Faced with changes in the labor market, growing competition in recruitment and the acceleration of digitalization in all aspects of work, the job of recruiter has changed in 20 years! Just like the HRD profession.
The days of carefully reading applications (or even graphology) to find the candidate who would make a career in the company are long gone.
Today, HR managers, employees and recruiters must compete with each other to differentiate their company on the job market. The job of a recruiter today requires the skills of a fine strategist, a salesman, a community manager, and even a data scientist.
That’s a lot for one person, don’t you think? Fortunately, tools exist to make the recruiter’s life easier!
Time: the recruiter’s main challenge
Unsurprisingly, time is the main challenge for any good recruiter.
On average, each recruitment takes between 4 and 8 weeks (if you’re wondering, follow our advice on how to reduce the recruitment time). That’s not a lot of time to write a suitable job offer, publish it on all available platforms, study all the applications received, contact the interested persons, interview them and choose the right profile!
And of course, this one to two month period must take into account all the unforeseen events: the possible defection of the first selected candidates, the change of mind of the managers or even the redefinition of the job description during the process.
The recruiter is the master of time in this frantic race against the clock. This is why any tool that aims to accelerate the recruitment process or to limit repetitive tasks is to be preferred.
Time is not only an issue for the recruiter, it is a decisive issue for the company for which you are recruiting and for increasingly demanding candidates.
Recruiters facing increasingly demanding candidates
Because the second challenge for recruiters concerns the care given to candidates.
As the gateway to the company you represent, you are the first image the candidate will have of your company. And today, candidates have a choice! Their selection criteria have changed. Stability is no longer at the top of their search, it is now flexibility, suitability to values, teleworking, humanity.
And humanity, even after a first digital exchange, is still you.
Your job offer must seduce the candidate at first glance. The way you approach them, through a professional social network like LinkedIn or an interview proposal sent by e-mail, must show your interest in their application, distinguish the company you represent and, if possible, adapt to the profile of the candidate you have in front of you.
This is probably what has changed the most in the recruiter’s profession in recent years: candidates used to adapt to the recruiter, today we see more and more the opposite.
You may be thinking that it is difficult to adopt such a posture when faced with hundreds of candidates applying for the same job offer?
You are right. That’s why optimized management of your candidate pool and refined monitoring of your CV library are essential to make your work easier and to differentiate you from companies that are looking for profiles similar to your ideal candidate’s.
Our Jobaffinity solution is designed to do just that.
Here are some statistics compiled in the form of an infographic by Officevibe and translated by us:
Stand out from the competition of job offers
The third issue that every recruiter faces is competition, which means that you are short of candidates.
The recruitment field is no exception to the mass of information we are subjected to on a daily basis with the digitalization of our society. Hundreds of job offers are often published on the same day for candidates with similar profiles.
The five-legged sheep you are looking for may not be consulting this famous website on which you usually publish your ad, perhaps he is directly solicited on LinkedIn, or another platform specific to his job that you may not know.
Today, in some sectors, job searches are done on Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, in Slack or Discord communities, some recruiting starts on Whatsapp. The candidate too has moved into the digital age.
It’s up to you to identify the main channels on which you can flush them out. By going after them on their territory, you avoid being overwhelmed by the crowd of job offers published by your competitors.
You don’t necessarily have to be everywhere, and that’s good because it would require a considerable amount of time that you don’t have (we’ve already talked about this).
The good news is that the candidate who receives the offer on his preferred platform already feels pampered (convenient for our demanding candidate!) and therefore has a positive preconception of you from the outset, you are in tune with the times and you have understood his world and his profile.
This is also where employer branding comes into play: if the potential candidate has already heard of your company, your products or services and already has a positive impression of them, this will multiply the chances. Employer branding is a collaborative effort between HR departments, internal and external communications, and marketing and sales departments.
The recruiter’s job does not have to be done alone! You can rely on your colleagues to relay your offers, especially your marketing or communication department. They certainly have interesting data on where to find the profiles you are looking for, since their job is based on profiling and the means to reach targets that may be interested in your company, its products or services. You can also set up a co-optation program or involve the future manager in the process.
This is a good way to win the battle against your competitors on the job market.
A day in the life of an offline recruiter
Have you ever regretted that a day only contains 24 hours?
Imagine, you have written the right job offer. Being a conscientious recruiter, you’ve posted it on the company’s website, the major professional social networks and recruitment sites.
If you read the previous point correctly, perhaps you even targeted the specialized sites that your ideal candidate frequents. You’ve taken the time to sort through all the resumes.
You have found the right candidate, the one who will surely please the company and its future team. And then it’s a tragedy, he slips through your fingers! The recruitment process is well underway and unfortunately the time frame for taking up the position is not scalable.
You have to start the whole process over again, but the recruitment deadlines have gone from “very short” to “hyper tight”.
Rather than diving blindly into the thousands of profiles posted online on professional social networks, or going through all the applications you have received, wouldn’t you prefer to turn to a digital solution that allows you to quickly access the profiles of the candidates in your CV library and contact them directly?
A day in the life of a (connected) recruiter
Modern recruiting solutions like Jobaffinity today offer many features to save you time. Here are some examples:
- Semantic search in the CV database
- Advanced search engine in your management tools
- Posting ads to multiple sites with a single click
- Import candidates from social networks
- Direct communication with your HR tools
- Planning for the organization of interviews by video or physical meeting
- Follow-up of applications
- Personalization of your exchanges with candidates…
All these possibilities are offered by our Jobaffinity recruitment software. Our team is at your disposal to set up your personalized tool. Accessible on all Internet browsers and all devices, it combines functionalities that meet the new challenges of the recruitment business.
Many companies, recruitment agencies, temp agencies, digital services companies and administrations have already taken the digital turn. This is a necessary shift to face the many changes in the recruitment field, to better target candidates, to save time and to establish real recruitment strategies.
Recruiters better equipped to face the challenges of tomorrow
As we have seen, recruiters face many challenges today.
When you consider the changes that these professions have undergone over the last twenty years and the accelerating changes that we are seeing in our lifestyles and work habits, there is no doubt that these changes will continue to increase in the future.
A good recruiter therefore seems to need one last hat: that of a planner to stay one step ahead. Impossible to fit this new hat on the head of our recruiter who is already a salesman, strategist and data scientist?
Not if the most time-consuming tasks that occupy him today are automated! This is the best way to guarantee that recruiters will be able to serenely tackle the next revolutions that their jobs will undergo.
The tools exist, and at only 50€ per month, it would be a shame to go without.
You want more useful information about your job? We’ve compiled a list of our most popular resources for 2022.
