topics relevant to a particular position that must be filled. The major social media sites are still important for recruiting, but you need to extend your search beyond these platforms if you expect to remain relevant in this field.
Consider Soft Skills – It may go without saying, but the Exelare team is a huge proponent of technology as a tool for enhancing the recruiting process. Even so, technology isn’t capable of doing everything—and that’s all for the best.
Certainly, applicant tracking software can analyze resumes, search for keywords, and extract data according to preset parameters, which is all well and good. What it can’t do terribly well is consider the human element. It can’t determine whether a candidate has the right personality for a given workplace environment, possesses the drive to learn new skills, or knows how to adapt to the unique challenges of a particular job.
That’s where you, the recruiter, come into play. If you know how to get a good “feel” for which candidates are the best fit for a position, then you will stay gainfully employed for the foreseeable future.