5 Tools Everyone in the Recruitment Industry Should Be Using

First there were conferences, then there were blogs, followed by apps and today we’re sharing the 5 Tools Everyone in the Recruitment Industry Should Be Using. And yes, that does include recruiters, sourcers, researchers, HR professionals, directors, hiring mangers – everyone. We’ve compiled a list of the online recruitment tools we find most useful when it comes to performing a number of tasks within the recruitment industry. Get ready to have your world rocked!

1. Email Tracking Tools

The benefits of being able to see exactly when and who is opening your emails are pretty self explanatory, especially when you’re a recruiter! If you know who is opening your emails, when they’re opening them, how often they’ve opened the same email and what links they’re clicking on within your emails, you have a significant insight into which candidates are interested in your job openings and when you should be picking up the phone and giving them a call for a chat. And there are three tools currently on the market that will help you do just that:

– Signals
Signals by HubSpot is an email tracking tool that lets you see who’s opening your emails and when, so that you can prospect, work and close deals all while on the go. It notifies you when and how many times a person has opened your email, it tells you where they opened your email and it informs you when someone clicks on a link in your email.

– Yesware
Yesware is a free email productivity plugin for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox that provides not only email tracking but customisable templates and CRM integration as well. The plugin allows you to see when your emails are opened and which links are clicked, it helps you create templates for common email messages you may send on a regular basis and enables your emails to sync with your CRM system.

– Streak
Sick and tired of switching back and forth between your CRM and your email inbox? Streak eliminates the monotony of going back and forth between the two by allowing your to check and send emails, group emails from a customer or deal together, keep track of status, notes and details of each customer, share information within your team and see every email between a candidate and your team all from the one app.

2. Indeed’s Intelligent Data

Thought Indeed was just for job seekers? Think again. You can use Indeed.com’s Advanced Job Search tool to your advantage by using it to scope out your competition and gain insights on things like salary estimates and who the biggest employers of a particular role are. After all, fore-warned is fore-armed and the information ingrained in Indeed is pretty priceless.

Go to Indeed.com, click the Advanced Job Search button and enter a search for the role your looking to fill. For example we’ve searched for a Software Sales Representative in Austin, Texas and we’ve done so by entering a Boolean string – (“inside sales” OR “saas sales” OR “software sales” -director -manager) – with the various synonyms of the job title into the “With these words in the title” section and the location – Austin, TX – into the “Location” field. (More on how to run a job search in Indeed in our dedicated blog post).

When you click “Find Jobs” and your results are retrieved, you’ll get a list of all the available jobs on offer for that role, but you’ll also notice a number of populated categories lining the left hand side of the results page. The categories include “Salary Estimate“, “Title“, “Company“, “Location” and “Job Type“.

We can see from our search that the average salary of a Software Sales Representative in Austin Texas is $30,000+, the various job titles associated with the role, Dell are hiring the most Software Sales Reps in the area right now and the vast majority of jobs on offer are full-time positions – all of which you can use to inform your job ad when it comes to writing one.

3. BufferApp

We are great advocates of anything that makes the use of social media easier, faster and more efficient and Buffer is right up there with the best of them. Buffer is an automated social posting application that lets you schedule your tweets (and other social media posts) so that they publish at predetermined times (these predetermined times are based on an analysis of your social activity and the success rates of your past Tweets, suggesting that you schedule posts for times that have been most successful for you so far).

The tool enables you to quickly post any webpage of content (like your job spec or blog) out in to your chosen social network with one click. So how does it work? Let’s say you’re on LinkedIn and you see a recommended post, you read it and decide you’d like to share it, you can do so using the Buffer extension which is located in the top-right hand corner of your screen. Click the button, your Buffer account opens up and it gives you a suggested tweet that you can use or alternatively you can edit it yourself.

4. Boomerang for Gmail

While Buffer is taking care of your social posts, don’t let your emails go to rack and ruin. Schedule them to go out at the best times too! Boomerang allows you to write emails now and schedule them to send automatically at a future date and time. It also helps you to postpone incoming emails by waving a magic wand and making them disappear into specific folders or by labelling them, and only bringing them back to the top of your inbox at a time you have specified. Not only does this help keep your inbox clean, but it also helps you stay focused on the most important emails – no more ASOS or Facebook side tracking! Oh, and Boomerang is the ONLY reminder service that will alert you if someone hasn’t replied to your email.

If you’re away on holidays but need to contact someone during the same week, Boomerang is for you. If you’re contacting people in alternative time zones, Boomerang is for you. If you’re unsure as to whether or not a candidate has contacted you back, Boomerang is for you. More information on the extensive benefits of Boomerang for Gmail can be found in our Black Belt Training Course.

5. 360 Social

The recruitment world has been going crazy for both job and talent aggregation as of late, heck even Monster have re-designed their whole strategy to incorporate it. We think it’s time social media got with the programme too. 360Social.me is a social profile aggregation tool that searches the web to provide you with a comprehensive social picture of the people you’re communicating with via email or via social networks. In other words, when you type a candidate’s email address into the ‘To’ box of a blank email or when you view a candidate’s Twitter profile, 360 Social gets to work collecting social information about that candidate from over 200 social networks and condensing it onto one simple sidebar.

Understanding who you’re talking to and what is important to that person is a crucial element of social recruiting. 360 Social provides you with a complete picture of who the candidate is and as a result, instantly deepens and enriches your communication and engagement.

Have you found any good tools you feel the recruitment industry could benefit from? If so, let us know in the comments below. If you’d like more information on a even more excellent recruitment tools take our Black Belt in Internet Recruitment training courses. You’ll be in awe of just how many free tools can help you do your job more efficiently and more productively, trust us! Click here to request a demonstration of our online training platform and have a chat with one of our lovely Sales people.