When choosing a database or other data processing vendor, safeguarding your organization’s information and experiencing consistent application uptime are fundamental, but making informed decisions can be challenging.

Choosing Secure & Reliable Vendors

At PCRecruiter, we regard security and availability as our most important goals. This commitment extends beyond our internal operations. We understand the crucial role secure and reliable partners play in your organization’s success. But how can you, as a customer, effectively assess potential vendors in terms of their security and availability posture?

Here are some key considerations

Established Security Certifications

Seek SOC 2 Compliance. This widely recognized independent audit assesses a service organization’s security controls and measures to safeguard customer data. SOC stands for System and Organization Controls. It refers to a framework developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) for assessing the effectiveness of a service organization’s controls related to information security, privacy, and other operational risks.

Consider Additional Certifications. Depending on your industry and data sensitivity, additional certifications like ISO 27001 (Information Security Management) or PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) might be important factors.

Scrutinize Security Policies and Procedures

Request access to the vendor’s security policy outlining their approach to protecting your data, who can access it and under what controls, and what their incident response plans entail. It’s important to understand what their communication protocols are in the case of a potential security incident.

Inquire about third-party testing procedures they may be employing and learn how they address vulnerabilities found by these tests. It’s one thing for a vendor to claim security of their system, but without outside auditing and testing their claims may be hollow.

Evaluate Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Plans

Ensure documented disaster recovery plans exist. These plans should outline what the vendor’s backup systems include and how the vendor would restore critical systems and data in case of an outage. You’ll also want to inquire about redundancy measures that guarantee application uptime during unforeseen circumstances.

Your PCRecruiter account is always available to you in a warm standby (read-only) mode, operating on a completely independent and geographically separated infrastructure, and continuously backed up to our current Recovery Point Objective. We call this our ‘snapshot’ feature. In the event of a loss of access to our primary service, snapshot can quickly be switched out of read-only mode and be promoted to primary service, and then reverted to backup mode as required.

Transparency and Communication

A reputable vendor will openly discuss their security practices and be prepared to answer your questions concerning their security practices. Look for vendors who prioritize transparency and actively communicate.

Main Sequence Technology is pleased to provide PCRecruiter users and prospective customers with this information, including documentation of our SOC2 compliance. Your comfort level and ability to meet your own vendor assessment responsibilities to your customers and stakeholders are important parts of the value that working with our company provides.

Be Wary of Overpromising

Watch out for vendors who make big promises or seem overconfident. The fact is, absolute cybersecurity cannot be guaranteed by anyone for reasons such as:

  • Unforeseen Threats (Zero-Day Exploits): Cybercriminals constantly develop novel attack methods (zero-day exploits) that exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities. Even with robust security measures, these new threats can pose a temporary risk until patches or solutions are developed.
  • Shared Infrastructure (Internet): The internet, which forms the foundation of most communication and data exchange, inherently presents security challenges. Malicious actors can exploit vulnerabilities within this shared network, potentially impacting even well-secured systems.
  • Human Error: Accidental mistakes by employees or authorized users can introduce security vulnerabilities. Social engineering tactics can also manipulate individuals into compromising security protocols.
  • Determined Attackers: Highly motivated and well-resourced attackers may relentlessly target specific organizations, employing sophisticated techniques to overpower and defeat commercially realistic security measures.
  • External Dependencies: Software applications often rely on libraries, frameworks, and other components developed by third parties. Vulnerabilities in these external dependencies can introduce risks beyond a single vendor’s direct control.

While achieving absolute cybersecurity is an unreachable goal, carefully monitoring the threat landscape, deploying and effectively using reasonable controls, communicating transparently, and deploying skilled and objective third-party experts are what you should expect from your vendors, and what Main Sequence will provide as part of our service. Contact us with your questions.

Please note that this blog post is intended for informational purposes and should not be considered as expert security advice. Appropriate and commercially reasonable business operations regarding cybersecurity are highly dependent on conditions affecting each organization. Each organization should obtain professional services from accredited providers pertinent to their industry and the type of information processing being conducted. This blog post is not a warranty, representation of merchantability, or statement of fitness for any particular purpose regarding the service or other offerings of the company.

Candidate engagement is a critical piece of your recruiting process — particularly in a job market as competitive as we see in 2024. However, it’s important to remember that engaging with candidates isn’t just about ticking off boxes on a to-do list. It’s about building connections, fostering trust, and keeping candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process.

An effective candidate engagement process, especially one that leverages automation, not only helps candidates become more comfortable working with you, but has the added benefit of keeping your private talent pool more efficient overall.

Let’s look at some of the key factors that make up a candidate engagement experience:

The Power of Connection

Regular, meaningful communication is key for all relationships, and your relationship with candidates is no different. Whether it’s a quick email, a friendly phone call, or a personalized message on LinkedIn, staying connected keeps the relationship alive.

But it’s not just about talking; it’s about listening too. Keeping communication open with your candidates means more opportunity to learn what motivates them, what their strengths are, and what they’re looking for in a job. The more opportunities you create for candidates to connect with you, the better you can tailor your own communications with them and ultimately with the potential managers you’ll be recommending them to.

Securing Your Brand

Recruitment branding isn’t just for big corporations. Even a one-recruiter agency has a story to tell. By sharing your own story with candidates, you can help them understand who you are and what it’s like to work with you. Your reputation as a highly-attentive and engaged recruiter can lead to more referrals, better reviews, and ultimately the growth of your talent and client pools for future placements.

Keeping Them in the Loop

We’ve all been there—waiting anxiously for an update, refreshing our inbox every five minutes. Don’t leave your candidates hanging. Keeping them informed every step of the way shows you respect their time and effort. It’s not just about being professional; it’s about being human.

Furthermore, your continual engagement with candidates may reduce the likelihood of them ghosting you, which a survey by Indeed shows has become increasingly common. Even a simple email on a regular basis can show candidates that you’re still there and still interested in their career, which might mean the difference between making a placement or losing them entirely.

Embracing Automation with a Personal Touch

Recruitment automation can help reduce phone time while keeping candidates engaged.
Recruitment automation can help reduce phone time while keeping candidates engaged.

Automation is more important than ever, even for small-scale recruiting operations. When you streamline repetitive tasks you not only save time but you ensure a more consistent candidate experience.

Using sequencing tools with automated emails and time-based task reminders helps you check in with candidates more regularly, collect the most up-to-date candidate information, and generally stay on top of your process with less work. Giving candidates continual opportunities to update their information via simple forms means your database remains fresh and more useful for surfacing existing matches for new roles.

Your automation should also allow for manual involvement where appropriate, giving you the chance to include details about specific opportunities, personal anecdotes, or links to relevant resources. Recruitment automation should always enhance, not replace, human interaction.

Build Connections, Build Business

Growing and maintaining meaningful connections by sharing your story, keeping candidates informed, and embracing automation will help you create an experience that leaves a lasting impression. Remember that you’re not just filling a position or placing a candidate — you’re building relationships that can bear fruit years into the future. In a world where the recruiting process can feel increasingly impersonal, the frequency and quality of your candidate engagement can be the key to setting yourself apart from the competition.

Digital tools for recruiters are rapidly evolving. Used properly, new technology can enhance every aspect of the recruitment process, including sourcing. Automating the extraction of relevant candidate data from social platforms like LinkedIn or job sites like Indeed has become commonplace.

For recruiters, the right recruitment tech gives them a competitive advantage. However, the methods used to gather online data on potential candidates can raise legal and ethical questions around data ownership and fair recruitment practices.

In this blog post, we explain the difference between capture and scraping, and how recruiters can best navigate this online frontier.

Capture vs. Scraping 

There’s no doubt that automating the process of extracting data about potential candidates or clients is a time-saver for recruiters. It’s a process that would otherwise be done manually, by transposing information from the source to a recruitment CRM or other data store.

From a recruiter’s perspective, what’s important is how that process is automated. This starts with knowing that capture and scraping are two very different approaches with very different implications. 

  • A capture tool processes information displayed to an authorized user of a service after downloading to the memory of their device.   
  • A scraping tool automates the download of prospective web pages directly to a database without user intervention.

Legally, this is yet to be codified, but ethically, the distinction is clear. A capture tool is designed to extract authorized information about a candidate from a source already accessible to the recruiter. Importantly, although it is automated, it still requires human direction and intervention. Essentially, capture is simply speeding up the manual copy/paste job that the recruiter would otherwise be doing.

On the other hand, scraping uses a ‘bot’ to indiscriminately extract candidate data from a website, which it may or may not be authorized to access. Authorization is largely determined by a data provider’s terms of service.

Terms Of Service

Put simply, some third-party terms of service distinguish between the use of legitimately downloaded information and the automated collection of information while others do not. 

At the same time, some terms of service are so restrictive that they essentially disallow any use of information not explicitly approved by the vendor. It’s important to note that very few terms of service agreements are ever tested legally all the way to trial and damages.

Third-party vendors also have all kinds of enforcement mechanisms outside the legal system, which can influence customer behavior. Whether used systematically or on a whim, it’s possible for vendors to take a variety of actions to deter actual or perceived malpractice, including warnings, altering service privileges, suspending users, or even cutting them off entirely. They may also choose to engage with tool vendors.

Legal Cases

hiQ LABS v. LinkedIn (now owned by Microsoft) is one of the most high-profile cases on scraping to pass through the US legal system. 

In 2022, the appeals court ruled that under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, anti-hacking law does not apply to public websites. So far, LinkedIn has been unable to obtain an injunction to stop hiQ from scraping personal data from its professional networking platform. 

So far, the merits have not been decided. Although it outlines an interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the appeals court has suggested that the CFAA is not the correct law to regulate hiQ’s conduct.

So where does that leave recruiters? Automated methods for extracting candidate information are here to stay. It’s only a question of time before a court ruling sets the precedent for the legitimate and ethical use of these tools. For now, it’s up to recruiters to use capture tools in accordance with relevant data privacy laws — such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

PCR Capture

As the name suggests, PCR Capture is a capture tool, not a scraping tool. As a specialist software vendor, its creator (Main Sequence Technology), has no measurable influence over major third-party service providers.

For that reason, we’re not able to certify any activity or obtain any kind of consent or waiver on behalf of our customers in their use of PCRecruiter Capture. Neither can we assume liability for behaviors and contexts over which we have no control.

However, we do assert a good faith belief that information downloaded to the memory of a user’s device in the normal and authorized course of the usage is information that belongs to the user, and the vendor has exhausted their right to that information by providing it.

Back in October, Google announced changes to their email handling policies designed to combat spam. These new changes will be fully in place by February 2024. Yahoo/AOL has announced similar policies and others will likely follow suit. While the changes should mostly have a positive effect — reducing the amount of junk and scams that get to inboxes — they could have a negative effect on your recruiting process if you rely heavily on cold email or aren’t using properly configured outgoing email systems.

Google’s new policies apply to emails received by any Google-hosted account, including Google Workspace and Gmail accounts. It is estimated that Google’s servers host roughly 1/3 of all email, so no matter what email provider you’re using to send your email, a significant number of your recipients are likely hosted by Google and will have their filters managed under these new rules. It’s important to understand these changes so you can stay on their good side.

Meet The Inbox’s bouncer

The inbox's bouncer

Spam filters exist to protect the recipient from unwanted and unsafe mail, and the rules about what is and is not allowed into the inbox are up to the email recipient’s provider and the email server administrator. This means there’s nothing that you can do to 100% guarantee your email won’t get routed to a recipient’s spam folder (if there was a surefire way to avoid every spam filter, the spammers would be using it.)

The email spam filter examines each incoming message for common hallmarks seen in previously reported spam, including text phrases, web addresses, sender domains, IP addresses, and underlying code contents. Each suspicious element found is used in a weighted calculation and mail that reaches a given threshold gets filtered out. The specifics of the formula are up to the email server, and some are beginning to apply GPT methods in addition to traditional tools. While Google Workspace Business edition admins can create whitelists and adjust spam settings for their own users, users of basic Gmail accounts get standard spam filter settings that are beyond their control.

These systems learn to identify spam based on which emails cause the user to hit the ‘spam’ button, as well as the emails that users choose to remove from their spam folders by hitting ‘not spam.’ They build up a reputation for your domain or IP that is continuously updated over time. Your objective as a sender should be to minimize the number of people who mark your messages as spam, as that can affect your deliverability overall.

6 Best Practices for Email Delivery

Whether you’re sending 10 emails or 10,000, there are established best practices that will go a long way toward keeping you deliverable. Several of them overlap with the CAN-SPAM Act, so adhering to them helps with your email getting delivered as well as your FTC legal compliance. The CAN-SPAM laws apply only to advertising email, so messages about an application process or other ‘transactional’ messages with existing candidates or clients are typically exempt from it. The laws in non-US jurisdictions may vary, so if you’re emailing people elsewhere, check the applicable laws.

  1. Be thoughtful about what you send and to whom — Sending the same email blast to everyone in your recruitment database is bound to hit people it doesn’t apply to, and the less relevant people find your email, the more likely they are to flag it as spam. If you’re building an email sequence or sending a single-mail campaign, make sure your content and your email list are well-matched, and that you’re not including anyone unnecessarily.
  2. Be transparent and authentic — Don’t fake your email address, use deceptive subject lines, or hide your contact information. Put your physical mailing address and phone number into the email. This not only legitimizes your business and helps to reassure the recipient that you’re not a scam, but it also gives them an alternate way to reach you if they want to do business.
  3. Be responsive to opt-outs and keep your lists clean — Don’t make it difficult for people to stop getting your emails if they don’t want them. Include an unsubscribe link and make it easy to find. Remember that losing an unwilling email recipient is better than getting marked as spam, because getting a spam reputation affects your ability to reach willing recipients in the future. If someone opts out, retires, or bounces, make sure they stop getting your emails. It’s also smart to remove addresses from your lists if they haven’t clicked or replied to anything in a long time — outdated addresses can turn into spam traps. Buying email lists is also very risky and can fill your database with recipients who are more likely to bounce or to spam-flag you for cold emailing them.
  4. Be clear and brief — A personal message from you to the recipient, particularly if you can mail-merge in their name or other unique info, is far likelier to make it past the inbox bouncer than a designed marketing piece with lots of ALL CAPS, common spam words, long subject lines, many colors and font sizes, or extraneous exclamation points. Avoid mixing advertising content and transactional content like offers or agreements in the same email. Believe it or not, some spam filters will even knock you for bad spelling or grammar, so proofread before sending! Before sending any mass email, send a test to yourself and see what it looks like in as many different email clients as you can manage. Unfortunately, there is no reliable HTML standard for formatted emails, and Outlook Classic for the desktop will often render margins and padding very differently than Gmail or Apple email, as well as blocking images. If your email doesn’t require fancy formatting and pictures, skip them for better consistency and deliverability.
  5. Be prepared and informed — You can send your email to one or more free email spam checkers, such as M@ilgenius or Mailmeteor to see how they rate its deliverability. While these can catch mistakes or make suggestions before you send something, treat them as a guideline and not a guarantee — every mail server’s spam filter settings are different and a ‘good’ mail can still be blocked or a ‘bad’ mail might get through. You can also check your email domain or your IP address to make sure it’s not on any RBLs (remote block lists) using a tester like MX Toolbox. If you’re on a mail hosting service where the same email server is shared by multiple businesses, someone else’s spam habit could impact your delivery.
  6. Be consistent — When an email server suddenly gets a lot of mail from a single source, particularly one that wasn’t already on their radar, it can appear suspicious and impact your deliverability. A mail server is less likely to filter out a regular newsletter than a sudden and singular blast of advertising. If you plan to send a large amount of email, ramp up slowly. Start with a small number of engaged recipients, and increase volume over time. The more email you’re planning to send, the slower you should take it as you’re ramping up. The same goes for email frequency — if you’re going to be sending emails daily, you’ll want to ramp up your quantities even more slowly than if you’re only going to send emails monthly.
Gmail Graphic (https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/)

What are Google’s new rules?

Google’s new changes are centered around sender authentication and stricter adherence to spam report thresholds. In response to rising scams and phishing emails, where someone impersonates a different sender by faking the “From” address on their email, Google is now changing “show our bouncer your ID at the door” from a recommendation to a requirement.

Their policies fall into two categories: rules that apply to everyone sending emails to Google accounts, and rules that apply specifically to bulk senders.

Google’s rules for everyone

Fortunately, most of the changes Google is making will not have much impact on you if you’re already using a properly configured email server and following the best practices above. We’ll outline the rules below and give some details on how they apply to PCRecruiter specifically.

Most of these items relate to technical settings that are handled by your DNS (domain registration) admin or your email provider. If you’re not sure who your configuration is through, you can perform a DNS lookup at MX Toolbox.

Here’s what Google requires for all senders:

  • Keep your ‘spam rate’ below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching 0.30% or above. This is a ratio of emails from your domain that Google’s users have marked as spam vs. the number of emails received from your domain overall in the same period. You can check the stats for your domain by getting access to Google’s Postmaster Tools.

If you’re used to importing candidate lists or sending larger Campaigns in PCRecruiter, you’ll need to be even more particular about where you get your data from, what messages you send, and how often. Before these updates, Google treated the 0.30% spam rate as a recommended maximum, but these changes mean they could be treated with more scrutiny. If you want to get to the inbox, being more granular and relevant will be increasingly important. The Postmaster Tools also show your Domain Reputation — keeping your Spam Rate low will help to keep your reputation High.

  • Authenticate your email domain with SPF or DKIM. These methods allow the recipient’s email system to verify that your email is really coming from the domain your ‘From’ address says it is from. Many public and private email servers already check these but Google will now be even more strict about them. 

You can verify your own SPF here. If you have a Gmail account, you can use the Show Original option in the More menu (three dots) on any email you’ve received to see if the sender’s SPF and DKIM passed or failed.

For PCRecruiter users who only send email directly from their own email account and server (i.e. you’ve linked PCR to your Google or Microsoft account), the authentication is already handled. However, if you’re using a dedicated bulk email service like SendGrid or using a self-managed email server, you’ll want to double-check that you’ve properly configured your DNS so that mail sent using your domain is showing up as authenticated, no matter what mail server it is sent from.

If you’ve got multiple Email Aliases in PCRecruiter, check SYSTEM > Email Setup > Email Alias List to review your outgoing settings. If the “SMTP Server:Port” box on any of them contains an IP address rather than a full email server domain, you may want to check with that provider about authentication options.

  • Have valid PTR records for your domain. These forward DNS and reverse DNS records allow the recipient’s email server to verify that your mail is being sent from an IP address that is associated with your domain name. You can check your PTR here.
  • Use TLS to secure your email communications. This is the modern standard for email connections. If you’re unsure whether you’re using TLS (you likely are), this can be checked by examining the email headers of a mail you’ve sent to yourself. You can sometimes tell by checking your outgoing mail settings in your email client as well.
  • Make sure your emails follow Internet Message Format standards. These are the basic rules for how email content and code should be transmitted. You don’t have to do anything special for this rule, as it’s almost guaranteed that your email client is taking care of these requirements automatically.
  • Don’t impersonate sending from a Gmail account. Sending email from a fake or mis-aligned email domain is bad practice, but faking Gmail’s own domain on a mail sent to Gmail would be a clear red flag.
  • If you forward a lot of emails, check that your email system is using ARC, which makes sure that the SPF or DKIM authentication from the original email gets passed along when forwarding.

Google’s additional rules for bulk senders

Google has a few more requirements for “bulk senders” in addition to those listed above. Google defines bulk senders as any domain sending 5000+ emails per day to Google-hosted accounts. Keep in mind that this is cumulative, meaning that Google considers your domain a “bulk sender” whether you’re sending a single mass mail to 5000 recipients or 100 people at your company are sending 50 personal emails daily.

  • Your emails must support a one-click unsubscribe header and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. When an unsubscribe header is found in the email’s header code, Gmail will automatically add an “Unsubscribe” link to the top of the email near the sender’s info. They will also add an “Unsubscribe” button to the mail when mousing over it in the inbox list. Gmail will only add these two links for emails sent from addresses not found in the recipient’s Google Contacts.
Gmail Unsubscribe Header Implementation
Gmail automatically adds these Unsubscribe links if the required one-click unsubscribe header is found and the sender is not already in your Contacts.

PCRecruiter adds the required “one-click unsubscribe header” code to any outgoing Campaign or Bulk Mail that contains an unsubscribe link merge tag in the body automatically, so by using PCR’s opt-out features for your form letters you’re already compliant. When a recipient uses the ‘one-click’ unsubscribe, they’re instantly opted out of any future emails for that bulk mail category in your PCR database.

Hiding or omitting your unsubscribe link just makes it more likely that an unwilling recipient will mark you as spam, so making it easy to get off the list will improve your deliverability overall, whether you’re sending bulk emails to 5000 or 50. If you are not currently including an unsubscribe link in your bulk emails, review our documentation on setting up the opt-in/out features to get started. 

  • In addition to having an SPF and DKIM as noted above, bulk senders must also set up a DMARC policy for the domain. DMARC gives you control over whether the recipient’s server should quarantine, reject, or do nothing special with emails from your domain if the SPF / DKIM checks fail. The main advantage to having this is that you’ll get reports about the emails that didn’t authenticate, which can help you identify problems or potential fraudsters sending mail that claims to be from you. Once you reach a point where you’re absolutely certain that everything you’re sending is always going to pass SPF / DKIM checks, then you may want to set the DMARC policy it to ‘reject’ so that any mail that doesn’t appear to be truly from you gets blocked. Make sure the “From” address on the email matches the domain listed in the DKIM or SPF record.

Be smart and fear not.

The typical PCRecruiter user is sending mail from a Google or Microsoft 365 account, which means a lot of the nuts and bolts of setting up authentication are already taken care of. PCRecruiter also already generates properly formatted emails and headers, so you don’t need to change anything to comply with these rules either. Plus with PCR’s bounce handling, opt-out list, and Sequencing, you can send the right emails to the right people and keep your database clean.

So, in essence, Google’s new rules just enforce what you should be doing already: sending legitimate emails to people who want to receive them and using a properly configured email server to do it. With a double-check of your domain record and a bit of extra scrutiny of your large-scale email plans, you should have nothing to worry about.

As of January 2024, Main Sequence Technology has certified to the EU-US Data Protection Framework, reconfirming PCRecruiter’s full commitment to EU data protection requirements.

The history of transatlantic data flows twists and turns with shifting regulations and legal pronouncements. From the sunken hopes of Safe Harbor to the EU Court of Justice’s (CJEU) pronouncements in Schrems I and Schrems II, EU businesses have sought reliable pathways for data being processed in the United States.

Today, the EU-US Data Protection Framework offers a new course, but responsible practices and reliable routes like the Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) remain available to Main Sequence Technology’s customers in the European Union.

From Safe Harbor to Privacy Shield

In its heyday, Safe Harbor was based on self-declared compliance. However, in 2015, the CJEU’s landmark Schrems I ruling effectively ended Safe Harbor as a viable path. The ruling expressed the court’s findings of inadequate US oversight and vulnerabilities in data access by US intelligence agencies, sending a shock through the data transfer landscape.

Privacy Shield, erected in response, attempted to correct course, but the CJEU’s 2020 Schrems II decision likewise foundered Privacy Shield, citing persistent concerns about US government surveillance programs. These rulings left EU businesses navigating transatlantic data flows in substantial uncertainty.

Throughout these developments, Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) have served as reliable tools to establish per se data protection adequacy, offering EU Executive pre-approved agreements that describe responsible data handling practices and define each party’s role in complying with legal requirements. At Main Sequence, we recognize the critical importance of legal compliance and per se adequacy for our EU Customers.

A Fresh Framework for EU-US Data Transfer

Following the CJEU’s judgments in Schrems I and Schrems II, the need for a durable framework governing data transfers between the EU and US became clear. From July 2023, The EU-US Data Protection Framework addresses this challenge by establishing enhanced safeguards for EU citizens’ personal data when processed in the US. Key elements of the new framework include:

  • Enhanced US government oversight: Stronger mechanisms ensure robust monitoring and oversight of data accessed by US intelligence agencies for national security purposes.
  • Multi-layered redressal mechanism: EU citizens now have a dedicated ombudsperson within the US Department of State to address concerns about potential data misuse.
  • Binding obligations for US companies: Participating US organizations must adhere to strict data protection principles and implement comprehensive security measures.

PCRecruiter is Certified to DPF

Main Sequence have approached this challenge by adopting industry-recognized best practices, continuously offering the SCCs, and participating in the available frameworks as they have evolved, but our commitment extends beyond basic compliance with available frameworks.

We regularly and realistically assess risks, invest in ongoing training, and conduct evaluations of our vendors and third-party audits of our own controls. By responding with agility to the regulatory landscape and employing a multi-layered approach to data security and availability, we seek to position Main Sequence as a trusted partner for organizations navigating the complexities of transatlantic data transfers.

Accordingly, Main Sequence is pleased to announce that as of January 2024, we have certified to the Data Protection Framework. We will continue to offer the SCC’s, but now our customers can be comfortable that their PCRecruiter accounts are managed in a per se adequate way for EU data protection requirements.

For more information about the DPF and the certification list, please see dataprivacyframework.gov.

To discuss your private recruiting database needs or for further details about EU data compliance, please contact your PCRecruiter representative.

It’s been quite a year! 2023 was the year that AI broke into mainstream recruiting tech, as firms went in search of new ways of doing things better and faster with the help of GPT. The good news is that AI won’t replacing human recruiters any time soon. As the best in the business know — it’s all about people.

On that note, this year we had the pleasure of getting to know our customers and their industries a little better. We’d like to extend a huge “thank you” to everyone who has contributed to the PCRecruiter blog. We’ve uncovered some fascinating insights into different challenges, approaches, and niches of the recruitment world.    

In the coming year, we’re looking forward to speaking with more of you, hearing your stories, and discovering how PCRecruiter helps you get the job done. For now, we’d like to leave you with a round-up of the top trends from 2023, and a look at what’s to come in 2024.

5 Ways ChatGPT Can Enhance Your Recruiting Workflow

5 Ways Chat GPT can enhance your recruiting workflow.

Although large language models and GPT AI tools are quickly becoming smart enough to help recruiters work more efficiently, they’re still not good enough to do the job better than humans. Still, cutting-edge recruiting firms are already taking advantage of emerging AI tools like ChatGPT. In this popular post, we uncovered 5 ways ChatGPT can enhance recruiting workflows.

Keeping It Real In Recruiting: When To Push Back On Clients

Keeping It Real In Recruiting: When To Push Back On Clients

Finding the right talent is tough — if it were easy, recruiters would be out of a job, after all! But sometimes the difficulty comes from the client rather than the jobseekers. The client may not understand the limitations of the market, especially when there’s a small pool of candidates for an open role. In this post, Dave Nerz of NPAworldwide shares his thoughts and expert insights on when to push back on clients.

How To Write Job Descriptions For Search Engines

How To Write Job Descriptions For Search Engines

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – techniques are primarily used by digital marketers to increase traffic to websites, generate leads, and increase revenue. The question is: how can inbound recruiters use SEO to improve the chances of job descriptions being discovered and shared online? We talked with Steve Gipson, Sales Manager at Recruiters Websites, about some of the best practices.

Secrets To Successful Recruiting In Engineering And Energy

Secrets To Successful Recruiting In Engineering And Energy

There have been a lot of changes in the energy industry over the last 30 years, particularly in the area of renewables and the reduction in fossil fuels. For this blog post, we spoke with the President of Natek, Mark Dillon, to uncover some of the secrets behind his sustained success in recruiting engineers for renewables and energy efficiency using PCRecruiter.

A Guide To Switching Recruiting Verticals

A Guide To Switching Recruiting Verticals

For recruiters working in a specific sector, switching verticals is a chance to grow their business and learn something new. But more often than not, recruiters find themselves moving in and around different industries out of economic necessity. Long-time PCR user and experienced executive recruiter David James shared his extensive knowledge on how to handle a switch in recruiting verticals with us.

Recruiting Franchise Tech That Drives Success

Recruiting Francise Tech That Drives Success

While many recruiting firms see great success as indepedent operations, there are valuable advantages to joining a wider operation. For this post, President and CEO of American Recruiters – Gino Scialdone – explained why the franchise model is a great fit for recruiters, and how choosing the right ATS and CRM (PCRecruiter) helps drive its success.

Why Leading Recruiters Build Their Own Talent Pool

Why Leading Recruiters Build Their Own Talent Pool

The danger of proliferating AI-driven sourcing tools and a sea of public profiles at your fingertips is that it can become easy to overlook the people you’ve already got in your history. There are remarkable benefits to building your own talent pool. In this post we discover why a private database of people in your industry is a valuable business asset.

Top Recruitment Firms Make A Success Of Internal Splits

Top Recruitment Firms Make A Success Of Internal Splits

Recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Best Executive Recruiting Firms – four years in a row – Bowerman Group is a boutique firm specializing in premiere and luxury consumer brands. They’re experts in all things retail, ecommerce, and marketing. Not only that, they’ve got the process of internal splits down to a fine art. We uncovered their insights on this method for this post.

What’s in store for PCRecruiter in 2024?

2024 is already shaping up to be a massive year for PCRecruiter. You can expect an all-new version of our flagship platform with more a more intuitive, modern, and easy-to-learn design that retains and builds on the high level of functionality and customization that our users have loved for 25 years. 

In addition to the fully reimagined user experience, PCRecruiter will also see the direct integration of GPT features in the new year. We’ll be implementing it in thoughtful ways that make the work of recruiters easier, such as powerful ‘natural language’ search, while avoiding the legal or ethical concerns that directly qualitative use may bring about.

The new year will also see the release of a wholly rebuilt version of our popular PCR Capture browser extension. This update will add more configurability and nuanced duplicate merging to help you add contacts quickly while also enhancing and cleaning up existing records.

At the same time as we roll out the new platform, PCR 9 users will be pleased to know that our documentation will be getting a major revision at the start of the year, making it easier than ever before to get the answers you need, when you need them the most.

Follow us on LinkedIn and watch this blog for more on the exciting news to come in the next few months, and contact a PCRecruiter consultant for a personal consultation or preview of things to come.

Recruiting might be a people business, but many firms are catching on to the business benefits of analytics. The metrics that matter – and the ones that make a difference to your recruiting efforts – depend on the size and scope of your firm.

Tracking the number of placements made and the dollar value of customers is important from the get-go, but as your team grows other metrics also come into play — like setting KPIs to monitor team performance. Here are our insights into recruitment analytics.

Trends in recruitment analytics 

There’s no doubt that getting recruiting analytics and dashboards in place helps you get clearer oversight and control over your recruiting business. It works at every level. In PCRecruiter you can set and track business objectives, whilst individual recruiters can take greater ownership of their personal goals and performance. 

Scaling firms and larger recruiters tend to pay closer attention to activities related to job placements. Tracking the outreach journey — such as marketing campaigns aimed at potential clients — is also valuable. You can see who’s clicking on those campaigns, and which organizations should be pulled into your list and monitored.

Once you start recruiting, you can easily monitor the progress of open roles, and how well your team is performing in terms of making placements. It’s here that KPI goals can be set around metrics like the number of candidates placed, the number of first interviews completed, the number of outreach emails, and the number of calls made. 

That data also becomes valuable when speaking with clients. You can use it to tell the story of your recruiting efforts, sharing useful data such as the percentage of roles filled, the number of calls made on their behalf, and so on. 

Measure quantity and leverage quality 

Alongside quantity, you can also measure quality. Take a job marketing campaign, for example. You can track where the best candidates originally came from, enabling you to focus efforts for future campaigns and increase your impact.

The same goes for recruiter communications via calls and emails. It’s possible to measure quantity, but you can also leverage the expertise of high-flying individuals by scripting sequences based on the work of an individual contributor. 

Using the available data — and PCRecruiter’s Sequencing Tool — you can identify your top recruiters, then design and build workflows around their best practices. This can then be used to guide and support new or less experienced team members.  

PCRecruiter’s partnership with CarbonWeb means analytics and reporting can be integrated with data from Monday.com to provide even deeper insights. Not only can you see how well you’re doing for particular clients based on a job description, you can take it one step further to analyze how well your workflow is performing. 

Is there a step in the process with a big drop-off? Perhaps you’re doing too many interviews or the interview questions aren’t effective? Maybe the candidates you’re finding aren’t a good fit? You can find all of this out and more through Business Intelligence (BI), visualizing valuable and relevant data in graphs and charts. 

Monitor each and every step of the process

Recruiting Analytics Pie Chart
Proper recruiting analytics should be insightful and informative, unlike the pie chart shown here, which is just for decoration.

Top recruiters have a competitive drive, which means there’s real value in having a personalized dashboard for monitoring and measuring performance. That could be KPIs benchmarked against the rest of the team, or it could be analysis of their end-to-end performance from the initial outreach to the final placement. 

Seeing a drop-off at the first interview with a hiring manager? Any activity performed using PCRecruiter — whether inside or outside the pipeline — can be monitored, so the answer to your question is only ever a few clicks away. Struggling to get candidates through a particular hiring authority? Maybe it’s time to make a call to that hiring manager and uncover how you can bring them candidates that are a better fit.

The important thing here is that you can only analyze and report on the data you collect. PCRecruiter is designed to automatically collect the relevant data you need. For example, connecting to RingCentral enables you to report on call data, times, connections, and so on. With email addresses held inside PCRecruiter tracked via IMAP sync, it’s possible to log every email that goes in and out — whether that’s through Apple, Microsoft, or Google. 

Invest in a culture of data analytics 

For smaller firms or professionals that have been doing recruitment for a long time, collecting and analyzing data can seem like an additional burden. In fact, simply by operating out of PCRecruiter and setting it up in the right way, the software does all the heavy lifting for you.

Be warned that you may not see immediate benefits. It takes patience and discipline because the real pay-off is further into the future when you can use historical data to visualize trends which can yield actionable insights about your recruiting efforts. 

PCRecruiter’s Sequencing Tool is more than just a way to set up and send out email campaigns. What’s unique about it is that it’s an entire workflow manager. It can prompt you to make connections on LinkedIn, launch phone calls or text messages, and then link the person to a position pipeline or route them to a separate sequence depending on the outcomes.

Sequencing, along with the pipeline, takes candidates from the very first contact to the final placement, and all of this journey can be tracked and analyzed. For smaller firms, setting sequences up from day one makes total sense. It allows them to shape and refine their workflows to optimize their success rate, so when the time is right to grow, new users have a tried and tested process to follow. This cuts down on the need for protracted and complicated onboarding to your entire ATS system. In PCRecruiter, new recruiters need to know three things: the capture tool, sequencing, and pipeline. 

More time for what you do best

Surfacing business insights using data and analytics can help recruitment firms do what they do, only better. Taking those insights, it’s possible to set up automations to take care of 90% of repetitive, repeatable daily activities – like sending out automated email responses. 

As with any automation, it’s important to include human activity and oversight into the process — like reading a reply and qualifying a response. PCRecruiter’s Sequencing Tool enables you to do all that and more. But analytics and automation don’t replace human interaction.

At the end of the day, a recruiter’s job is to talk to people, get a feeling for who they are, and build a relationship with them. Data and analytics can help enhance those conversations, adding all round value for recruitment professionals, clients, and candidates. 

Discover how data and analytics tools inside PCRecruiter can help improve your recruitment efforts. Book a demo.

With increasingly AI-driven sourcing tools and a sea of public profiles at your fingertips, it’s easy to overlook the benefits of building your own talent pool. But owning a database of people in your industry – potential passive candidates, who you already know and who you’ve already background checked – is a valuable business asset.

That’s because maintaining and nurturing a talent pool with clean and relevant data on people you know – who are likely to be interested and suitably qualified – can cut the time needed to source and sift. The time to hire is quicker, placements become more profitable, and your clients get high-quality candidates. 

Leading recruiters build their own talent pools. Here’s why and how.

Why build your own private talent pool?

There are recruiters out there who rely on live searches to fill their clients’ open roles. And that’s fine. But they’re missing out on a future goldmine — a keyword searchable database of historic candidate data. 

Building a private talent pool is essential to recruiting.
A private talent pool gives you a competitive advantage.

When clients come to you with an open role, you can immediately dip into your talent pool to find candidates that fit their needs. It’s also somewhere to store those candidates who didn’t make the cut last time around, as you never know when they might be needed.

Having your own talent pool makes you more valuable to your clients because it’s where you find passive candidates who are potentially unknown to (or forgotten about by) your competitors. It enables you to stay on their radar even if you don’t have an opportunity for them right now.

Sure, LinkedIn is great for sourcing active candidates, but what about that person you placed years ago? They’re now a passive candidate who may be open to taking on a new position and who’d be a great fit for this new role you’ve been given.

The truth is that often the person you need to fill a particular role is the person who’s not regularly updating and posting on LinkedIn because they’re not actively seeking a new position.

How to keep in touch with talent and the industry

Keep the message going that you’re in touch with both the industry and the best candidates out there, and you keep your pipeline full of new opportunities.

You might think keeping connections going with hundreds or even thousands of potential candidates is an impossible task. Even with the best motivation in the world, trying to maintain that many relationships over time — including many that don’t necessarily end with a placement — would take time and resources you simply don’t have.

But by setting up repeatable timed tasks through the Sequencing Tool inside PCRecruiter, you can regularly reach out to candidates through automated emails, text, or other scheduled activities. By segmenting candidates or clients, you can maintain a schedule of personalized messaging.

For example, you might segment candidates by a particular role, experience, and location and send them a regular message to see how they are and qualify their interest. You can also record their response for potential follow-up activity, such as a phone call or sending them a list of roles that might interest them. 

The pay-off may not be immediate, but it could be significant. Imagine one of those candidates becomes a hiring authority themselves further down the line. Suddenly, they’re coming to you with new placements to fill.

Sequencing can also be used on the client-side. They may not have any open roles right now, but what about in the future? Set up a sequence to send an automatic email after your most recent placement, seeing how it worked out, and inquiring about upcoming roles.  

Think of it this way. As a recruiter, you are your own brand. Like any good marketer, you need to keep your brand front and center in clients’ and candidates’ minds. Regular, relevant, and anticipated communication is a great way to do that. 

Keep the message going that you’re in touch with both the industry and the best candidates out there, and you keep your pipeline full of new opportunities.

Fill your talent pool with data from a job board

The easiest way to get new and updated candidate data into your talent pool and pipeline is through a job board. Even if you don’t currently have any open roles, it’s still a great channel for securely and compliantly collecting candidate data and resumes. 

PCRecruiter’s Job Board module offers a clear target where you can direct interested candidates or clients and have them voluntarily send you their details. It’s also much more efficient and streamlined than directing them to your inbox because the data can be directly imported into your database.

The advantage of capturing candidate data in this way is that you can draw a line on how much data to collect, striking a balance between the quantity and quality of your talent pool. And when the time comes to sell up or retire, you’ll also have a highly valuable business asset.   

Discover how to use PCRecruiter to build your talent pool and add value to your recruiting process. Book a demo

The energy industry has seen a lot of changes over the last 30 years. During that time, recruiting firm Natek has consistently placed top talent in energy efficiency and renewables – including engineers, sales, operations, management, and executive leadership – for some of the biggest names in the industry.

Mark Dillon, President of Natek
Mark Dillon, President of Natek
LinkedIn @ natekenergy

There’s no substitute for experience. Natek’s enduring success is built on long-term industry relationships. Hiring authorities and career professionals in the energy sector know Natek and the team at Natek knows them. This gives the firm a deep and unique talent pool that’s all their own.  

We spoke with President of Natek – Mark Dillon – to uncover some of the secrets behind his sustained success in recruiting for the energy space (including what makes PCRecruiter a great ATS software for engineering recruiters.)

Industry expertise from the outset

More than 35 years ago, Mark Dillon was working in the energy industry. Back then, it was known as the ‘power generation’ field. His clients were major multinational companies supplying the world’s ever-increasing demand for power. Mark spent most of his time either on the road or in front of clients.  

I’ve owned my own engineering firm. I’ve headed and led energy groups for Fortune 50 companies. I’ve also partnered with the Association Of Energy Engineers (AEE) and the World Energy Congress as a career counselor.

– Mark Dillon, President, Natek

When energy efficiency and renewable power initiatives started to come in, these companies and their energy customers were presented with new incentives to reduce costs and demand. This shift resulted in a trend for performance contracting, where energy providers guaranteed efficiencies to corporate customers by identifying and delivering savings. 

In 1990, Mark decided he needed a role that would allow him to be closer to home, giving him the chance to spend more time with a young family. Recruiting was an obvious choice because it enabled him to work from home. 

Having worked with some of the biggest brands in the industry, Mark had built up a network of trusted contacts. So he took the opportunity in front of him. He focused his recruiting efforts on delivering staffing solutions in the fields of energy efficiency and renewable power.

The impact of work-from-home on energy recruitment

PCRecruiter is Natek's chosen recruiting software for engineering roles
There remains a demand for on-site work in the office and in the field.

Fast-forward to 2020. Most of the world began working from home in response to COVID-19. This left a lasting impression on the recruiting landscape, including recruiting for engineering and energy. Today, some of Mark’s clients want everyone working from the office, some offer hybrid roles, and others are now fully remote. 

Office-based roles are still valued. They create a synergy between co-workers, especially for junior team members, that’s not easily replicated in a video call. But the biggest challenge for recruiters is to get companies — and people — to either embrace working from home or feel excited about getting back into the office. 

And what’s on offer can potentially make or break a potential placement. In Mark’s experience, he’s seen executives pass up a six-figure salary increase because they wanted to cut the commute and use that time for their kids and family. Alongside understanding where candidates want to work, the other important ingredient in making successful placements is understanding what companies are looking for in their candidates.

Recruiting in engineering means knowing what companies need

These days, energy companies increasingly need to do more with less. Like any industry, the top candidates for open roles are usually already taken or in high demand. 

Transferable skills are invaluable in the renewables sector. That’s partly because if all the best talent is taken within a particular geographic area, the next best thing is to bring in someone with related experience, say mechanical engineering or other relevant fields.

When energy companies are putting a team together, they want people who can develop a project and manage the risks of those projects – especially when it comes to performance contracts.

– Mark Dillon, President, Natek

Another important quality is the ability to manage risk. From the C-level through to engineers on the ground, responsibility for mitigating risk is everyone’s business. And that’s a big weight. Imagine a project with a performance contract worth between $10 million and $200 million. There’s a lot at stake and a lot that can go wrong.

Recruiting Software for Engineering - PCRecruiter
Successful placements in engineering recruitment often requires the right blend of technical and leadership skills.

From an engineering recruitment perspective, employers are often looking for candidates with a technical background who also have the leadership skills to develop and deliver projects to clients. Even when aspects of a project are contracted out — such as the design phase — they need someone to take ownership and provide oversight and control. 

That’s why the risks associated with recruiting the wrong person are huge. It also means industry expertise and experience are vital when it comes to finding the right candidates.

A private talent pool is the engineering recruiter’s best asset

PCRecruiter has been my recruiting software for engineering, energy, renewables, and related fields for over twenty years. It’s the heartbeat of how I do business, from logging individuals to prepping a candidate for a VP role.

– Mark Dillon, President, Natek

Recruiting is about building relationships, and Mark’s been in the business a long time. People he placed two or three decades ago now occupy C-level positions. The truth is, you just never know when these relationships could become valuable. That’s why building your own private talent pool over time is so important. Sometimes, data that could be decades old can unlock new opportunities for candidates and companies. 

Securely held inside PCRecruiter, Natek’s talent pool contains records stretching back to the early 2000s. It allows Mark and his team to look up individuals, pull up notes, and put candidates up for interviews in no time at all. For Mark, this database is the beating heart of his recruiting. Having PCRecruiter behind him enables Mark to focus on what really matters – communicating with people. 

I live and die by customer service! Kudos to PCRecruiter. Not only is it a great ATS software for engineering recruiters, but I know I can always reach out to somebody if I have a question and get a quick and useful response.

– Mark Dillon, President, Natek

Relationships are the cornerstone of Natek’s success. It’s a people business, and while AI and automations help make doing business faster and easier, Mark’s an advocate for picking up the phone and speaking to candidates, explaining the opportunity, and building rapport. With PCRecruiter as his recruiting software, Mark has instant access to the information he needs to have meaningful conversations with candidates and clients.  

Having their own private talent pool gives Mark and his team depth, breadth, and access to quality candidates who may not be visible on platforms such as LinkedIn. That built-in insight and expertise separates Natek from the rest of the field. It also means energy companies don’t just view them as a recruiting firm, but as a strategic partner helping to build their business. Energy companies know Mark and his team understand the bigger picture of the industry, and can lean into their know-how when identifying, qualifying, and placing high-quality candidates.

To discover more about Natek, visit their website natek.com

To learn more about how PCRecruiter works as a CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE (or any other recruitment vertical) contact us for a personal demonstration.

The PCRecruiter Team recently attended the Sanford Rose Associates Fall Conference in Dallas. We wanted to publicly thank them and recognize all the work that went into putting such a strong conference together.

The PCRecruiter Team recently attended the Sanford Rose Associates Fall Conference in Dallas. We wanted to publicly thank them and recognize all the work that went into putting such a strong conference together.

It was great to meet so many successful recruiters, partners (SourceWhale, ZoomInfo, HireEZ) and to take in presentations from pros like Jeff Kaye, Jon Bartos, Jordan Rayboy, Katie DeVries, Scott Rivers, Darren McDougal, Kent Burns, Tess Lepore, Brittany ValVerde, Mike Silverstein, Norm Volsky, Jacob Binke, Scott Chadbourne, Jess Tello, and Dan Charney (all of whom happen to be PCRecruiter users), among many talented others from NextLevel Exchange, Kaye/Bassman and beyond.

We look forward to the next event!

For recruiters working in a specific industry, switching verticals can be a chance to grow their business and learn something new. But more often than not, recruiters move in and around different verticals out of economic necessity.

David L. James - Executive Recruiter
David James, shown delivering his TED Talk “Why Resumes Do NOT Work” in Las Vegas (Jan. 2020)

The economy shapes the job market. Economic downturns can reduce demand in one sector and create a surge in another. In order to survive — and thrive — recruiters and recruitment firms sometimes need to reposition themselves to weather economic storms.

We spoke with seasoned executive recruiter (and ‘O.G. PCRecruiter user’) David James to gain his perspective on how to handle a switch in recruiting verticals.  

Potential pitfalls of switching verticals

Some people come to recruiting because they want to make money, and it’s an absolute grind to them. I’ve always felt like getting somebody a job has this form of valorization. If you don’t love people and love talking on the phone, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the best vertical ever!

– David James, Executive Recruiter 

It’s possible that given the right timing and right connections, you could slide into a new sector and put together a couple of lucrative placements. The thing is, however, you’re now working outside your area of expertise. You’ve left your core competency, and its marketing, on your previous desk, and that desk has now closed. You’re in a new sector with no recyclable candidates — the talent pool of prospective placements who may not have fit one role but could potentially match your next one. 

Switching verticals creates a gap in your industry-specific knowledge and skills and puts you in unfamiliar territory. You’ll need to plug the holes in your knowledge, and fast. So be prepared to invest time and effort into upskilling. Without the established connections you had in your previous specialty, you’ll also need time to grow your network. Different industries come with different compensation structures, so also be prepared for variations in salaries, commissions, and bonus structures.

Change can be challenging. Clients may be skeptical about hiring a recruiter experienced in a different vertical. So you’ll need to earn their trust, demonstrating your transferable skills and commitment to excelling in this new market. Anticipate resistance from clients and candidates who may question your decision to switch. Some clients may even think you’re using the new vertical as a stepping stone rather than getting into it for the long term. Be clear about your intentions and how this move fits into your career trajectory.

The art of market mastery 

In any new vertical, you’ve got to have market mastery – you need to aggregate all the talent. That’s why you need a FILL statement – Function, Industry, Location, and Level.

– David James, Executive Recruiter 
David L. James on the "Bit About Crypto" podcast.
David James recording an episode of the ‘Bit About Crypto’ podcast.

A professional recruiter since 1988, David James loves what he does. He’s also switched verticals enough times — from internal auditing to cryptocurrency to casinos to construction, and back again — to know that market mastery is the key to success. That’s why, before jumping on the phone, it’s important to truly understand the roles you’re looking to fill and which types of candidates will offer the best fit.

F.I.L.L. (Function, Industry, Location, Level)

Here’s how a FILL statement breaks down…

  • Function: What are the core functions of the roles you’re trying to fill? Do they align with your candidates’ skills and interests? Do the day-to-day responsibilities resonate with their career aspirations?
  • Industry: Understanding the industry’s dynamics, key players, and prospects is key to long-term success. Ensure the industry not only interests you, but also has potential for growth. 
  • Location: Consider the geography of the roles in your new vertical. They could be local, national, or even international. Are potential candidates willing to travel or move for new career opportunities?
  • Level: Assess the level of responsibility and seniority of your open roles. Ensure that the roles align with candidates’ career goals and expectations. What are the opportunities for growth and advancement within the vertical?

Tips for making the switch to a niche

When it comes to changing verticals, David says “you need to find one thing that everybody wants. Not only do they want it, they need to have it. For them, it’s essential.” But, of course, that’s not easy to find. That’s why you need market mastery (FILL). 

Take this as an example: you’re a recruiter with a specialty in engineering, which is actually a very broad market. You need to take a deep dive into that market and pull out a niche. How about engineers who calibrate scales? Scales on the highway, scales at the meat counter, scales at the market. There’s your business model (and that’s a real example, by the way). 

It’s not how many calls you’ve made. It’s how many conversations you had.

– David James, Executive Recruiter

The big misconception is that you can conquer an entire market segment. Take the accounting sector, for example. Let’s say you need to source candidates for three roles: an internal auditor, a treasury manager, and a corporate controller.

Those are three separate searches. Why? Because the internal auditor can’t do the treasury job or the corporate controller job, and vice versa. Let’s say that you sourced three candidates for each one of those searches and it took a month to find them. What you effectively have is three different recruiting businesses. What you need is recyclable candidates.

Whatever candidates you need to find, they need to be recyclable. Think about nurses. Imagine you’ve found a nurse who is willing to travel and who has got the right certification. Suddenly, you can actually go to multiple hospital systems, and they’ll see that nurse whether they have a position or not.

Relying on the right recruiting tech

No matter what vertical you’re in, having the right recruitment tech behind you is essential. That means building out your own talent pool — a private store of candidates with your own enhanced details, activity, and history records. When you’re new to an industry, the very first thing you need to do is populate your database. 

The people behind CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE have made it one of the best partnerships of my recruiting career.

– David James, Executive Recruiter

But here’s the tip from David: don’t worry about the candidates right off the bat. You need to segment your hiring authorities. Find your hiring authorities first. Push that to between 1,000 and 2,000 hiring authorities, and then you’ve got a market. 

No matter what vertical (or verticals) you recruit in, PCRecruiter adapts to your needs. To request more information or book a demo, contact us.

Got a recruiting problem? David James is an executive recruiter and recruiting consultant  with years of industry experience. Reach out to him via email, dj@talstrats.com or LinkedIn @davidjames-iar

Recruitment and HR industry events, summits and conferences are a great way to learn best practices and grow your business network.

The CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE team has compiled this list of upcoming shows for the remainder of the year to help you keep your calendar filled with professional development opportunities.

October 2023

  • LinkedIn Talent Connect, Week of Oct 2 : Online and in-person (NYC) events.
  • HR Healthcare, Oct 2 – 3 : Austin, TX will see WBR’s HR Healthcare forum for sharing, networking, and learning in the HR space.
  • Ceridian INSIGHTS, Oct 2 – 5 : Catch visionary thought leaders, industry experts, and innovators at this Las Vegas event, including key speaker Kevin Bacon
  • Staffing World, Oct 3 – 5 : This year’s ASA event in Charlotte features keynotes from Mike Krzyzewski, Paul Zikopoulos, and Dominique Dawes
  • Paylocity Elevate Conference, Oct 3 -5 : a virtual event featuring keynote speakers Abby Wambach, Jenn Lim, and Elatia Abate
  • Talent Success Conference, Oct 4 : a virtual conference with industry-leading HR experts discussing trends, insights, and new methods for recruiting and retaining top talent for your business.
  • Recruitment Agency Expo, Oct 4 – 5 : Industry leaders in the UK will converge on Birmingham for this big annual exposition.
  • Swipeclock Summit, Oct 5 – 6 : a free event with hands-on education, workshops, and so forth for Swipeclock users
  • NAPEO’s Annual Conference and Marketplace, Oct 9 – 11 : The National Association of Professional Employer Organizations will be hosting this annual event for the PEO industry in Orlando
  • HR Tech Conference, Oct 10 – 13 : The huge annual show at Mandalay Bay in Vegas has been going for 25 years!
  • Sanford Rose Associates, Oct 11 – 13 : SRA members will convene in Dallas, TX to meet and learn
  • IHRE Summit, Oct 17 : The In House Recruitment Expo Summit will be attracting top UK and global recruiting pros to Coventry Arena
  • Hunt Scanlon ‘Optimizing Talent for Growth’, Oct 18 : This conference in San Francisco is on the topic of private equity and venture capital recruiting and talent management.
  • UNLEASH World, Oct 17 – 18 : Taking place in Paris, this show is billed as “where the HR world meets”
  • HRO Today’s Talent Acquisition Strategies & Technology Showcase, Oct 17 – 18 : A two day event with insights and best practices for HR in Houston, TX
  • Gartner ReimagineHR Conference, Oct 23 – 25 : This is an Orlando, FL event for CHROs and HR leadership teams with multiple tracks to choose from
  • Silicon Valley TechRecruit, Oct 25 – 26 : Head to San Francisco for workshops on recruitment operations, AI sourcing, and other talent acquisition topics

November 2023

  • SIA Healthcare Staffing Summit, Nov 1 – 3 : Staffing Industry Analysts will hold their summit targeted at the healthcare staffing market at Red Rock Resort in Vegas
  • Tech Recruitment Conference, Nov 2 : TRC is a one-day event in person in Amsterdam and virtually aimed specifically at technology recruiters
  • Michigan Recruiter’s Conference, Nov 2 : The only specifically designed Recruiter conference for corporate Talent Acquisition Pros and Leaders in Michigan!
  • NAPS Conference, Nov 5 – 7 : Jacksonville will host the National Association of Personnel Services’ annual event this year
  • HCI Analytics Conference, Nov 15 : Human Capital Institute offers this event on Finding New Candidate Pools with Recruitment Analytics
  • LEAP TA Healthcare, Nov 14 – 15 : Talent acquisition leaders in the healthcare space will meet in Houston for a free conference with action-orientated, strategic dialogue.
  • Future of HR, Nov 15 – 16 : Join in HR.com’s FREE virtual event, “Future of AI and Recruitment Technologies”

December 2023

  • Recruiting Daily “Talent Sleuths” Dec 7 : An immersive training event featuring HR sourcing leadings where you’ll hone your detective skills to unveil top talent and master the art of recruitment.

Are you planning to attend any of the events above? Did you go to one already? Let us know in the comments below!

Franchising – licensing a brand, business model, or product to a separate entity – is a popular way to run a business. And for good reason: some of the world’s best-known brands are built that way. Take American Recruiters, for example. They’re recognized by Forbes as one of America’s top professional and executive recruiting firms.

Gino Scialdone - President & CEO - recruiter franchising at American Recruiters
Gino Scialdone, President & CEO, American Recruiters

President and CEO of American RecruitersGino Scialdone – began his franchise program over 20 years ago. Since then, it’s grown from strength to strength.

We spoke to Gino to discover why his franchise model is a great fit for recruiters, and how the right ATS and CRM – in the shape of PCRecruiter – helps drive success. 

Why franchise?

Franchising is about systems and processes. The beauty of the franchise model is that it gives people the chance to run their own business for themselves, but not by themselves. 

We started franchising for one reason: to better serve our customers’ needs.

Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters

This is really important in an industry like recruiting, where being able to tap into networks of people and organizations is so vital. It also helps to mitigate some of the risks involved with starting a new business. So it’s no surprise that there are nearly 800,000 franchise establishments in the US alone.

American Recruiters serves a wide range of industries – including healthcare, IT, engineering, and manufacturing – with specialist recruiters. Whether our clients are large enterprises or small businesses, they have one thing in common: they need help to bring in the right talent for multiple roles. 

That’s where PCRecruiter comes in. American Recruiters uses a centralized database – a single source of truth – for all their franchisees so that people with the client relationships are clearly signposted and so “the right hand knows what the left hand is doing”.

This is similar to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system used by Realtors, where property details are listed alongside the brokers. Like an MLS, American Recruiters’ database gives franchise owners access to a ready-made network and a customer-base with an ongoing need to fill open roles. 

The two sides of a recruiting franchise 

Building a database in a recruiting CRM like PCRecruiter creates the opportunity for cross-selling and upselling. Take the healthcare sector, for example. A hospital system needs to recruit nurses, but they might also need someone for their accounting department or IT department. 

The American Recruiters franchise model creates the opportunity to introduce other franchisees – experts from within the network – and get them in front of the right people. Using a single private database inside PCRecruiter, American Recruiters can look across the platform to see who their clients are, the openings they have, and then knock on some different doors within an organization.

Our franchise model does two things: it enables us to go wider and deeper with our customers, and it gives new franchisees the chance to compress the bell curve and get their business started.

Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters

Relationships with companies that fill permanent placements through American Recruiters present opportunities to offer contract staffing – staffing solutions for temporary positions on projects, maternity leave, and so on. At the same time, their franchise model gives new franchise owners the chance to ramp up business faster than if they were doing it on their own. 

The relationships between franchisees are also a strong mechanism for support – they help each other out, working on placements together and going to each other for advice. That’s important because around 60% of placements made by American Recruiters are internal splits between franchisees. Recruiting really is a team sport. 

The keys to success as a recruiting franchise

Recruitment is a people business. American Recruiters’ top franchisees use their previous relationships to garner business for their recruiting practice. They’re real go-getters; people who are always open for business, working across timezones and leading and influencing others. Alongside the ability to build relationships, successful franchisees have three things in common: energy, engagement, and ambition. 

It’s all about relationships. Either developing them with existing franchisees and their network, customers in the database, or with people outside our database.

Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters

Recruiting experience is an obvious feature of their resumes, but that’s not always a prerequisite. One tried and tested route to becoming a successful franchisee is for executives in transition. These individuals move from being the leader of an organization within a particular sector to becoming an executive search consultant. Seasoned executives know their business, know the people, and they know their industry. 

Specializing works because it’s difficult to be all things to all people. In the type of recruitment that American Recruiters does, franchisees need to be entrenched in a core practice. They may diversify their specialties over time, but specific knowledge of a niche is invaluable for executive search. Couple that knowledge with good experience of sales, and you have the recipe for recruiting franchise success.

Success built on synergy, security, people

In recruiting, collaboration is key. American Recruiters’ private database in PCRecruiter enables franchisees to work as a team rather than being siloed. Franchisees also benefit from exceptional brand resilience; they move forward with the power of the American Recruiters brand behind them.

Over the years, American Recruiters has weathered multiple financial storms, from Black Monday in 1987 to the Great Recession in 2008, and more recently the global pandemic that wiped out around 40% of recruiting firms. That’s just one reason why Forbes has recognized American Recruiters as one of the top 250 professional recruiting and staffing firms since 2016. 

No matter how stellar the recruitment tech, if you can’t get someone on the phone to walk you through something – like training or setting up a new feature – the shine quickly diminishes. With PCRecruiter there’s always someone there to help.

Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters

This endorsement makes the brand attractive to both companies seeking a high-performing recruiting firm and potential franchisees looking to grow their own business by being part of an established recruiting brand. They also get peace of mind from PCRecruiter’s robust security protocols, which ensure the database is protected from nefarious external parties. At the same time, they benefit from reliable, high-quality, and on-demand customer support. After all, successful recruiting – and recruiting tech – is all about people. 

To discover more about American Recruiters’ winning franchise model, visit their website at https://www.americanrecruiters.com/franchise-now/

Back in 2015, All-In-Staffing’s Account Executive, Mike Trent, was in sales and business development, helping the firm get off the ground. Today, he’s part of a thriving staffing service company operating out of three offices in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Their specialty is the manufacturing sector, placing candidates in a range of industrial and clerical roles.

Mike Trent, Account Executive for All-In-Staffing

Working in an increasingly digital world, and staffing a technology-driven sector like manufacturing, it made sense for Mike and his team to go paperless. He had two goals: make it easier to get the right candidates through the door, and make better use of data. They partnered with PCRecruiter, and we recently helped them finish the leap from paper-based to online recruiting. Here’s their story.

There’s a huge labor shortage in our area. The process we’re using now – thanks to PCRecruiter and our web-based platform – helps us extend our reach.

Mike Trent, Account Executive, All-In-Staffing 

Before going paperless, All-In-Staffing operated a recruiting model familiar to many firms. They stored their candidate records on paper files, including extensive handwritten notes on a front sheet. It was a flawed system, but it worked — to a point. After first signing on with PCRecruiter in 2016, the team began tracking their process in the ATS, which made the recruiters’ work much simpler. However, the recruiters still had to manage transferring paper application responses into the system by hand.

Attracting the right applicants

In 2023, All-In Staffing decided to pursue the complete digitization and optimization of their application process. They realized that this would improve the candidate experience, and consequently fill more roles for their clients.

Before pushing into online recruiting, applicants would physically come into the office and complete a 19-page paper application for the open positions. The form-filling cost everyone a lot of time, potentially up to an hour, and wasn’t great for the candidate experience. There was also no ‘job board’ as such, and applicants needed to make an in-person visit or call the office to find out what was available.

On paper, there’s just no connection. You can’t connect the data at all. You can reference it, but there’s a lot of back and forth. Going digital enabled us to put candidates in the right places, and set everyone up for success.

Mike Trent, Account Executive, All-In-Staffing 

As a staffing firm, improving the candidate experience has been key to staying competitive during an ongoing labor shortage. All-In-Staffing has worked to overcome applicants’ negative perceptions of staffing firms and the myth that they only give candidates access to temporary, short-term placements. Becoming more appealing to applicants and changing their perceptions required a new, more digital approach.

Applying from anywhere, anytime 

Marissa Delgado, Office Manager at All-In Staffing

All-In Staffing’s Office Manager, Marissa Delgado, helped oversee the changes, training all the recruiters in the transition from paper to digital. She was well-placed to see the impact. 

Before going digital, many candidates were reluctant to go into the office, unwilling to waste gas or time on a position that wasn’t guaranteed. Online applications were fast becoming the norm, so All-In Staffing needed to meet candidates where they were. 

Working with a PCRecruiter consultant, Marissa and Mike reviewed their old on-paper forms and revised their data collection for the online world. They cut down on the work required of candidates, collecting only the necessary information.

Our online application now takes 20 minutes. Tops. Now applicants can do it from anywhere, as opposed to coming into our office. It saves them — and us — a lot of time.

Marissa Delgado, Office Manager, All-In Staffing

Not only has online recruiting made it easier for applicants, it’s also improved things from the recruiters’ standpoint as well. They can screen more candidates, and screen them before meeting in person, which saves everyone time. 

Making use of online recruiting data across locations

All-In Staffing found great efficiency improvements by eliminating the need for manual filing and the back and forth between the screen and a manual filing system. Not only do digital candidate records take up far less space than paper records, they’re also much easier to reference and share.

That’s especially important for All-In Staffing, who are distributed over three office locations. Regardless of where they’re based, their recruiters can now access every file without putting in a request to another office. Records are secure and centralized, which means they’re accessible and easy to update by everyone who needs them, when they need them.

The All-In Staffing Team, now moving ahead with digital recruiting
The All-In Staffing team poses in front of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in their hometown of Cleveland

Make a plan, make the change

Every firm and every recruiter has their own unique way of doing things, and going digital means change, which can be daunting. However, re-contextualizing a legacy paper-based process for the digital realm can also be a great opportunity to decide what information is actually needed at what step in the process.

Unlike a paper application, where everything must be collected at once, while the candidate is in the office or holding the paper, a digital format makes it easy to collect the minimum to get rolling and to augment the record via emailed questionnaires or other follow-ups if and when the extra details are required.

Going paperless means reimagining your processes and workflows in a whole new context. When done with forethought, expert guidance, and the right recruitment CRM / ATS, it benefits clients, candidates, and recruiters alike.

Discover how PCRecruiter can help digitize and optimize your recruitment processes. Book a demo

Every sector comes with its own unique set of recruitment challenges. The medical space is no exception. Sourcing qualified candidates for a wide range of roles – from Pediatric Allergists to General Radiologists – is no easy feat, especially when there’s a shortage of new talent coming through.

Spencer Britt
Spencer Britt, President of Britt Medical Search

Britt Medical Search have been members of the National Association of Physician Recruiters (NAPR) since 2016. Their dedicated team has built up a network of nearly 500,000 physicians, helping to fill roles in critical access facilities, medical groups, and hospitals.

Co-founder and President, Spencer Britt, spoke to us about the challenges of recruiting in the medical space, his passion for serving the healthcare sector, and how the right recruitment tech helps support the process.

It’s a people business

For recruiters, healthcare is a complex industry to navigate. It takes knowledge, experience, and expertise to understand the needs of healthcare organizations and connect them with the best candidates for their open roles. That’s why Spencer’s background in the health industry and MBA in Healthcare Management are invaluable tools for getting the job done. He understands the needs of different healthcare settings, and the depth and breadth of roles and specialties. 

Like many recruiters in the medical space, Spencer and his team are dealing with high volumes. They have hundreds of thousands of physicians on their books, and around 4,000 open requisitions. That’s why they need recruitment software — an ATS with CRM functionality — that can handle high volumes of data. 

I’m all about simplicity, and I’m a relationships guy – someone who’s not getting worked up about Artificial Intelligence!

Spencer Britt, Co-founder And President, Britt Medical Search

The current talent shortage (partly caused by limited access to fellowship and residency programs) means qualified candidates can cherry-pick their roles. Recruiters need to work fast to get the best candidates in front of a hiring manager. For that reason, candidate databases need clean, up-to-date, and accurate records that are easily searchable.

When sourcing and placing candidates in the medical sector, there are additional factors to consider, from board certification and relevant qualifications to any record of malpractice. Having customizable fields makes sourcing and selecting suitable candidates much easier.

Britt Medical Search’s mission is to get the right medical expertise into healthcare organizations that need it. They do a lot of recruiting for critical access facilities — something Spencer is passionate about. After all, recruitment is a people business.

Balancing generality and specialty

Recruiting in Healthcare
The current talent shortage (partly caused by limited access to fellowship and residency programs) means qualified candidates can cherry-pick their roles.

Like any recruitment sector, there are different approaches to recruiting and retaining top talent in healthcare. Some firms niche-down on a specialty, whereas others — Britt Medical Search included — take a more generalist approach. A lot of that comes down to belief.

Spencer and his team have the relevant expertise and experience to provide a generalist service that covers the full range of candidates and clients. They’re confident in their ability to take on that responsibility and to deliver the best outcomes for all parties. They’ve been doing it now for over 6 years and counting, so they must be getting something right!

PCRecruiter is super simple and intuitive to use. The ability to create unlimited custom fields to hold our particular data points is really important for the work we do.

Spencer Britt, Co-founder & President, Britt Medical Search

One key factor is that healthcare is ever-evolving. Being a generalist enables Spencer and his team to provide recruitment support wherever it’s needed, from placing an orthopedic specialist in New York to filling open positions for a nurse practitioner and a pediatrician in Oregon. 

With an intuitive yet powerful and customizable ATS/CRM at the center of their tech stack, Britt Medical Search is empowered to serve a broad community of medical professionals. They’re able to strike the right balance between generality and specialty.

The value of human interaction

Spencer enjoys the diversity and variety of his role. Like most recruiters, he thrives on human interaction. At Britt Medical Search, he handles new and continuing client communications while other team members focus on key aspects of data management, and moving candidates along their uniquely configured pipeline toward a placement.

For Spencer, it’s important that recruitment tech is not overly engineered. It needs to support the process, not get in the way of it. That’s because collaboration is the key to success. Spencer’s team collaborate and communicate with each other, and clients, to achieve a simple end goal: to find a great healthcare provider who can support a local community.  

PCRecruiter offers all we need for all the volume we have, which says a lot. I can’t underscore that enough. It’s been a real cornerstone for our base of client customers.

Spencer Britt, Co-founder And President, Britt Medical Search

Human interaction lies at the core of Britt Medical Search. They believe in the fundamentals of human communication. They know their roles, and they know how all of their efforts can work synergistically toward their goals. 

For Spencer, taking a human-centric approach to recruiting boils down to one thing: be easy to reach. It’s that ability to be responsive and contactable in and around people’s busy schedules that make the difference in a high-volume recruitment sector like healthcare. That, together with the right recruitment tech.

No matter what space you recruit in – whether you’re in permanent placement, contracting, or HR sourcing – PCRecruiter makes it easier to do more of what matters most: interacting with people. 

Book a demo

It’s easy to see the appeal of a 360-degree recruitment cycle and the potential to earn big fees. But with recruiters focused on full-fee placements, firms can often miss out on the untapped value of internal splits. Sure, internal splits won’t suit every recruitment setup, but done right they can bring exceptional results. Just ask the Bowerman Group.

Rob Bowerman
Rob Bowerman, President — The Bowerman Group

For the fourth year in a row, the Bowerman Group has been recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Best Executive Recruiting Firms. They’ve been using PCRecruiter for five years.

As a boutique search firm specializing in premium and luxury consumer brands, they’re experts in all things retail, ecommerce, and marketing. Not only that, they’ve got the workflow of internal split-desk recruitment down to a fine art.

Michelle Catucci
Michelle Catucci, Executive Recruiter — The Bowerman Group

We recently discussed the topic of internal splits and their value to the recruitment business with President, Rob Bowerman, and Executive Recruiter, Michelle Catucci, to discover more about how they power their process with internal splits.

What is a split placement?

A split placement occurs when a job order is handled by two separate parties — typically the lead recruiter and the researcher. Each party takes charge of a different aspect of the placement. 

The lead recruiter handles the client’s job order while the researcher supplies the candidates. When the placement is made, each person involved takes their cut of the fee. This can happen within a firm or between firms. 

How do internal splits work?

While there’s definitely a place for inter-agency splits, the way Bowerman Group does it (and does so highly effectively) is through internal splits. Here’s how internal splits work:

When a search comes in to a recruiter, both the lead recruiter and the researcher are (ideally) part of the kick-off meeting. This is particularly important for the researcher, who needs to gather as much information as possible about the role before seeking potential candidates.

Bowerman Group begin their search inside PCRecruiter, having built up a private database of quality candidates over the years, but additional, high-caliber candidates are also sought out externally and added to the list. PCRecruiter’s PCR Capture is a great advantage here because it allows the researcher to quickly generate records for potential candidates from online sources such as LinkedIn. 

All notes are kept inside the system, so previous correspondence or engagement with a particular candidate is instantly available. This is a time-saving advantage, as recently placed candidates or those who aren’t the right fit are easily dismissed, allowing engagement with the right ones more quickly. 

“Copious notes go into PCRecruiter. So when I’m making a new search, if one of my colleagues has touched this area in the last year – it keeps me from wasting time with candidates who aren’t the right fit.”

– Michelle Catucci, Executive Recruiter, Bowerman Group

Once a successful match is made, the candidate is turned over to the lead recruiter with all the information they need to make their presentations. Throughout the process, candidates are tracked by the software, from first contact through to offers accepted.

When a placement is completed, the split is entered into PCRecruiter, identifying the lead recruiter and the researcher. At the Bowerman Group, it’s acknowledged that this is not always clear-cut, especially when someone else — often a research assistant or another recruiter — has made a contribution to the placement. So whenever necessary, they also credit a third person in the split when sharing with the accounting team. Users of the PCR Analytics can also log and report on these split calculations across time, reporting on team and team member contributions to KPIs.

Internal splits add all-round value

For the Bowerman Group and their clients, offering a single point of contact is essential. Within that client relationship, the firm will perform a variety of searches. They’ll cover a variety of open roles, from a training manager to an executive.

“Our number one tip for making splits a success? Have a really good process. That’s the key. Sometimes it feels like it’s patented because we now have it down to a science!”

–  Rob Bowerman, President, Bowerman Group

Internally, responsibility for the research and screening will go to the person with the most relevant expertise, while the single point of contact is someone who knows the client and has built a relationship with them, This is maintained at all times. It’s hugely valuable because it means clients don’t feel as though they’re being ping-ponged from one person to another.

At the same time, this internal split means the lead recruiter can give the client access to the best possible expertise for a particular type of role. This helps to strengthen and increase the value of their relationship.

The Bowerman Group attributes much of their success to their process — something they’re worked hard to refine over the years. That includes a second screening with the lead recruiter, so they can confidently explain why someone is being presented as a good fit.

Making internal splits work for you

“I really enjoy digging into PCRecruiter and reformatting how we present candidates using a key points page, and resume page. The client can always see everything — there’s a link, so they can forward that link to anyone in the company who wants to look at it.”

– Michelle Catucci, Executive Recruiter, Bowerman Group

Internal splits allow recruiters to play to their strengths. It’s a collaborative model that also helps with economies of scale. At Bowerman Group, this model has evolved organically over time, with specialisms emerging based on background experience and personal preference. Those recruiters who thrive in frontend roles are given room to thrive, and those who enjoy the sourcing side are able to focus on their research efforts. 


There are more formalized ways of working out there — such as the pod system — but ultimately it’s about finding a process that works for you and your clients. A simple-to-use ATS / Candidate Relationship Management system can help support your process so you can find the information you need when you need it the most. 

PCRecruiter offers a visual and easy-to-follow pipeline that indicates every step of your process. Book a demo

Whether your recruiters are in the office or at home, the safety of candidate and company data is a priority. A breach can be costly for your recruitment efforts, your finances, and your reputation. As with any remote role, recruitment comes with its own risks. But with the correct knowledge, clear policies, and the right recruitment software, you and your remote recruitment team can keep data safe.

Risks To Data In Remote Recruiting

More and more people are getting used to remote interactions as part of the recruitment process and efforts to attract the best talent with a view to hiring them. The risks to data privacy in recruitment are similar to many other professions.

Remote lawyers, accountants — even mobile engineers — need systems for keeping data safe. Hardware risks arise when users bring their own device as opposed to a company-issued one. This isn’t a major issue for large enterprises that supply employees with equipment, but it may be a concern for third-party recruiters and smaller recruiting firms.

A home workstation (photo by Elle Hughes)
Working from home can be as secure as working from the office with the proper protocols in place.

Another obvious risk to data is when remote third-party recruiters work for multiple clients and potentially use data from one client to benefit another. For employers, there’s the inherent risk that an unscrupulous remote third-party recruiter, working on their behalf, might attempt to entice talent away to another client. This ethical (and possibly legal) problem is part of a more general challenge around the performance management of remote workers. This is especially relevant in recruitment niches where the key candidates and hiring authorities are well-known to major players.

Legal Implications

Remote recruiting often, but not always, aligns with recruiting across multiple jurisdictions with different employment and contracting laws. This too can create issues around compliance with different data privacy regulations – such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from the European Union (EU).

In the US, social security and financial account information are the only protected pieces of personal data. This is different in other parts of the world. At the same time, legal cases such as the commercial use of a subject’s data are constantly challenging what can and can’t be done with data. In short, recruiters need to be better informed about the candidates and companies they’re working with, and what the legal relationships are.   

The good news is that Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and CRM like CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE have always been suitable for remote work. That’s because users can be in different locations when they sign in, but the database is centrally and securely located in one place. 

9 Recruitment Data Security Considerations

If your team is going to be handling recruitment data remotely, here are nine key points you’ll want to bear in mind:

  1. Technology: Getting your technology stack in order has to be the number one priority for all recruiters — not just those working remotely. This includes everything from communication platforms right through to trust and verification technology for managing performance metrics.
  2. Legality: Alongside your tech stack, recruitment firms and in-house HR teams need to ensure clarity over legal requirements at local, national, and international levels. Ownership of the data is also important to fully understand — who owns it, who’s responsible for it, and which rules apply.
  3. Form management: Another key consideration arises when your recruitment processes involves the distribution, management, and processing of forms. You’ll need to be certain that the data is securely transmitted, securely held, and be aware of who’s responsible for it.
  4. Contractual obligations: Recruitment firms can also ensure that compensation for contractors or employees is dependent on their data compliance and classification. By making it a job requirement for data to be entered cleanly into the system, the sources and the audit trail are made transparent and complete.
  5. Virtual Private Network (VPN): A core piece in remote security is the ability to lock down recruitment software within your company’s VPN and to and not store data like social security numbers unencrypted on a local device.
  6. IP Restrictions: By imposing restrictions that only allow a specific range of IP addresses to access data, business owners can limit access. Using IP restrictions means that even a compromised password is cannot allow unauthorized users into the system. 
  7. Remote desktop: Running your work desktop remotely via another connected device is another option for controlling access to data and monitoring its use. This is less common today thanks to browser-based software, but tools like Chrome Remote Desktop have also made it more convenient.
  8. Control measures: Establishing what the appropriate permissions are for each user of your recruitment software — and each kind of remote worker — ensures recruiters only see what they need to see, and can only access data that’s relevant to their role. 
  9. Data disposal: Different regulations exist determining record retention and destruction. Recruitment firms, as well as in-house teams, need to know how to store and destroy data accordingly. One example is the I9 form in the US, which must be kept for 3 years.

Considerations such as these need to be addressed at the contact stage between the customer and the vendor. That’s especially important when the data held is aggregated over an extended time period. A further consideration is the difference between data held online and data physically kept in disconnected cold storage.

The Security Features Recruiters Need

PCRecruiter’s built-in security functionality makes it the safe choice for remote recruiting. Here’s a list of some of the most popular security features:

  • IP whitelisting, which means only trusted IP addresses can access your recruitment data.
  • Permissions and preferences that enable you to impose limitations on a recruiter’s views and access to particular functions.
  • IP-tagged action logs so you can monitor where and when users are accessing the system, as well as what major actions are being taken.
  • Two-factor authentication (2FA) helps provide assurance that the loss of a password doesn’t automatically compromise your recruiter’s account.
  • Multi-database functionality allows you to keep datasets separate and secure from cross-contamination.
  • Field-level encryption means you can protect sensitive data in particular fields.
  • The ability to host PCRecruiter locally allows it to run on a private ‘air-gapped’ network where required.  

When it comes to keeping data safe, remote recruiting is not substantially different from other forms of remote sales. In fact, the nature of remote recruiting encourages companies to more carefully consider the security of their recruitment practices. 

These practices include the processes used to build and validate trust in remote workers. Of course, it also helps to choose a CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE vendor with highly-configurable security and remote features.  

Managing remote recruiters? PCRecruiter can help keep data safe. Speak to our sales team. Contact us.

From a recruiting industry standpoint, it’s often assumed that increased labor mobility equates with increased job change velocity, which is a positive factor for recruiting activity. However, this trend may be starting to shift.

A man leaving a business.

In recent years, the United States has seen an increase in workers leaving and changing jobs — a phenomenon known as “The Great Resignation.” The reasons behind this trend are not yet entirely clear. Possible explanations include health and safety concerns, workers reevaluating their work-life balance, and the effects of remote work.

Some argue that “The Great Resignation” is merely a result of fluctuations in the business cycle. This trend is a reversal of the long-term decline in labor mobility that began in the 1980s and was reflected in various data, including the job-to-job transition rate and the number of hirings and separations. The ‘quits’ rate, which measures the proportion of jobs that workers quit in a given month, provides insight into labor mobility.

The Rising Rate of Quits

Until roughly 2017, the quits rate reflected the overall decline in labor mobility during this period, particularly during the Great Recession. The more recent pandemic-induced recession caused a sharp decline in job mobility, particularly in voluntary job changes. However, the quits rate has grown since that time, peaking at 3% and remaining comfortably above any pre-pandemic level.

The reasons for this sudden increase in labor mobility are disputed, with some arguing that it is temporary and others seeing it as a long-term trend. The potential benefits of increased mobility are significant, especially for young workers, but there are also concerns about increased uncertainty and inefficiency in the labor market.

Nobody knows what is currently driving or inhibiting labor mobility.

Ultimately, economists will need to develop models and test them empirically to gain a rigorous and thoughtful understanding of what the current trend in labor mobility means for American workers. In other words, nobody knows what is currently driving or inhibiting labor mobility.

The Rising Rate of Mortgage Interest

Another wrinkle is the rise in interest rates over the past 18 months, leading to an increase in housing mortgage finance rates. This has resulted in homeowners being effectively locked into their mortgages.

A new paper by Professors Julia Fonseca and Lu Liu reveals that homeowners with mortgages in the US can only move to a different home after paying off their existing mortgage and then refinancing their home with a new mortgage. Those caught in a mortgage lock-in can only relocate by buying a cheaper home or increasing their earnings, in addition to covering the costs of moving and refinancing.

The paper’s authors build their case around the metric of the mortgage rate differential, which is the difference between the mortgage rate locked in at purchase and the current market rate. The paper found that a decline in mortgage rate differentials reduces moving rates, which could explain a decline in moving by around 25% between 2018 and the next 10 years.

Household-specific mortgage rate deltas (Δr), measured as the difference between the mortgage rate that the household locked in at the time of mortgage origination and the current average 30-year fixed mortgage rate.
Household-specific mortgage rate deltas (Δr), measured as the difference between the mortgage rate that the household locked in at the time of mortgage origination and the current average 30-year fixed mortgage rate. (Fonseca / Liu)

Additionally, the study found that mortgage lock-in discourages labor mobility. Interestingly, the U.K. and Canada have a different mortgage market, where many more home loans are assumable and portable —i.e. the loan can follow an owner to a different dwelling. Such reforms in US practice could have a material effect on labor mobility.

The Rise of Remote Work

In our opinion at Main Sequence Technology, the ‘X factor’ in this situation is remote work and the increasing digitization of any business processes that’s amenable to virtual performance.

Recently released Census data shows that remote work has increased unevenly across the United States, with the highest rate of remote work being in Washington, DC, followed by San Francisco, CA, and Austin, TX. Remote work is clustered along coastal areas and mega-growth cities, but is also prevalent in a variety of other places.

The remote work share has rocketed from 5.6% in 2019 to 17.9% in 2021 to an estimated 33.5% for 2023 at the national level, meaning more than a third of all workers are able to do their jobs away from a fixed office at least part of the time. Remote work is related to occupation mix, higher education levels, longer commute times, and more expensive housing markets.

We assume that remote work will accelerate labor mobility velocity, while higher interest rates may inhibit labor mobility. It remains unknown, and unknowable, what effect future policy or social changes may have on labor mobility, as the pandemic emphatically demonstrated. Recruiting looks to benefit from current trends, as there is no sign of remote work or digitization slowing, even in the face of potential recession and already-felt rises in the real costs of borrowing.


Martin Snyder is a co-founder and Principal at Main Sequence Technology, Inc.

What started out as a good intention – using legacy hiring data to streamline the candidate screening process – had the unintended consequence of perpetuating hiring bias. In the case of one online retail giant, recruitment AI learned to exclude particular groups of people from certain roles.

As of 2023, New York has legislated against ‘automated employment decision rules’. Other states are sure to follow. Clearly, the use of AI in recruitment isn’t quite there – yet. (When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) in recruitment, you probably already know the story so far. If you don’t, then we highly recommend that you check out our blog post about the potential and the pitfalls.)

However, what these developments have done is help highlight how technology could be used to support diversity and inclusivity in recruitment. Let’s take a closer look.

Overcoming Historical Bias 

When recruitment AI takes historical hiring data, let’s say for software developers, it discovers a historical trend. In this example, the hiring trend leans towards white males of a certain age. So when the AI uses this data to potentially screen candidates for a software developer position – guess what? It screens out candidates who don’t fit the criteria. Therein lies the problem with using ‘automated employment decision rules’ – they’re susceptible to historical bias.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get the same result.

What recruitment AI has exposed is an inherent structural issue within the employment market where groups of people were not getting shortlisted, not getting interviewed, and not getting hired because of who they were as opposed to what they could do. What we’re seeing today is an adjustment to that inequality through a confluence of history and technology which enables recruiters to not only create a more inclusive workforce, but to proactively recruit talent from more diverse backgrounds. 

Offering distance-based roles is just one example of how employers and their recruiters can reach a wider and more diverse talent pool by looking beyond their city limits or state lines into previously overlooked communities or social groups. Similarly, ATS and CRM software can help recruiters specifically target a wider demographic of candidates, which simultaneously improves their chances of acquiring the right talent for the right role.

Facilitating Diversity Of Thought

As organizations actively seek to increase the diversity of their workforce and create more inclusive environments, it falls to recruiters to increase the appeal of open roles to a broader audience. That means positioning the company’s employer brand and job postings in a way that appeals to many different types of individuals, irrespective of their age, skin color, sexual orientation, or gender. Through their recruiting efforts, employers need to ensure that underrepresented groups become an integral part of their organization. Groups of people who have been overlooked in the past will need greater opportunity to not only get hired, but also progress into leadership roles.

Diversity comes in many different forms.

One of the great things about increasing workforce diversity is that it brings in new ideas and perspectives. It’s healthy for organizations to encourage diversity of thought, and to openly welcome and facilitate a range of viewpoints, which can ultimately help to drive business forward. Instead of speaking with one voice, companies can embrace a range of different voices and therefore increase their appeal to people from different backgrounds.

The other benefit of having a diverse and inclusive workforce is that it makes everyone feel more welcome. In turn, this increases employee happiness. A happier workforce is usually a more productive one. A more productive workforce creates better business success and increased revenues. 

Technology As A Force For Good

Diversity and Inclusion in the work environment is highest in stock photos.
Studies show that workplace diversity is at it’s peak among employees depicted in stock photography.

Unfortunately, some employers might look at a stack of resumes and discount potential candidates based on their name alone. If the name didn’t sound “right,” if it wasn’t the sort of name that was perceived to traditionally fit with a certain role, it ended up in the ‘no’ pile. Studies as recent as 2021 have shown that name discrimination is still having an impact. This means some of the best, well-qualified talent may be out of the running even before the race has even begun.

These days, recruitment technology allows recruiters to proactively search for a more diverse range of candidates based on factors beyond their name. This needs to be carefully aligned with the recruiter’s fundamental purpose, which is to bring in the best talent for the role, whoever they may be. 

Ultimately, organizations need recruiting practices that ensure their workforce reflects the totality of the population they serve; while getting the best available talent. To that end, recruiters need an ATS with the ability to search for candidates based on a range of quantifiable skill sets. 

At the same time, the way in which recruiters source, track, and recruit individuals needs to be transparent and compliant with the laws of a city, state, or country. The right ATS and CRM platform can help recruiters ensure that a more diverse range of candidates make the cut, helping the organizations they serve to become more inclusive. 

PCRecruiter is a powerful recruitment platform which partners with a range of systems and services that provide cutting-edge recruitment tools. View our integrations and partners.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps websites improve their web page visibility on search engines like Google. SEO is primarily used by digital marketers to increase traffic to websites, generate leads, and increase revenue.

In the world of inbound recruiting and staffing, your job descriptions are your primary content, and writing them should be done with search engines in mind. How can recruiters use SEO techniques to improve the chances of their job descriptions being discovered and shared online? 

We spoke to Steve Gipson, Sales Manager at Recruiters Websites, and to PCRecruiter job board implementation guru Andrew Rothman, to find out more. 

What is a search engine optimized job description?

A search engine optimized job description is one which has been created using SEO best practices in order to increase its visibility on search results. This can help drive potential candidates to a recruiter’s website.

SEO is the practice of improving the visibility of websites and web pages in organic search engine results pages (SERP). While this can involve optimizing various aspects of the back-end, like the page title, meta title and meta description, the goal for the content on the front end is to provide the most relevant content for the user’s intent. 

User intent can be broken into three categories: informational, navigational and transactional. Put simply: know, go and do. It determines what sort of content users are looking for. Here are three common examples of user intent in recruitment content: 

Informational

The user is seeking information about a particular job role, career path or potential employer within a certain industry. Their search terms might include phrases like ‘what is’ or ‘how do I become’ or ‘where can I find’.

Navigational

The user is looking for job postings from a particular company where they would ideally like to work. They’re likely to search using terms like the company name, their location and the word ‘careers’. 

Transactional

The user knows they want to apply for a specific job role and is seeking a way to begin that process. Their search terms might include words like ‘apply’ or ‘job application form’.

A search engine optimized job description will incorporate SEO fundamentals, relevant on-page content, and specific keywords to make it more visible to prospective candidates searching for a specific role within a specific industry, and in a specific location.

The job description itself is informational content, but when it forms part of a job posting that sits on a company website it also needs to meet the needs of navigational users looking for that specific role, as well as transactional users who already know they want to apply for it. 

That’s why it’s important to include clear information with relevant industry and role keywords.

Why ‘search engine optimize’ a job description?

Studies show that 75% of people don’t go beyond the first page of the SERP. In other words, the majority of people won’t scroll past the first eight organic search results on Google. For job seekers, this means they largely end up on major sites like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, or Indeed. No matter how good your SEO practices are, an independent company or recruiting firm’s job listings are unlikely to out-rank the big guys because Google knows those sites are the most-clicked results. However, you can still help to raise your jobs above others for more granular searches.

And that’s where search engine optimized job descriptions come in. If your job posting lives on a web page on a company or recruitment website, and it’s been correctly optimized, it stands a much better chance of getting picked up through organic search.

While it’s good recruitment practice to combine SEO with paid advertising, organic search is the equivalent of free advertising.

Even if the role advertised is not exactly what the candidate was looking for, this might be the first time a speculative jobseeker has stumbled across your organization and/or the first time they’ve visited your website. This gives you a chance to really showcase your brand, and start to build a relationship with them.   

Techniques for optimizing job descriptions

There are many tried and tested techniques for SEO. With almost 86% of the search market, Google is the go-to source for most web searchers. Google’s algorithms determine which organic content ranks highest (beneath paid ads), so it’s important to follow the best practices to maximize the visibility of your job descriptions. 

Here are nine techniques to help you optimize your job descriptions:

➀ Keep job titles clear and simple 

Putting the job title in the page title, and meta title of your page when possible, will help it get picked up by Google and give it a clear title when the page is shared. If you can, include the company name as well. The key here is to be clear and simple using common, unabbreviated industry terminology.  Use the title phrasing that your jobseekers are likely to use.

➁ Incorporate keywords and phrases

When describing a specific role, you’re naturally going to include keywords associated with that particular role and industry. If you want to be more precise with what to include, take a look at a competitor’s top ranking job description from the search results and scan it for relevant words.  Remember to use the phrases a job seeker might use when searching.

➂ Avoid ‘keyword stuffing’

Repetition of a keyword phrase is important, to a point, but Google is increasingly good at prioritizing natural-sounding content. After all, a search engine’s success relies on the quality of results it returns, and nobody wants to be taken to a page they can’t make sense of. Simply repeating the same keyword or phrase over and over again can be detrimental. At most, aim for three mentions for every 400-500 words. And never employ trickery like hiding keywords in white text on a white background.

➃ Use smaller chunks of text

Like most human readers, Google finds it easier to read easily-digestible chunks of text. So it’s essential to break up your text using clear headings (H2s and H3s in SEO-speak) and bullet points. Your HTML editor will have tools for adding Headings. Try to keep your job description text clear and concise. Use bullet points for things like required experience or workplace benefits, but keep them short and sweet. Five bullets at a time is ideal. If you’re approaching double figures, you’ve gone too far. 

➄ Avoid duplicate content

A search engine that returns link after link to the exact same content is not going to be very useful! Job descriptions are no different. When Google finds the same job on multiple sites, their algorithm has to decide which one is the ‘most important’ – that’s likely the direct-hire employer’s own website, or a major job board site. By making sure that your job description isn’t too similar to any other, you increase the chances of it being found. This also applies to jobs within your own job board! If you have multiple job postings that are identical aside from the title or location, search engines are apt to ignore them, and may even down-rank your entire job board as a source of low-quality content.

➅ Include geographical information 

Your prospective candidates are almost certainly using geographical location in their searches. By ensuring your job description contains relevant keywords such as the state, city, or county together with the job title, you’re in a much stronger position to be seen by candidates with a specific destination in mind. If you’re advertising a confidential opening, give as much location information as you can manage, or list the job with the nearest major city to get regional searchers.

➆ Use internal and external links

Making connections is as important to SEO as it is to recruitment. A search engine cannot index what it cannot find, so more connections to and between jobs is beneficial. If you can, include relevant links to other parts of your website or to other jobs in your job descriptions, and use job boards and social media shares to make your links discoverable outside of your site.

➇ Include relevant visual media

A job description is a job description, but by simply embedding a short relevant video — either about your company or the role — you not only enhance your SEO, but also provide more appealing and engaging content to potential candidates. If you are using the PCRecruiter Job Board, talk to a rep about adding YouTube or Vimeo links to custom fields for display on your postings.

Final thoughts on SEO optimized job descriptions

Ultimately, job postings are web content like any other page. When you think about it, a job description that’s been optimized for search engines is actually a job description optimized to properly engage potential hires. If you want your content to be appealing to Google, make it sure that it meets the user’s search intent.


PCRecruiter offers a flexible job board that you can use to easily frame your own positions inside of your website and to collect candidates directly into your talent pool. For larger volume job boards or more specific SEO requirements, talk to us about options for more advanced configurations.

Here’s the conundrum. Employers want to reward loyalty. So they value tenure and they value experience. At the same time, many workers are looking to increase their remuneration. So they move companies more frequently, each time with the expectation of moving forward financially.

Jeff Kaye
Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO of Kaye/Bassman International and Next Level Exchange

Consequently, employers are faced with the challenges of conflicting motivations.

On the one hand, they need to reward loyalty. On the other hand, they need to attract the best talent. It’s a balancing act between making the right offer to secure the best talent today, and retaining top talent in the long term.

For this blog post, we once again spoke with industry expert Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO of Kaye / Bassman, to share his insights into the main factors impacting pay today.

Geographic Location 

Are you paying people based on the role that they’re providing, or paying them based on the context of their cost-of-living situation?

Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO, Kaye / Bassman

The pandemic was a catalyst for distance-based working. In sectors where it’s been successful, it’s created trends for greater flexibility in terms of working location. Remote-only and hybrid roles have become increasingly common. Due to regional differences in the cost of living, this has created a push-pull effect. 

A man working remotely from the mountains.

When a company is based in an area with a high cost of living, and the work can be done remotely, employees can still command premium wages. They can also decide to relocate to an area with lower living costs.

At the same, by opening up distance-based roles, companies searching for the right hires can take their pick from a broader talent pool, searching beyond their city or state. If hiring locally is more expensive, they can acquire talent from an area with a lower cost of living and, in theory, pay them less. 

Of course, regardless of where a company’s headquarters are located, some organizations have to compete against each other irrespective of localized differences in the cost of living. In talent-driven markets, some companies are willing to do whatever it takes to bring the best talent on board. Likewise, local businesses which offer products or services within a particular city or state, need to pay their employees in line with the local cost of living to attract and retain the right talent, almost by default.

Company Cost Structures

Organizations based in areas with a higher cost of living either have lower margins or lower cost structures. One way to lower cost structure is through a geographically dispersed workforce.

Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO, Kaye / Bassman

Companies in certain fast-moving industries — particularly those in the technology sector — are changing their approach to office space. Where hybrid or distanced-based working is viable, companies can strategically cut down on square footage. One trend is for companies to open up smaller satellite offices, which provide smaller, more flexible working spaces. From decreasing the size of physical office space to becoming an entirely remote organization, some companies are leveraging distance-based working to cut costs.

A CFO speaking with one of her coworkers.

There are other economic factors which impact overall company cost structures. In industries which are heavily backed by venture capitalists – such as technology – some companies have been given incredibly high valuations. To kick-start and sustain growth, they’ve invested heavily in recruitment, attracting talent with extremely competitive remuneration packages. But that can only continue for so long.*

Already we’re starting to see a plateau and normalization of wages in the face of potential economic downturn. But pay is impacted by multiple factors. Alongside macroeconomics, there’s where the talent is located, and above all else — supply and demand.

Hand It To Hiring Managers

What are companies doing to create an environment which attracts and retains the best talent, one that goes beyond where you can work and the benefits to you?

Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO, Kaye / Bassman

Regardless of the company location, the availability of talent, the compensation, or the opportunity for distance-based working – a great hiring manager can make the difference in getting the right talent through the door at the right price for both the employee and the company. 

The hiring manager is the coach. They create a culture that makes working for an organization desirable – and raise the level of engagement. Interestingly, some of the best companies to work for are also the most profitable. That’s because employees want to work for them, and so location and financial benefits are not the only determining factors.  

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – recruitment is a people business. See how PCRecruiter helps to keep it that way. Discover our tech.

* As a side note, Main Sequence Technology, the company behind PCRecruiter, has always been self-capitalized and owned/operated by its founders. This has led to a quarter-century of growth and stability.

The work from home phenomenon divides opinion. Nowhere is that more keenly felt than in recruitment. Some employers and employees see it as a performance enhancing perk, whilst others view it as a barrier to productivity and career progression. So how can recruiters use it to their best advantage?

Dave Nerz - President of NPAworldwide
Dave Nerz – President of NPAworldwide

NPAworldwide is a global recruitment network of 550 members operating in 42 countries. It spans multiple sectors, and includes specialist and generalist recruiters.

For this blog post, PCRecruiter spoke to the President of NPAworldwide, Dave Nerz, to get his inside perspective on the work from home (WFH) trend.

WFH Wednesday

WFH provides two different working environments. Places to get different kinds of work done. It makes the day go faster – and it’s really helpful for me.

Dave Nerz, President, NPAworldwide

WFH was around long before the pandemic, but lockdowns and social distancing meant more people experienced it than ever before. At that time, WFH became a necessity rather than a ‘nice to have’ option. But like many forward-thinking organizations, NPAworldwide was already testing the water with WFH. They employed remote staff, and Dave Nerz had introduced WFH Wednesday. So when the pandemic hit, they were ready. 

Employees were already set up at home. They had a space to work, and the right tools to get their work done, like a telephone, Internet services, office stationery, and computers. In fact, as a leader, Dave had been doing his own version of WFH for years. Every Wednesday afternoon, he’d set up in the local library to get things done without interruption. He’d switch off his phone and create a situation where he could focus on longer tasks like writing reports. 

Right now, Dave splits his working day between the office in the morning and home in the afternoon. He gets the best of both worlds. Face-to-face meetings and in-person work happens in the office. At home, he can schedule longer video calls, and focus on more complicated time-consuming tasks. His team also benefits. For example, parents can work around their childcare duties, and still get the job done to the benefit of the organization.  

Hybrid Working Arrangements 

As an industry, we’re going to have to figure out how to make more people available to us that would otherwise not be able to fill the roles.

Dave Nerz, President, NPAworldwide

It’s fair to say that certain jobs don’t currently work in a hybrid or remote model. For example, there are roles in manufacturing and engineering which have to be done on site — although with new technology, even that is slowly changing. When roles can be done remotely or hybrid, it opens up a much broader talent pool. That’s important on a global scale. Why? Many sectors are facing a demographic drought. In terms of age, their demographic looks like an inverted pyramid: many people are retiring and there’s not enough young talent coming through. 

An image of a man working at his laptop from home. Photo by Yasmina H.

Specifying a geographic location for roles which could be done remotely immediately shrinks the talent pool. Conversely, widening the search to a particular state — or even the entire country — adds depth and breadth. Hiring on home soil makes things like onboarding and communication easier. But there’s no doubt that in certain industries, such as software development, offshore is sometimes the only answer.

Timezones are also playing an increasingly important role. In the future, we’re likely to see a trend for employers searching for people who work on a certain slice of time, as opposed to being based in a particular city. In that respect, remote and hybrid working will help to close the skills gap.

Training For Success

WFH and remote working is going to help the industry solve some problems in the short term, while we figure out the long term.

Dave Nerz, President, NPAworldwide

As the boomer generation continues to retire, the skills gap widens. In the past, corporations had training programs which would give graduates the right skill sets to go out into an industry and launch their careers. 

Today, a lot of that has gone. Post 9/11 and financial crises, many companies cut costs by axing their training programs, instead searching for ready-made talent. The problem is there’s often not enough of it to go around. 

Bringing in talent from overseas can help. For recruiters and employers, geographic borders make relocating people — physical immigration — a complicated and time-consuming process. Virtual immigration opens up new possibilities. You can have trained talent from abroad work remotely in no time at all.  

The key challenge for employers taking on remote talent is how to ensure new recruits can be successfully onboarded and work effectively without stepping into an office. In the physical environment, you have managers and peers to support their training and development. With WFH, those opportunities don’t arise naturally. They have to be scheduled in. This might make it more challenging for those people who are purely remote. 

It also impacts career development. When someone’s remote-only, managers can see the end results, but they don’t necessarily have visibility over the process including the wins and the mistakes. Without seeing it, managers have to take a leap of faith based on results, which could affect an employee’s promotability. Remote working can also limit opportunities to discuss career advancement because there aren’t those live, face-to-face moments that you get from working in an office. 

Recruitment In A Remote-First World

We’re going to have to select people on the basis of how they demand to work. In some cases, as opposed to an option, WFH becomes a demand.

Dave Nerz, President, NPAworldwide

There’s no question that some work is better done in-person. Remote-first isn’t suitable to every sector. Take automotive engineers, for example. They need to be inside the company to see what’s being done, how it’s done, and what their impact is likely to be.

Even with roles that can potentially be done remotely — such as marketing or recruitment — in-person meetings are still important. People need to get together. Whether that’s casual interaction, or scheduled crossover with other workers and teams, companies need to figure out new ways of working. And recruiters have to be on board with that in order to sell it to prospective candidates. 

A woman working at home. Photo by Kelly Sikkema

At the same time, remote and hybrid working is a matter of taste. Different people work best in different ways. We all have different styles. This is something that employers and recruiters can tap into. The question is: what can they do to attract and retain the right talent as well as optimize their performance? The answer is to offer flexibility that benefits both parties. 

Different demographics will have different demands. Couples with young children will have different needs than people approaching retirement. What it comes down to can be any number of factors, whether that’s style, convenience, or economics. 

Being Effective From Anywhere

I don’t see work in the office as going away. For many businesses and industries, it’s not feasible. It doesn’t make sense.

Dave Nerz, President, NPAworldwide

The bottom line is simple. Employers need the best talent to fill their open roles. Where and how the work gets done most effectively comes down to personal choice. Whether working from home or in the office, it’s personal situations which determine effectiveness. This means managers have to think much more creatively about how things get done.

Recruiters also need to go beyond simply listing WFH, remote, or hybrid as part of a job posting, and consider the wider implications for their target audience. Being able to offer more flexible working arrangements which work in both company and the candidate’s interest can be a win-win — if you get it right. 

Whether you’re a WFH, hybrid, or office-based recruiter, and no matter what type of recruitment you work in, the right ATS and CRM can streamline your day to day and help you make the right hires. Learn more about PCRecruiter

Post pandemic – and in response to the ‘Great Resignation’ – some recruiters quickly turned to innovative methods, in order to speed up the hiring process and fill open positions. Bringing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to handle some of the key decision-making might have initially helped to streamline workflows, but it’s also had some unintentional consequences.

While many people might be happy to have AI make suggestions around which film to watch next, or to recommend other music they may enjoy, handing it responsibility for the selection process in their next job application can raise understandable concerns.

In this blog post, we take a closer look at the pitfalls and the potential of using AI in recruitment, and where it might add value rather than systemized bias.

Current Applications 

There’s no denying that in the modern world, AI has a lot of great uses. Across a range of industries, it’s being increasingly used to streamline workflows and cut costs. In fact, in the recruitment world, AI — and more specifically machine learning — has been used in various forms for some time now. 

Common applications include automated interviews, resume (or CV) screening, as well as administrative duties, such as identifying duplicate candidate records. But the truth is, there’s a lot we don’t know about how AI is being used in recruitment. And that’s a concern. 

Potential Benefits 

For the recruitment business, where AI can really shine is in crawling talent pools for potential candidates based on specific job criteria such as qualifications and experience. It can also learn broadly what kind of candidate is a good fit for a particular role. However, its real potential benefits come from automating some of the repetitive and time-consuming work which goes along with screening, assessing, and scheduling.

Even as far back as 2017, studies showed that hiring decision-makers saw the cost and time saving potential of AI, alongside its ability to deliver better candidate matches. Interestingly, 43% of decision makers also believed that it would remove human bias. And that’s exactly where AI has come unstuck: when it’s been used to replace human decision-making in an effort to speed up the hiring process.

Knowing The Pitfalls of AI in Recruitment

When we talk about AI in recruitment, we really mean machine learning — computer systems which can learn from statistical models and data sets. As Amazon discovered in 2015, using historical human data to inform AI decision models can come at a cost to both potential candidates and their future employers. Their experimental hiring tool which made use of machine learning was informed by ten years of resumes submitted to the company.

This illustration of a robot recruiter was generated entirely by AI.
This illustration of a robot recruiter was generated entirely by AI.

The issue was that the computer system was essentially given a decade of data revealing male dominance in the tech industry and adapted its algorithms accordingly. The result? Resumes containing the word ‘women’ were automatically downgraded. When this ‘algorithmic bias’ was discovered, interventions were made to ensure the system became gender-neutral, but it left lingering concerns that future unintended discrimination might occur, raising important questions around how to ensure that recruitment AI is transparent and fair. 

In fact, transparency over the use of AI in recruitment is one of the biggest challenges currently facing the industry. That’s where new legislation is playing a crucial role.

New Employment Laws

A game changer in terms of the use of AI in recruitment, New York City’s AI employment law restricts the use of ‘automated employment decision tools’ and requires recruiters to undergo an annual bias audit to alleviate potential bias in their systems. 

Recruiters will also have to be transparent about where AI has been used in the recruitment process, and to even provide candidates with alternative options for processing their applications. Undisclosed or biased use of AI in the hiring process will also be subjected to penalty fines. 

Taking effect from January, 1 2023, New York’s new law blazes the trail for further legislation to tackle the inherent bias and potential discrimination generated by machine learning algorithms.

Similar conversations are taking place in the European Union, where the AI Act is set to institute self-certification programs and government oversight. This law will create transparency requirements for AI systems that interact with people, and will attempt to ban a few “unacceptable” qualities of AI systems. Individuals or companies located within the European Union, placing an AI system on the market in the European Union, or using an AI system within the European Union would be subject to the regulation.

Future Possibilities

It’s easy to be dismissive of AI in recruitment. After all, it’s a people business. But there are some clear use cases where it can make trustworthy and time-saving improvements to the placement process. AI can also be trained to trawl records and match specific criteria. For more common roles requiring limited experience or technical skills there is perhaps wider scope for AI to assist with search and selection. The real danger arises when AI trained on imperfect data, and therefore inherently biased, is used for key decision-making.

Conceivably, AI could be used to handle the entire recruitment process — which perhaps less scrupulous recruiters might find appealing. But for most recruiters there’s a sense of professional pride, and a human aspect to hiring — building relationships with employers and candidates — which AI simply can’t replace. 

As an example, there could be three equally well-qualified candidates in the running for an open position. Their education, qualifications and experience all fit the bill, but what about their cultural fit? A good recruiter understands the importance of aligning the employer’s value proposition with the right candidates. AI can easily miss the subtle verbal and non-verbal nuances which influence human-decision making. Humans can also see beyond the data. Especially when you’re looking for someone with transferable skills from outside a particular industry. Good recruiters know that instinct, as much as anything else, comes into play when making the right hire.  

There’s also the candidate’s perspective to consider. They may have a (sometimes valid) suspicion of any technology used to influence the hiring process. For example, even though Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have been around for decades, you can still find plenty of blog posts and guides for ‘how to beat the ATS’. Fears run even deeper with undisclosed uses of AI, particularly when it comes to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. As the Amazon experiment revealed, machine learning opens up the potential for discriminatory algorithms, and runs the inherent risk of excluding candidates you really wanted, over the ones it thinks you want.

Accelerate Hiring Without AI

Although there are some tasks and activities which can be comfortably replaced by AI, when it comes to key decision-making, sourcing the right talent and identifying the best-fit candidate is best left in the hands of humans. But how can you speed up the time to hire without using AI?

Recruitment automations can take care of repetitive, and repeatable everyday tasks, and give recruiters more time to spend time with candidates and employers. It’s particularly helpful for keeping all parties updated through emails, form letters, and notifications, cutting down the time needed to manually create correspondence.

PCRecruiter is an ATS / CRM hybrid which offers recruiters a huge range of opportunities to automate certain aspects of their recruitment process, making workflows more streamlined and cost-effective. Tailored to specific workflows, it’s a seamless, customizable and powerful tool for handling your end-to-end talent sourcing and. 

Want to learn more about the benefits of using automation in recruitment? Read our blog post 5 Ways To Use Automation In Recruitment.

Recruitment is most definitely a people business, so introducing automation into your recruiting process might not seem like an obvious move. That is, until you realize that by adding automation at various points in their workflow, recruiters can actually free up more time to focus on their core business – making placements.

In this post, we explore ways that forward-thinking recruiters use automations to drive efficiency in their recruitment workflows. We’ll see how the right applicant tracking system (ATS) can help you hire faster. 

What is recruitment automation?

Recruitment automation is the use of technology to automate specific tasks within the recruitment process. It helps minimize the time to fill open roles, and reduces costs. This delivers a better overall experience for candidates, employers, and recruiters.

Automation covers both external and internal tasks. These can include things like notifications sent at specific stages of the hiring process or emails to candidates. Ultimately, the less time a recruiter spends logging information, the more time they have to spend working with clients and candidates. 

Recruitment automation can also include more strategic tasks, such as email campaigns, which help keep clients and candidates informed and engaged. Examples of time-saving automations include:

  • Form letters to candidates 
  • Notification prompts to administrators 
  • Emails to clients regarding scheduled interviews

PCRecruiter’s own system for recruitment automation is essentially an open box. Wherever a communication is both repeated and repeatable, the opportunities for automations are endless. As recruiters spot more opportunities to refine workflows, there is less need for them to manually create and send correspondence. 

The great thing about automating via the ATS is that recruiters don’t need to spend time jumping between multiple tools. Doing more things from a single hub reduces friction, speeding up the placement and hiring processes.

The automation building tool is part of recruitment automation in PCRecruiter.
PCRecruiter’s Automations make event-triggered recruitment automations easy for users to implement.

How to use automation in recruitment 

Think more strategically about your own recruiting workflows. You’ll see almost any recruitment process presents potential for automation. Everything from the initial job posting to interview scheduling to following up post-hire is an opportunity to streamline.

For most recruiters, their bane is technology that interferes with their work or slows them down. That being so, the best approach to implementing automations is to identify opportunities in existing processes. Look for points where automation might help recruiters to be more efficient and productive. By automating repetitive and repeatable tasks, recruiters free-up more time to focus on their core activities.

Here are five ways to use automation in recruitment: 

Applicant Tracking 

1

Applicant tracking is the backbone of any recruiter’s day-to-day. A whiteboard or spreadsheet solution might cut it in the early days. However, when you start handling multiple placements and hundreds of candidates these tools become inefficient and unwieldy.

No matter how many candidates in your database, or how many employers you’re dealing with, an applicant tracking system (ATS) like PCRecruiter scales with you. Because the software tracks candidates from end to end, you’ll never lose track of potential hires along the way. Candidates you couldn’t place remain ready for next time a suitable role opens up.

PCRecruiter users can modify fields and forms to suit existing workflows — this includes adding custom automations. For example, triggering behaviors when records containing specific information, such as a location or industry, are entered. 

Job Postings

2

When it comes to job postings, there’s an administrative burden on recruiters to make the information visible. Whether on recruitment websites or your own company’s careers page, it can become complicated to track and manage multiple postings. Automation can help you create once and publish anywhere.

The great thing about PCRecruiter’s integrated job board is that it can be implemented into practically any website. This saves duplication of effort and potential errors that come from managing a website’s job board separately. In addition, leveraging job feeds and integrations helps to advertise the opening on other sites, saving time and effort.

Social Recruiting 

3

In a world where 70% of the workforce consists of passive talent and 82% of Americans have a social media profile, it makes sense to reach potential candidates via their favorite social hangouts. Recruiters can leverage the potential reach of both personal and professional networks via social recruiting. This is accomplished through a combination of posting links to new job postings, and strategic employer branding.

What if every time you published a new position, your marketing team received a notification with all the relevant details? What if the job could be posted to social networks automatically? This could then be easily incorporated in and around other content promoting your employer brand and its values. PCRecruiter’s built-in automation features as well as integrations with services like Paiger and Zapier make these workflows easy to implement.

Process Sequencing 

4

Process sequencing plays a vital role in helping support reps respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently. It provides standardized workflows and even scripting. 

The same approach can be applied to recruitment. Sequences provide the recruiter with a clear and standardized series of tasks. These can be customized to suit different roles or industries. This creates the potential to create and apply automations at specific stages of the process. 

PCRecruiter’s own sequencing tool enables recruiters to create their own workflows, with manual or automatic tasks. Tasks can include phone calls, prompts to connect on LinkedIn, or an automatic email confirming review of a resume. More quickly completing tasks and leveraging automating steps means recruiters can make more placements with less effort.

An easy task-based interface makes recruiting automation simple.
The task-based Sequencing interface allows users to work through their queue with minimal friction.

When it comes to onboarding new recruiters (or helping to keep current ones more effective), sequencing simplifies training. Making every step a clear and straightforward task guides users and informs them what the result of each action will be.

For example, after marking a completing a call, a contact is moved to the next step. The prebuilt sequence defines what that step is. For instance, if you have to leave a voicemail, the next step could be an automatic SMS confirming the message. If the call was connected, the next step may be a follow-up email with a form to complete.

Personalized Communication 

5

In most competitive industries, there’s an increasing customer expectation of regular, relevant, and anticipated communication. People want more personalized and hassle-free experiences, and they expect regular notifications and updates as a matter of course. Just think of all the notifications you received the last time you placed an online order; you’re told when it’s been received, when it’s shipped, that it’s with the carrier, and so on.  

Automations don’t just streamline existing processes. They can also help recruiters to do more than they would have been able to otherwise. Leveraging relevant data makes communication with candidates and clients can more personal. You’ll improve engagement by using their name, roles applied for, and even other roles they might be interested in. This creates a closer relationship, even if the placement is unsuccessful, that can return value in future placement efforts. This kind of personalized communication could take many forms. PCRecruiter can handle a variety of notifications:

  • Text messages (SMS) 
  • Email notifications
  • Pop-up notifications within PCR
  • Push notifications (via the mobile app)

Making strategic use of recruitment automations

Any attempt to save time and cost through automation works best when it adds value and efficiency to existing processes. Look to automate aspects of your recruitment process with that in mind.

At the end of the day, most recruiters are people people, not tech people. That’s why it’s important to make workflows as streamlined and intuitive as possible. The software solution needs to fit their way of working and not the other way around.

PCRecruiter’s training team on-boards users by taking time to understand their daily flow. They get to know what your process looks like and how it works. By mapping out the process, they can identify where the software can solve pain points. Recruiting is already a challenging role — why add another layer of unnecessary complexity? 

Once set up, automations in PCRecruiter enable you to do what you would do without it, only much faster. To learn how you can make placements with less administrative hassle, book a free consultation today. 

There’s no question that recent years have been uncertain times for almost every type of business. Even those employers who managed to successfully ride out the global pandemic are feeling the effects of an ever-changing recruitment market. In a number of sectors, there’s also a widening gap between the skills needed and the skills candidates can offer.

As we move into the latter part of 2022, what are some of the key hiring recruitment trends for the staffing industry, permanent placement recruiters, and HR professionals?

Working Remotely Is Here To Stay

A man working at home
“Candidates now expect remote or hybrid working models as the norm.”

We live in a world where flexible working – greater freedom in when and where we work – is now an integral part of the employment landscape, particularly in knowledge-based industries. In fact, 80% of people are likely to recommend remote working to a friend. To that end, potential hires expect absolute clarity around remote and hybrid practices within companies. And for recruiters, remote working has advantages on both sides of the hiring process. 

On one hand, candidates now expect remote or hybrid working models as the norm. With proven benefits in terms of employee job satisfaction and morale, the best candidates can demand their ideal working conditions. Many people prefer remote working to cut travel costs, reduce their carbon footprint, and the time they spend commuting. For that reason, putting together a personalized package of flexible working arrangements can help to differentiate your offer – and even become a deal-closer – when the right candidate has multiple offers on the table. 

On the other side of the coin, remote recruitment practices are enabling recruiters to make the right hire faster. From access to a deeper and wider talent pool to streamlining the early stages of the recruitment process, through to things like online interviews or screening, remote hiring offers recruiters a competitive advantage in terms of time-saved and reduced costs. Find more strategies for reducing your time to hire, by reading our blog post on 10 tips to help you hire faster

It’s Still A Jobseekers Market

Artificial intelligence is growing stronger, as shown in this “photo of a recruiter talking to a candidate” generated by DALL•E

Never mind artificial intelligence (AI) and robots taking human jobs, according to a recent study by Korn Ferry, the biggest threat facing recruiters will actually be a shortage of suitably skilled humans. In fact, it’s predicted that by 2030 there will be a global talent shortage of around 85 million people. The competition for recruiting and retaining top talent is heating up.

With more open positions than candidates, the best talent has the most power in the current job market. As the demand for talent continues to outstrip supply, companies are adopting evermore proactive hiring strategies in an effort to optimize their talent pipelines. Developing an appealing employer brand, deploying proven marketing tactics, and engaging with potential candidates via social media are fast-becoming a necessity in many sectors. 

For instance, being present on the right social media platform for your target audience is a way to build relationships with potential candidates, especially as a growing number of digital natives begin filling up the talent pool. Learn more about social recruiting, and how to implement it, with our blog post on how to use social media in recruiting.

Employer Branding Is A Key Differentiator 

Employer Branding Stats
There’s ample evidence that a great
employer brand makes it easier to recruit
and it also impacts the business’ bottom
line in more than one way.

Whether you choose to leverage it or not, the second an employer makes a hire, they have an employer brand. Like a company’s “traditional” brand, it embodies your mission, vision, and core values. For many organizations, an effective employer brand helps them to connect with the right candidates, attract the best talent, and retain that talent once they’re inside the organization. 

As with a company brand, you need consistency across every touchpoint, creating a candidate experience which leads to positive word of mouth, and clearly sets out your value proposition as an employer or recruiter. In addition, the right employer brand and candidate experience will continue to make your company an attractive proposition to potential candidates who didn’t quite make it this time around. The other benefit of employer branding is its impact on retention, with one study indicating that it could lead to a 28% reduction in staff turnover. Take a more in-depth look at employer branding with our blog post on the topic. 

Hard-To-Fill Roles In Tech And Marketing

In part, the talent shortage is due to demographics, with the majority of the boomer generation expected to exit the global workforce by 2030. As work becomes increasingly tech-based, many businesses are facing up to the reality of a deficit of the right talent. According to a study by Korn Ferry, without an influx of skilled, high-tech workers, the US could potentially miss out on $162 billion worth of annual revenues. 

Contrary to what you might think, despite the global reach of digital recruitment channels, from job posting sites and careers pages to social media, filling roles in tech and digital marketing is becoming increasingly challenging. This is largely due to the uptake of digital technologies in the wake of the global pandemic, and the trend for digital transformation – the adoption of new technologies to drive efficiencies. Put simply, technology is moving at such a fast pace, when it comes to front-end developers and software architects, there just isn’t enough expertise to go around.

The “MarTech Map”, courtesy of https://martechmap.com/

This shortage of talent is especially true of digital marketing and the expert use of ‘martech’ (marketing technology). Comparing Scott Brinker’s MarTech Map from 2011 and 2022 shows an increase from 150 solutions to over 9,000 in 2022. That’s 6,521% growth in just 11 years. No one can be expert in every digital marketing tool, and this illustrates the challenge facing recruiters looking to hire the finest and most up-to-date marketing minds. Whether they’re looking for a marketing automation specialist or a search engine optimization (SEO) strategist, it can be difficult to find the right talent because the technology is so new. Smart recruiters are even employing SEO techniques to improve the online visibility of their job postings.

Recruitment Trends Round-Up

Whether you’re competing for the best candidate in a shallow talent pool, exploring new channels for networking with potential hires, improving your overall candidate experience, or trying to fill open roles in a highly-specialized market, the right applicant tracking software (ATS) can help. 

PCRecruiter has been helping people hire since 1998. The technology might have changed, but our dedication to providing intuitive and time-saving solutions for sourcing, tracking, and recruiting candidates remains the same. 

Find out how PCRecruiter can help streamline your recruitment efforts, by booking a demo.

Whichever type of recruitment you’re involved with, and whatever sector or niche you specialize in, having the right tools to handle your recruitment process can give you a competitive advantage and ensure you fill your open roles with top talent.

For any type of recruiter, from permanent placement through to internal HR departments, the right applicant tracking system / software (ATS) can help you manage large quantities of applicants and candidates and make your recruitment process more efficient and effective. 

In this blog post, Stacy Racutt, PCRecruiter Training Manager, explores the basics behind applicant tracking software, and how the right solution can streamline workflows to enable you to make the right hires, faster. 

Isometric cartoon of man holding an ATS (applicant tracking system) sign

What is an applicant tracking system (ATS)?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a type of software which enables recruiters and employers to track applicants and candidates through the recruiting and hiring process.

Functionality is typically broad, covering everything from a candidate database to email and SMS integrations which help to streamline and automate communication between candidates, employers, and recruitment professionals.

The right ATS can facilitate the standardization and improvement of processes and workflows to achieve the bottom line: finding the best candidate for the role.

How an ATS works

Once a company’s job descriptions have been created, they’re typically posted on a job board on a website. This gives active candidates a window into what’s available, allowing them to view open positions, and apply for suitable roles. 

After completing and submitting an online application, often uploading their resume or curriculum vitae (CV), applicant information is then captured and added to a database on the ATS. Once a candidate is in the system, recruiters can then interact with, and track, the progress of candidates throughout the recruitment process.

With PCRecruiter (PCR), any activity around a specific candidate can be tracked across the full range of communication channels including emails, SMS, and calls. This helps recruiters build a clear history of their relationship with a candidate. With every communication in a single, centralized record, it’s easily accessible, and highly visible to recruiters and their managers.

Passive candidates take a slightly different path into the ATS. These people are not actively seeking a specific position, but may be open to the right opportunity. The PCR Capture tool enables employers and recruiters to parse candidate contact information from popular social media and professional websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Indeed to create a record for them. 

Why use an Applicant Tracking System?

From a candidate application on a job board through to the final interview, some system to track the sourcing and placement process is a recruiting necessity. However, for many smaller-scale search firms, or recruiters who are just starting out, it’s not uncommon for workflows to include manual processes, which are inefficient and vulnerable to human errors. 

Over time, and with an ever-growing talent pool, it can become increasingly challenging to keep track of top talent and MPCs. They may lose out to competitors, have to settle for second best, or not make a placement at all. While sticky notes on a whiteboard or a series of Excel sheets might be a workable solution in the early days, the need for applicant tracking software quickly becomes obvious. 

Digitally transformed recruitment

Isometric illustration of someone looking at a large resume on a screen

Digitization of manual recruitment processes usually leads to the use of spreadsheets to track candidate progress. If you’re dealing with a very small data set and a narrow set of needs, a spreadsheet can do the job, up to a point. There may be nothing inherently wrong with a spreadsheet, but it wasn’t designed with recruitment in mind, and it’s not a searchable database of resumes or CVs, or a convenient way to track a process over specific dates and times. 

A spreadsheet was built for numbers and data, and there comes a point when it’s not the right tool for getting the job of recruitment done. On the other hand, digitalization represents a step on from simply transferring an existing paper-based system to a digital one. Digitalization of your recruitment process requires the use of cutting edge recruitment technology to add value and drive efficiencies to your day-to-day operations. Digitalization gives you the opportunity to improve your existing workflows by leveraging the potential of digital tools and their functionality. 

For newer, scaling recruiters, the next logical step is to track and monitor candidates through an online recruitment platform. This acts like an ATS, but the information isn’t unique to them. Essentially, it grants access to a shared talent pool, which is being mined by multiple firms. It isn’t a private bank of contacts and resumes/CVs with a communication history that’s ready and waiting when it’s next needed for a potential hire.

History Matters

This history is really important. Why? If you have multiple recruiters in the same office, working in the same industry, it’s important they’re aware of each candidate’s history with your organization. Has anyone else interviewed them previously? Is someone else currently trying to place them elsewhere? 

Without a reliable ATS, it can be hard to tell. 

Having a complete history of a person, even including feedback from a client, on file and at hand, immediately provides a head start and avoids crossover with other recruiters going after the same talent.

Furthermore, all of your own notes and actions regarding a candidate can make them easier to identify for future searches. Searching across the open web or paid candidate sources may only turn up those who are actively on the market, or may only provide partial information, whereas your private talent pool may contain that perfect candidate that has been in your roster all along, and who may not be accessible to anyone else.

And this is to say nothing of the benefits of keeping your job openings and client information on file in the same database with your candidates, allowing you to efficiently cross-reference, promote, and communicate.

How an ATS benefits recruiters and employers

There’s no question that in a highly competitive job market, making effective use of the right ATS can give employers and recruiters the edge on their rivals when trying to acquire the best candidates. Here are five reasons to invest in an ATS: 

  1. Speed-up search by building a pool of talent which contains historical data, and personal details, which can come into play at any given moment in a future placement.  
  1. Centralize all communication, including calls, SMS, and email in one repository so that everything you know about a candidate is available with a just few clicks.
  1. Greater visibility over your processes can help you refine and evolve workflows by creating automations, finding spots where you can drive efficiencies by eliminating repetitive, routine tasks.
  1. Save time by creating re-usable templates for things like resumes, forms, and questionnaires. Upload online job postings quickly and efficiently to multiple sites.
  1. Quickly identify passive candidates through your ever-growing, searchable library of candidate records, including all your previous interactions with them. 

Choosing the right ATS

When a spreadsheet of contact information is no longer meeting your recruitment needs, and is actually slowing you down, an ATS gives you a lot more capability, versatility, and functionality. The right ATS allows you to do more with your data.

PCRecruiter is a fully customizable ATS and CRM designed to meet your specific recruitment needs, and works with your existing processes, evolving as you do. Pick the core and premium functionality that’s right for you, and discover new ways to speed up your placement process, from scheduling call plans to capturing data from online sources.

See PCRecruiter in action. Book a demo today.

Podcasts are a great way to get the latest recruitment industry insights, topics, and trends. Listen anywhere, on-the-go for actionable tips you can take with you the next time you step into the office. Need help getting started? Read PCRecruiter’s list of six top recruitment podcasts.

There’s no better way to stay up to date with the latest recruitment industry trends, than by listening to your favorite recruitment podcast. On your daily commute or whilst relaxing at home, listen whenever, wherever to get your daily dose of insight into the recruitment industry. 

Whether you’re looking for an in-depth interview with a recruitment industry leader, tips and tricks you can take into the office with you the next day, or a beginner’s guide to the fundamentals of recruitment, the right podcast can take you deep inside the world of hiring. 

But if you’re new to podcasts, new to recruitment, or searching for something that fits your recruitment niche, it can be difficult to know where to start. So, here at CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE, we’ve compiled our shortlist of top recruitment podcasts.

Read on to get listening! 

Recruitment Podcasts


Talk Talent To Me

Recruitment Podcasts: Talk Talent To Me

https://talktalenttome.com/

Drawing on a deep talent pool of recruitment leadership, Talk Talent To Me takes listeners on a rollercoaster ride through talent acquisition. Covering everything from strategies, metrics, and techniques through to current industry trends, it features top talent leaders on the front line of modern recruitment. The show is hosted, produced, and edited by Hired’s Content Marketing Manager, Rob Stevenson. We like the depth and breadth of talent interviewed, from VP’s of Global Talent, to CHROs.


The Recruiter Startup Podcast

Recruitment Podcasts: The Recruiter Startup Podcast

https://anchor.fm/recruiter-startup-school

With over a decade in the industry, Dualta Doherty has a hands-on approach to setting up and successfully running a recruitment business. Each episode, the founder of Dualta Doherty & Partners and this very podcast, is joined by recruitment agency leaders from around the world to talk about what it takes to start up, scale up, and operate at the highest level of recruitment. We enjoy hearing about the successes and challenges of recruitment industry leaders, and the valuable insights into setting up on your own.


Recruitment On The Go

Recruitment Podcast: Recruitment On The Go

https://soundcloud.com/recruitmentonthego

Everything you ever wanted to know about recruitment in daily, bite size pieces. Hosts Caitie and Mingus give you the latest lowdown on recruitment trends, top tips and tricks, plus all the tools and resources you need to maintain a competitive edge in the recruitment industry. Ideal for recruiters, HR specialists, and talent acquisition managers alike, each episode offers inspiration and insight, wherever you happen to be. We listen out for the actionable recruitment tips provided in each episode.


Recruiting Future

Recruitment Podcast: Recruiting Future

https://recruitingfuture.com/purpose/

The self-styled ‘calm voice of recruitment continuity’ offers insight, inspiration, and inclusivity in the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of recruitment. With a particular focus on the future of talent acquisition, each episode covers a different aspect of the industry, from technology, and automation to diversity and inclusion. With an eye on the future of work, guests are typically recruitment thought leaders and pioneers from the wider business world, who share ideas and experiences designed to inspire listeners and drive change. We like the focus on giving a platform to new and diverse voices in recruitment.


The RecruitingDaily Podcast

Recruitment Podcast: The RecruitingDaily Podcast

https://recruitingdaily.com/podcasts/recruitingdaily-podcast/

Going behind the scenes of the world’s most influential talent acquisition teams, the RecruitingDaily podcast is a one-stop shop for the latest insights into recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each episode drills down deep into a complicated topic, breaking it down into understandable chunks in order to help recruiters take their game to the next level. We enjoy the sheer variety of content, from equity audits to using virtual meetings to streamline recruitment processes.


The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Recruitment Podcast: The Elite Recruiter Podcast

https://pod.co/the-elite-recruiter-podcast

Benjamin Mena’s show covers a broad range of recruitment-related content, taking listeners on a journey through money, marketing, sales, leadership, and placement. Along the way, you’ll pick up tips, tools, and tricks from some of the best in the business. Hear the stories of top recruitment professionals, how they got to where they are now and the mindset that got them there. We like the Elite Recruiter Podcast for its vibrant and insightful look at the industry.


So you’ve reached the end of our list, only to find your favorite recruitment podcast is missing? Get in touch with PCRecruiter and let us know why we should give it a listen! And for even more podcasts, check out our Top 5 HR Podcasts blog post as well!

We love podcasts – they make commutes and grocery shopping fun. There are so many great HR podcasts available, covering every topic under the sun, so we’ve compiled a list of a few favorites which will keep you inspired.

We’re really keen on podcasts here at CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE. Why? Because they can make boring commutes or grocery shopping much more interesting!

There are a variety of HR podcasts available – covering topics from employee perks to corporate branding, and everything in between. We’ve prepared a list of some of our favorites and hopefully these shows will help you stay on top of changes in the industry and gain a little inspiration from those leading those changes. Here they are in no particular order:

HR Podcasts


Emotion At Work

HR Podcasts: Emotion @ Work

https://emotionatwork.co.uk/podcast/

Started in 2017, the Emotion at Work podcast is led by Phil Willcox and dives into the full spectrum of professional emotions that people experience at work. Phil’s belief is that emotions should be at the center of everything we do as they are so impactful throughout our lives – especially in our jobs. The episodes are released monthly and are a true deep dive into the chosen topic.

Phil speaks with industry professionals about a variety of themes, including emotion control, emotion expression, digital body language, shame, and other pressing social issues in the workplace. Phil and his guests share their personal stories and aim to build a greater knowledge of emotion among the listenership. The podcast, and its themes, are built on the vision of Phil’s company and look to educate and train people in emotion in any organization.


Talent Magnet

HR Podcasts: Talent Magnet Leadership Podcast

https://www.talentmagnet.com/podcast

Every week, Mike Sipple, the co-founder and CEO of Talent Magnet Institute, has discussions with thought leaders, industry executives, and a variety of HR professionals to better understand the sector. The topics they cover include business, relationships, community, and life in general. It’s a brilliantly varied podcast that taps into each guest’s personal experiences and how those have shaped their successes as well as their failures.

Founded in 2001, Talent Magnet was built with the objective of transforming business leaders and their organizations into ‘talent magnets’. They’ve become a trusted name in talent and aim to develop the skills of their clients, making them better leaders, and making their teams better because of it. With that goal in mind, they want the culture of quality leadership to work as a ‘talent magnet’ so that businesses that commit to improvement attract the talent they need.


#WorkTrends

HR Podcast: #WorkTrends

https://talentculture.com/worktrends-podcast/

#WorkTrends, hosted by Meghan M. Biro of Talent Culture, is a podcast series and Twitter chat that revolves around current HR news and features experts from around the industry. With over 400 total episodes, there is a serious back catalog for new listeners to tap into.

Some of #WorkTrends’ most recent episodes show just how varied the topics can be so matter what part of HR you’re interested in they’ll be something that grabs your attention. Seriously, check out their last few installments:

  • The Everywhere Workplace – Prioritizing Employee Experience
  • The Urgency Epidemic – Prioritization & Productivity
  • Building a Courageous Work Culture: Why it Matters
  • Myth Busting Common Video Interview Concerns
  • Military Hiring – Diversity, Inclusion & Business Success

The Recruitment Hackers

HR Podcast: The Recruitment Hackers

https://www.therecruitmenthackers.com/podcast

The Recruitment Hackers is a community of talent acquisition professionals whose mission is to promote best practices, tools, and industry trends. They’ve grown into a network of experts and a part of that connectivity is through The Recruitment Hackers podcast.

The weekly content deals with a wide range of themes, including recruitment automation, optimizing the candidate experience, and harnessing culture to attract the appropriate kind of people. The podcast prides itself on offering real-life examples of companies that are recruiting successfully as well as proven strategies to grow your talent pool. Best of all, they don’t get caught up in trends and make an effort to point out the gimmicks that are springing up in the recruitment space.


Chad and Cheese

HR Podcast: Chad & Cheese

https://www.chadcheese.com/

Of all the podcasts on this list, we think it’s safe to say that this one has the best name. Branding themselves as the snarkiest industry experts out there Chad Sowash and friend-of-PCRecruiter Joel Cheesman have built a platform with a number of different podcasts that cover European HR trends, HR startup critiques, and interviews with other recruitment pros to name a few.

Their particular style might not be for everyone’s taste but they definitely aren’t afraid to be open and honest about their views. It’s clear that whether you like them or not, they have a genuine wealth of knowledge and experience, over 40 years between them, and that makes this podcast well worth listening to – just get used to their lack of filter(!).


These podcasts are just a small selection of a huge range of available insight that is out there in audio form. We hope you check the suggestions out, and get as much from them as we have.

Do you have any HR podcasts or recruitment industry podcast favorites? Comment below and let us know what they are.

PCRecruiter has been named to G2’s Top 50 HR Software List in the annual ‘Best Software Awards’. This PCRecruiter’s first time appearing on one of G2’s Best Software lists, earning its place this year thanks to high marks for customer service and adaptability in the recruiting, staffing, and HR space.

PCRecruiter has been consistently highly-rated on G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace. G2 helps more than 60 million people every year make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews, and is the definitive online destination to discover, review and manage the technology that businesses need to reach their potential.

This year, PCRecruiter has been named to G2’s Top 50 HR Software List.  The annual Best Software List ranks the world’s best software companies and products based on authentic, timely reviews from real users.

This PCRecruiter’s first time appearing on one of G2’s Best Software lists, earning its place this year thanks to high marks for customer service and adaptability in the recruiting, staffing, and HR space.

“G2 has been a great partner in spreading the word about PCRecruiter,” said Bill Kubicek, PCRecruiter co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing. “We’re honored to have been included in the ‘Best’ this year, particularly because we know that standing is based on the reviews of satisfied recruiting and staffing pros.”

“As we continue to accelerate rapid growth, our online marketplace boasts 100,000+ software and services companies in 2,000+ categories and over 1.5 million trusted user reviews. Simply put, G2 is where you go for software,” said Godard Abel, co-founder and CEO, G2. “Our annual Best Software List aims to guide buyers on their purchasing decisions, knowing they can trust in the credibility and objectivity of our scoring algorithms. We applaud those companies named to our  2022 list, as they’ve earned the satisfaction among their customers as well as an impressive market presence.”

The top 100 software sellers are ranked based on a combination of Satisfaction and Market Presence scores for each seller, and the top 100 products are ranked based on reviews across all categories they are a part of. To be included in one of G2’s Software Sellers or Software Products “Best Of” lists, a software seller or product must receive at least 50 approved and published reviews during the 2021 calendar year. Scores reflect only data from reviews submitted during this evaluation period.

To learn more, view G2’s 2022 Best Software List and read more about G2’s methodology. To schedule a demonstration, contact us today.

G2, the largest software marketplace and review platform, has published its Winter 2021 reports. PCRecruiter was again ranked #1 in Customer Relationship and a Leader in multiple categories. G2 publishes these quarterly reports ranking applicant tracking software, staffing software, and recruiting agency software based on data from multiple sources.

PCRecruiter G2 Winter Awards 2022

Users love PCRecruiter on G2The Winter 2022 reports from G2, the largest software marketplace and review platform, are in! These quarterly reports are based on independent user reviews and satisfaction scores, as well as other data sources and indicators of market leadership. PCRecruiter has once again been revealed as one of the applicant tracking, staffing, and recruiting agency software industry’s top choices.

Still the Best in Customer Relationship

Among businesses from 1-50 employees, PCRecruiter has once again been ranked the #1 Applicant Tracking System in regards to quality of support, earning the ‘Best Relationship’ badge. In the mid-market range (companies with 51,000 -100,000 employees) PCRecruiter was ranked in the Easiest To Do Business With. Our team always works hard toward customer satisfaction, and we’re always glad to see the reviews that tell us we’re achieving that goal.

PCRecruiter Remains a Leader

G2 ranks software as a Leader based on substantial Satisfaction scores and Market Presence. PCR has once again placed in this group, both for the 1-50 employee range ATS market  for the ATS and the among Candidate Relationship Management categories overall. We also ranked as a High Performer in both the Staffing and Recruitment Marketing categories.

And, as with the Fall 2021 reports, PCRecruiter remained the vendor with Highest User Adoption for the Recruitment Marketing category.

Post Your Review!

We want your voice to be included in G2’s Spring 2022 reports! You can post a review of PCRecruiter at this link to be eligible for a gift card from G2 in thanks, or you can post via this link to donate $10 to “Girls Who Code”, helping to close the gender gap in tech.

Times change and recruiters can’t just rely on a spreadsheet of contacts, quick thinking, or a ‘roll-up list’ in LinkedIn to get ahead in an industry which never slows down. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) offers recruiters a custom built technology that can support them in their work to deliver great candidates to great employers. To show how that pairing is made easy by an ATS we want to show you 5 key benefits of the software.

Times change and recruiters can’t just rely on a spreadsheet of contacts, quick thinking, or a ‘roll-up list’ in LinkedIn to get ahead in an industry which never slows down. 

An Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) offers recruiters a custom built technology that can support them in their work to deliver great candidates to great employers. To show how that pairing is made easy by an ATS we want to show you 5 key benefits of the software.

Repeatability

What do you do with the other candidates that you didn’t put forward for your latest role? 

You’ve cultivated 10 of the brightest marketers for a recent commercial role and you’ve placed 1 of them straight into the job (nice work by the way!) But now you’re left with 9 additional shining stars… So what do you do with them? 

Well, with an ATS you can easily transpose your broader inventory of existing candidates into new roles. Simply put, an ATS helps you put the right people in the right places – so you have them all, ready to go, as soon as a new opportunity lands (or you go out and create it!)

Richer Data

We all love to drop in on LinkedIn and check out candidate history. But all too often, the details given barely scratch the surface. What about everything they don’t write about – things like their ambitions, their home life, their lifelong, unflinching love of the Chicago Cubs –? 

With an Applicant Tracking System you can save all that rich, personal data on your candidates in one place – to give you a true, more three-dimensional profile to take forward.

Specialist Database

Feel like pursuing a niche? As you build up multiple candidates for a new position you’ll realize you’ve actually farmed up a good herd of industry specific talent. You can make and save great contacts within that industry and then propel your dedicated flock toward them in a move that’s guaranteed to land in the right spot.

Success Support

Customer service and success support are absolutely critical when implementing any kind of software. After all, if you can’t use it, what’s the point in having it? 

An ATS is only going to deliver the benefits you need if it’s configured to your requirements. We only come to understand that by listening to what you really need. We’ve been in business for over 20 years and have adapted our levels of service over time; while understanding that every recruiter is different.

Automation & Efficiency

We’ve grouped these two together because automation feeds into and supports efficiency. A lot of recruiters are still using databases and pulling out information themselves. A properly configured ATS can scan your emails, set reminders, notify contractors – and much more besides. 

On top of that, call recording and dialing history features help to automatically fill out the CRM component of your system. No-one likes having to backfill an activity log, and with an ATS you don’t need to.

The bottom line is that recruiters want to save time by increasing speed. They have to compete to get the best employers and candidates on their books and Applicant Tracking Systems support that goal to a tee. 

At PCR we support everyone – from one user offices up to massive multinationals – in exactly  the same way; with expert support at every step.

 

Want to go bigger and better in recruitment? Contact PCRecruiter today.

G2, the largest software marketplace and review platform, has published its Fall 2021 report. PCRecruiter was ranked #1 in Customer Relationship and a Leader in multiple categories. G2 publishes these quarterly reports ranking applicant tracking software, staffing software, and recruiting agency software based on data from multiple sources.

Users love PCRecruiter on G2G2, the largest software marketplace and review platform, publishes quarterly reports that rank applicant tracking software, staffing software, and recruiting agency software. These reports are based on multiple data sources, including perceived market presence, satisfaction scores from independent user reviews, and indicators of market leadership.

With G2’s newest detailed breakdowns just released for Fall 2021, PCRecruiter has once again been revealed as one of the recruitment software industry’s top options for recruiting and staffing professionals in organizations of all sizes.

PCRecruiter is #1 ATS in Customer Relationship

The Fall 2021 reports indicate that, for businesses from 1-50 employees, PCRecruiter is a Leader among Staffing and ATS solutions. In fact, PCRecruiter is the #1 ranked Applicant Tracking System in this market in regards to quality of support, ease of doing business with, and likeliness to recommend.

Even among larger companies (51-1k employees), PCRecruiter ranked in the Top 10 easiest vendors to do business with. We know we go the extra mile to make our customers happy and successful, but it’s always nice to see it supported by the data!

PCRecruiter is a leader in Small-Business Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on G2

PCRecruiter is a leader in Small-Business Staffing on G2
PCRecruiter is a leader in Mid-Market Staffing on G2

PCR is Leading The Way

PCRecruiter received high marks across the industry, ranking as a Leader among Candidate Relationship Management and Applicant Tracking vendors, and as a High Performer in both the Staffing and Recruitment Marketing categories for businesses of all sizes.

In the Recruitment Marketing category, PCRecruiter earned the Highest User Adoption badge. This is perhaps one of the most important metrics we’re proud of — after all, even the greatest features and highest quality data can’t be of any value if your team isn’t using the software. The time and personal attention we put into getting new customers up to speed, and the system’s incredible configurability have put it at the top of the category in G2’s Implementation Index.

PCRecruiter is a leader in Candidate Relationship Management on G2
PCRecruiter is a leader in Recruitment Marketing on G2
PCRecruiter is a leader in Staffing on G2

We want your voice to be heard!

We appreciate the kind words and accolades from our users that went into these rankings. If you’d like to have your opinion counted in the Winter 2021 report from G2, we encourage you to post a review of PCRecruiter at this link. Not only will this help people learn about PCRecruiter, but you’ll also be eligible for a gift card from G2 in thanks.

G2, the largest software marketplace and review platform, has published its Summer 2020 report. Once again, PCRecruiter received high marks. G2 publishes these quarterly reports ranking applicant tracking software, staffing software, and recruiting agency software based on data from multiple sources.

Users love PCRecruiter on G2G2, the largest software marketplace and review platform, has published its Summer 2020 report. Once again, PCRecruiter received high marks.

G2 publishes these quarterly reports ranking applicant tracking software, staffing software, and recruiting agency software based on data from multiple sources. They use factors such as perceived market presence, satisfaction scores from independent user reviews, and indicators of market leadership to create detailed breakdowns.

PCRecruiter is a Leader & High Performer

The Summer 2020 reports show PCRecruiter as a Leader among ATS options in both the overall and small-business (50 or fewer employees) categories. Leaders have both high ratings on G2 as well as a substantial market presence score.

PCRecruiter was also ranked a High Performer in the overall and small-business Staffing categories. This is based on our high customer satisfaction scores, which remain consistently high. We ranked particularly well in areas of customer support and ease of doing business with. In fact, PCRecruiter was ranked top-of-the-list for Easiest to Do Business With among all Staffing vendors for mid-market (51 – 1k employees) companies.

PCRecruiter is a leader in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on G2 PCRecruiter is a leader in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on G2 PCRecruiter is a leader in Staffing on G2 PCRecruiter is a leader in Candidate Relationship Management on G2 PCRecruiter is a leader in Staffing on G2

Add Your Opinions

We appreciate the kind words and accolades from our users that went into these rankings. If you’d like to have your opinion counted in the Fall 2020 report from G2, we encourage you to post a review of PCRecruiter at this link. Not only will this help people learn about PCRecruiter, we’ve partnered with G2 Gives to donate $10 on your behalf to Direct Relief. This highly-regarded non-profit provides humanitarian aid to people affected by poverty or emergencies.

G2, the world’s leading B2B software and services review platform, has released their Fall 2019 quarterly reports. These reports are based on independent reviews from users in the staffing and recruiting industry. PCRecruiter has once again received high marks and is ranked in leadership positions on G2’s Grid reports.

PCRecruiter ranked in the Top Ten for multiple factors on both the Staffing and ATS Categories. In particular, we ranked well above the industry averages for customer service, ease of doing business, implementation speed, and more.

Small staffing businesses ranked PCRecruiter as one of the Top Three vendors in regards to customer relations, and PCR was given a Top Five slot for implementation and user adoption in the Candidate Relationship Management category.

Overall, PCRecruiter placed as a High Performer and Leader in both the Small-Business Staffing and ATS grids, as a Leader in the Staffing grid, as a High Performer in the ATS grid, and was ranked Highest User Adoption among  Small-Business ATS vendors.

PCRecruiter is a leader in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on G2PCRecruiter is a leader in Staffing on G2Users love PCRecruiter on G2PCRecruiter is a leader in Small-Business Staffing on G2PCRecruiter is a leader in Small-Business Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on G2

We are honored to serve our users and we extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone for their thoughtful reviews!

If you’d like your opinion considered in G2’s next round of B2B software reporting, please visit https://www.g2.com/products/pcrecruiter/take_survey and submit your own review of PCR.

Mike Gionta, The Recruiter U
Mike Gionta, The Recruiter U

Our friend Mike Gionta is hosting a 4-day virtual summit from March 26-29, 2019 called the Recruiting Firm Owner Summit. Solo-recruiters and search firm owners are all welcome at this FREE series, which has been attended by just under 25,000 recruiters from 6 continents over the past ten years.

Topics include:

  • How to increase billings even during a bad market or recession
  • The secrets to breaking through your income “ceiling” and the science of getting truly rich
  • The art & science of getting retainers that lead to $100k clients!
  • How to negotiate higher fees and establish long term repeat contracts with clients
  • The 6 lies that block recruiting success
  • The 5 secrets recruiters can use to build 7 & 8-figure recruitment businesses without ever having to micromanage or get back into the tools
  • Success secrets from the field for  solo/independent recruiters
  • The great techniques for sourcing candidates when you don’t have a network
  • The key unknown methods of how to sell contracting business to your assignments to ensure you get those assignments!
  • The 3 keys to consistently growing $$ for recruiters
  • 7½ ways to ditch your clients and still increase your revenue

Remember, these tips are from recruiting firm owners for solo-recruiters and search firm owners. All 12 sessions, taking place March 26-29, 2019, are offered at no charge.

Grab your spot by clicking here.

GetApp’s quarterly ATS ranking showcases the leading Applicant Tracking cloud apps in the North American market. PCRecruiter has been once again ranked in the Top 10!

GetApp research team identifies and evaluates hundreds of products, focusing on the top 10-15 cloud-based software products in the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software category. They then creates the Category Leaders list to help business owners and decision-makers  in evaluating their ATS technology options.

The ranking highlights key factors that small businesses should consider when assessing which software products may be right for them. These factors include user perception (“user reviews”), compatibility with other systems (“integrations”), mobile offerings (“mobile”), technical capabilities (“functionality”), and product security (“security”).

Check out the rankings at GetApp’s site or contribute your own review of PCRecruiter.

GetApp Category Leaders constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, GetApp or its affiliates.

PCRecruiter - Category Leader for 2017PCRecruiter has once again been ranked a top-ten choice in the Applicant Tracking Software category guides from Capterra and GetApp!

These sites are two of the B2B software industry’s leading directory / recommendation engines. They release regular reports based on user-submitted reviews, feature breakdowns, pricing, integrations, and other factors.

This quarter, GetApp’s Top Applicant Tracking Software list has ranked PCRecruiter in the top ten. The position is based on the strength of ratings from our users and our competitive stance in the mobile app for iOS/Android category.

On the Capterra site, PCRecruiter was included in the top ten Most Affordable Applicant Tracking Software list. Our cost of ownership was favorable compared to other ATS options, based on a hypothetical 2-user, 2-year license with the complete host of available features and services.

Main Sequence truly appreciates the recognition of PCRecruiter’s great ROI and comprehensive range of functions from these valuable independent services.

We invite all of our users to write their own review of PCRecruiter on Capterra or GetApp so that your opinions and experiences can be included in future rankings!

Earlier this year, SoftwareAdvice released their latest FrontRunners data. Main Sequence is proud to see PCRecruiter listed in the Masters quadrant, scoring 4+ out of 5 on most of the measured stats, such as Value (4.26) and Integrations (4.9).

FrontRunners is powered by Gartner Methodology and offers a data-driven assessment of the most capable and valuable systems for small businesses. It’s driven by real user reviews/ratings, and verified product data.

The content for the FrontRunners quadrant is derived from actual end-user reviews and ratings as well as vendor-supplied and publicly available product and company information that gets applied against a documented methodology. The results neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or any of its affiliates.

GetApp Category Leader - ATS

GetApp, a leading business software directory and review site, has released it’s latest Category Leader rankings, highlighting the top 25 cloud-based business applications in key business application categories. Main Sequence is pleased to announce that PCRecruiter was given a Top 5 slot in the Applicant Tracking category.

The rankings, which give business owners a short list of the best options to consider, are based on the following five criteria:

  1. Quantity and rating of user-submitted reviews.

  2. Number of integrations with other listed apps.

  3. Mobile app availability and rating.

  4. Social media presence and following.

  5. Security survey responses (modeled on the Cloud Security Alliance’s self-assessment form).

These rankings are completely independent of any commercial relationships between GetApp and the software vendors, taking into consideration factors including real user opinion, compatibility with other software products and mobile devices, security, and market presence. These rankings help provide an easy-to-follow overview of important factors for the buying process.

Main Sequence is glad to be recognized as one of the top solutions available in a reflective representation of the leading business applications on the market.

 

Capterra, a Gartner company that helps businesses select software solutions, has ranked PCRecruiter in the Top 10 on their list of the Most Affordable Applicant Tracking Software.

To put the report together, Capterra compiled “typical ATS software buyer” scenario with standard, expected features and customer service. They scored systems based on how many standard features they offered and the cost of those features, taking into account what customers were saying about the product’s functionality and quality to determine just how affordable and valuable the systems really were.

When the numbers were all lined up, PCRecruiter landed in the top 2% of roughly 300 selections, and practically neck-and-neck with the solutions listed above it.

Main Sequence is proud to be recognized for providing exceptional value to our users.

If you’re one of our many Windows-based PCRecruiter users, you should mark July 29, 2016 on your calendar as the end of your free Windows 10 upgrade period.

The free Windows 10 upgrade offer was a first for Microsoft, helping people upgrade faster than ever before, and July 29th is your last chance to get in on the deal. After July 29, upgrading your Windows 7 or 8 machine to 10 could cost $119 or more retail.

Most Windows 7 and 8 software is compatible with Windows 10, and PCRecruiter 9 is no different. If you’re still using PCRecruiter 8, you can also move to Windows 10, but you’ll want to continue working within Internet Explorer 11, rather than the newer Microsoft Edge browser, which is only compatible with PCRecruiter 9. We still recommend running PCRecruiter 9 in Google Chrome, regardless of your operating system.

To get your free Windows 10 upgrade, visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-upgrade

MedalWe were very pleased to learn that GetApp, a site where businesses can review business software for a variety of applications, just released a new quarterly ranking for their Applicant Tracking Software category with PCRecruiter in the tightly-grouped top 10.

Rank is based on user reviews, integrations, mobile app availability, media presence, and security. PCRecruiter ranked only 6 points from the top slot.

Check out the full listing at https://www.getapp.com/hr-employee-management-software/applicant-tracking/#getrank

William Kubicek, Martin Snyder, and Mic Harris of Main Sequence will be attending the NAPS Conference in Houston. They will be found from time to time staffing booth #2 at the event; if you are attending, Bill, Marty, or Mic would be pleased to provide an in-person demonstration of PCRecruiter9 or discuss any aspect of your recruiting software needs. Serving the professional and business development needs of the search and staffing community for more than five decades, NAPS has been a force in establishing the highest standards of ethics and performance for recruiters and staffing operations people. More information about the event can be found at www.naps360.org

On July 14th, the EEOC issued the first update to its pregnancy discrimination guidelines in 30 years. In the the Enforcement Guidance released on the EEOC Website, the comission addressed how the requirements of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as amended in 2008 should be applied individuals who have pregnancy-related disabilities. The commission posted a Q&A document and Fact Sheet.

Among other issues, the guidance discussed:

  • The fact that the PDA covers not only current pregnancy, but discrimination based on past pregnancy and a woman's potential to become pregnant;
  • Lactation as a covered pregnancy-related medical condition;
  • The circumstances under which employers may have to provide light duty for pregnant workers;
  • Issues related to leave for pregnancy and for medical conditions related to pregnancy;
  • The PDA's prohibition against requiring pregnant workers who are able to do their jobs to take leave;
  • The requirement that parental leave (which is distinct from medical leave associated with childbearing or recovering from childbirth) be provided to similarly situated men and women on the same terms;
  • When employers may have to provide reasonable accommodations for workers with pregnancy-related impairments under the ADA and the types of accommodations that may be necessary; and
  • Best practices for employers to avoid unlawful discrimination against pregnant workers.

For more information, visit http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/pregnancy_guidance.cfm

EEO data collection and reporting functions are standard with PCRecruiter. Anyone wishing to collect and track EEO data in their recruitment process can seek information or a demonstration by contacting their PCRecruiter representative.

The Canadian Anti Spam Law (CASL), which was designed to stop spam from being sent to Canadians, goes into effect July 1, 2014. Many people remain unfamiliar with the law, even within Canada, despite its serious potential impact for any business that sends commercial email to Canadian recipients. So what is this law and how does it affect recruiters, staffing agencies, and HR sourcing pros?

WHAT does CASL apply to?

In short, any email, text, or direct social networking message that actively or passively promotes your services or your current job openings could be placed into the category of communications affected by this law.

  • CASL applies to any "Commercial Electronic Message" (CEM). A CEM is defined as any electronic message (emails, texts, some social media messages) that contains a message which encourages the recipient to take part in some type of commercial activity. This includes e-newsletters that contain a link to a sponsor's website, client satisfaction surveys, mass emails providing general information about your business or organization, etc. It also covers emails requesting consent to send future emails.
  • There are exemptions from the rule for certain types of messages. For example, you are allowed to send a single CEM to someone without prior consent based on a referral, as long as the full name of the person making the referral is disclosed in the message.

WHO does CASL apply to?

The law is very broad, applying to all CEMs sent to anyone in Canada or by anyone in Canada.

  • CASL stipulates that Commercial Electronic Messages cannot be sent TO or FROM anyone in Canada without express prior consent. Even if your company is outside of Canada, any emails sent to Canadian jobseekers, partners, or clients fall under the stipulations of the law. Although it may prove difficult to prosecute violators outside of Canada, the the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has stated that it will work with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US, and other regulatory commissions to enforce this law.
  • There are exemptions from the "express consent" rule for limited periods of time and under certain "implied consent" circumstances. Implied consent includes recipients who have made a purchase or your product or service, made a business deal, contract, or membership with your organization in the past 24 months. Implied consent also includes a 6-month period following an application or inquiry. If you haven't gotten express consent to continue sending CEMs within the implied consent period, you are required to stop sending CEMs at the end of the 6-month or 24-month time frame.

WHAT are the penalties for violating CASL?

Unlike other anti-spam rules (such as the USA's 'CAN-SPAM' law) Canada's anti-spam law has been given very large, sharp teeth.

  • The maximum administrative penalty for a violation by a business is $10 million, and directors and officers may be personally liable for their company's violations.
  • Individuals can be fined up to $1 Million.
  • Up until June 30, 2017, the penalties will be administrative only. After July 1, 2017, the law allows individual suits against violators. Receivers of illegal messages can sue for $200 per individual transgression up to $1 Million per day. Additional penalties may be levied for altering transmission data and other violations.

HOW can I comply with CASL?

Some of the stipulations for complying with CASL are the same as those for complying with the US CAN-SPAM law. Make sure that your emails include the following:

  • Your name (or the name by which you conduct business if different) in your messages.
  • Your physical mailing address plus either a telephone number, web address, or email address in your messages.
  • A link to a method of unsubscribing from future messages which takes effect within 10 days.

In addition to the above, but differing from CAN-SPAM:

  • Recipients must give express consent to receive your messages. This consent can be oral or written, although written consent is clearly better should questions arise.
  • You must retain a record of your consent confirmations.
  • Methods for collecting consent via a form must be clear and affirmative. The person opting in must check a box or perform some other action which is clearly marked with a description of its purpose. Asking the person to un-check a pre-checked box is not allowed.

HOW can PCRecruiter help me comply?

Although PCRecruiter has offered "unsubscribe" tracking for many years, the new CASL law has generated changes in how email is handled.  The next system update will include an 'opt-in / opt-out' function which can be used in form letters, custom forms, email signatures, and job board links. The system will also include methods for tracking the 6-month and 24-month 'implicit' permission allowed under the law.   The system will apply these settings automatically when sending email communications.  PCRecruiter also gains new options for adding and removing multiple email addresses from the opt-in/out lists, as well as capabilities for exporting and importing email addresses in CSV format.

If you send email to anyone in Canada, or you operate business in Canada, you will want to become familiar with this new law and make sure that your electronic communications comply with it.  This information is not intended as an offering of legal advice; please consult with your applicable legal authority regarding the CASL or any other compliance activities that you may undertake.  

If you desire assistance with implementing features in PCRecruiter, please contact your Main Sequence representative.
 

Software Advice Inc, 5000 analysisOur friends at Software Advice have analyzed the new Inc., Magazine "Inc. 5000." list and have compared it with the 2008 listing. Their conclusion is that the "HR ecosystem" has grown and changed, consolidating, gaining employees and generating more revenue than five years ago. We'd like to think PCRecruiter has something to do with that, naturally.

For complete details, check out their study at http://www.softwareadvice.com/hr/industryview/hr-ecosystem/

The results of the Software Advice 2013 Recruiting Channels Survey, sponsored in part by PCRecruiter, are in! Here's what they've found:

  • Current Use of Recruiting Channels: 97 percent of participating recruiters said they have used employee referrals to source new hires in 2013. Traditional job boards and company careers pages came in at number two and three respectively. Social media was a close fourth, with 80 percent of recruiters saying they have used these channels to source hires.
  • Channels Delivering the Highest Volume of Candidates: The channel delivering the most candidates into recruiters’ inboxes was still traditional job boards, while employee referrals came in second. Social media came in at a strong third.
  • Channels Delivering the Highest Quality of Candidates: While traditional job boards delivered the highest volume of candidates for recruiters, employee referrals still deliver (by far) the best candidates for open positions. However, more respondents said social media delivered higher quality candidates than traditional job boards.
  • Projected Use and Budget for Each Channel in 2013: Although traditional job boards, employee referrals and company careers pages were the top three most used channels, recruiters plan to invest more in social media in 2013.
  • Conclusion: The data would seem to support the hypothesis that social media recruiting is only going to increase in the coming years, but only time will tell.

For the complete results, check out Software Advice's slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/SoftwareAdvice/2013-23205044

A new study found that when it comes to human resources hiring decisions, employers may value candidates who are a good cultural fit over those who can do best on the job. The researchers voice concerns that the emphasis on background similarities may create a class bias in hiring at elite firms.

A new study found that when it comes to human resources hiring decisions, employers may value candidates who are a good cultural fit over those who can do best on the job. The researchers voice concerns that the emphasis on background similarities may create a class bias in hiring at elite firms.

Study author Lauren A. Rivera, an assistant professor of management and organizations and sociology at Northwestern University, spoke out in the December issue of the American Sociological Review. She said, “Of course, employers are looking for people who have the baseline of skills to effectively do the job. But, beyond that, employers really want people who they will bond with, who they will feel good around, who will be their friend and maybe even their romantic partner.”

Based on more than 100 interviews at leading U.S. investment banks, law firms and management consulting firms, more than half of the evaluators ranked cultural fit as the most important criterion at the job interview stage. Rivera suggests that this may mean that parental socioeconomic status plays a big part here. She said, “Evaluators are predominately white, Ivy League-educated, upper-middle or upper class men and women who tend to have more stereotypically masculine leisure pursuits and favor extracurricular activities associated with people of their background.”

Rivera also commented on how these findings might apply to other workplaces. While leisure interests would be expected to be particularly significant in more affluent circles, the specific cultural similarities that matter might vary in different settings. If you’re applying at a health food store, maybe no one will care if you play squash, but being a vegan could potentially give you an edge.

While the authors say this is the first empirical demonstration of this process, human resource professionals have long recognized the importance of finding candidates who fit in. This is one reason behind detailed job descriptions that give applicants a chance to screen themselves out if long hours or a laid-back environment doesn’t jibe with their personal values. It also helps to explain why employee referrals are highly valued for finding new employees who will connect with the current ones.

If nothing else, employers may want to consider whether the study findings suggest a barrier to bringing on board new employees who could be top performers and the implications for developing diverse and inclusive workplaces. For recruiters and job seekers, it’s another reminder to pay attention to extracurricular activities and other considerations that could be even more important than grades and job skills.

More companies are looking to bring on new recruiters as they prepare for the typical end-of-the-year hiring surge.

A recent report from Wanted Analytics found that the number of job postings for recruiters and other staffing professionals increased by 12 percent in September when compared to 2011 and by 29 percent when compared to 2010. This is also a good sign that the recruitment industry has officially recovered from the effects of the economic recession.

When it comes to overall growth in recruiting jobs, San Francisco takes the lead, with a 36 percent increase in job postings when compared to last year. The top five cities with the most recruiting jobs listed during September were:

  1. New York, N.Y.
  2. Washington, D.C.
  3. Chicago, Ill.
  4. Los Angeles, Calif.
  5. San Francisco, Calif.

And if you’re looking for a recruiting job, make sure you’re brushing up on your negotiation and social media skills, because it’s not enough to just know the basics anymore:

We’ve been watching hiring demand for Recruiters for a while and noticed that job requirements continue to evolve for this profession. In addition to traditional recruiting skills – like experience with applicant tracking software (ATS) and full lifecycle recruiting – there are several emerging skill sets that are gaining more traction every month. Two of these include negotiation and social media skills. The number of job ads that look for candidates with strong negotiation abilities is up 13 percent compared to September 2011. Job ads with social media requirements have grown even more incredibly, up 52 percent since last year.

To learn more about ATS and other important recruitment tools, check out CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE.

With the 2012 Presidential Election less than three weeks away, we’ve officially entered the dreaded zone of back and forth debates, non-stop trash talking commercials, and endless political posts on Facebook. Even though this time of year can be annoying, there are some things that recruiters can learn, especially from the Presidential debates.

Americans don’t simply let someone walk into the White House without an intense screening process, the same way that you shouldn’t hire new employees without knowing all that you can about them. While the vetting process isn’t quite as intense for normal job candidates, there are still a lot of similarities.

Here are five things recruiters can learn from the Presidential debates:

  1. Interview your candidates thoroughly. Just as Americans want to know as much as they can about each Presidential candidate before they make a decision, recruiters should learn as much as they can about each potential employee before choosing who to hire. Keep in mind that it usually takes more than one interview to learn everything you need to know about a candidate – you not only want to know about their experience and their skills, but their attitude and how they will fit in with your company culture – so it helps to have a series of different types of interviews with different people in the company.
  2. Understand what each candidate’s strengths are. By thoroughly reading through their resumes and conducting several interviews, you should eventually be able to pinpoint what each candidate’s strengths are. Once you know each candidate’s skills and abilities, you can more easily decide who’s talents align with the job and your company as a whole.
  3. Understand what each candidate’s weaknesses are. Just as you need to know what each candidate’s strengths are, you also need to know what each candidate’s weaknesses are. You can unveil a job seeker’s weaknesses by simply asking them what they think their own weaknesses are and by asking a number of other behavioral-based questions. You shouldn’t always discount a candidate because of their weaknesses, but instead ask yourself how you might be able to help that job seeker overcome their weaknesses and whether or not they’re willing to grow and learn within the position.
  4. Check the facts. Just like Presidential candidates, most job seekers will say almost anything to make themselves look good, which is why you need to check all the facts. Make sure you verify a potential employee’s education and employment history, try to speak to a few references about the candidate, and maybe even conduct a thorough background check so you can be assured the person is who they say they are.
  5. Pick the person that’s best for the job. Once all the interviews are complete and your fact-checking is done, you might be left with several candidates that you think have enough experience and are qualified for the position. This is where you need to use your gut instinct to pick who will be best for the job at hand, not necessarily who has the most experience or the most education.

A huge number of Americans are currently looking for new job opportunities – is your recruiting team ready?

Earlier this week, Jobvite released its Social Job Seeker Survey 2012, which found that a whopping 75 percent of Americans in the workforce are looking for new job opportunities. This is a 6 percent increase from last year.

The survey polled more than 2,100 adults – 1,300 of which are considered to be in the workforce, meaning they are either employed or unemployed and looking for a job. Of those who are employed, 69 percent are looking for a new job, up from 61 percent last year.

Some other interesting findings of the survey include:

  • About 33 percent of job seekers are less optimistic about finding a new job this year.
  • 61 percent of job seekers think finding a job is more difficult this year.
  • 41 percent of job seekers think they are overqualified for their current positions.
  • 83 percent of job seekers use Facebook to look for work, a slight jump from 82 percent in 2011.
  • The number of job seekers using Twitter to look for work increased from 37 percent to 46 percent over the last year.
  • The number of job seekers looking for work on LinkedIn grew from 32 percent to 41 percent between 2011 and 2012.
  • 88 percent of all job seekers have at least one social media profile, while 64 percent have two accounts, and 44 percent are using three or more networks.
  • 24 percent of job seekers have been asked for social media info when applying for a job.

“With fierce competition for jobs, which now includes a majority of employed people on top of active job seekers, social media has become a critical tool for job hunting and career growth,” Dan Finnigan, President & CEO of Jobvite, said in a press release. “One in six job seekers polled credited a social network for leading to their current/most recent employment.

“Maintaining your online presence and keeping employment top-of-mind at all times are vital to professional success,” he continued. “With technology and social networking rapidly evolving, those who don’t engage through Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter will quickly find themselves falling behind.”

A lot of things can affect an employee’s happiness, but some cities just seem to have happier employees than others.

CareerBliss recently unveiled its list of the “Top 20 Happiest U.S. Cities for Young Professionals for 2012.” This year, six California cities appeared on the list, with three taking hold of the top spots.

The list is based on data from more than 38,000 employee reviews completed between 2011 and 2012 by young professionals, or those with less than 10 years of experience, throughout the country.

Employees were asked to rate 10 key factors that affect workplace happiness (including: work-life balance, compensation, company culture, overall work environment, company reputation, relationships with managers and co-workers, opportunities for growth, job resources, daily tasks, and job autonomy) on a scale of one to five.

The 20 happiest cities include:

  1. Los Angeles, Calif.: 3.952
  2. San Jose, Calif.: 3.951
  3. Sunnyvale, Calif.: 3.950
  4. Indianapolis, Ind.: 3.942
  5. San Diego, Calif.: 3.884
  6. Irvine, Calif.: 3.866
  7. Atlanta, Ga.: 3.857
  8. Boston, Mass.: 3.845
  9. San Francisco, Calif.: 3.833
  10. San Antonio, Texas: 3.828
  11. Las Vegas, Nev.: 3.820
  12. Seattle, Wash.: 3.784
  13. Irving, Texas: 3.783
  14. Philadelphia, Penn.: 3.779
  15. Orlando, Fla.: 3.763
  16. Pittsburgh, Penn.: 3.743
  17. New York, N.Y.: 3.716
  18. Plano, Texas: 3.705
  19. Miami, Fla.: 3.679
  20. Houston, Texas: 3.679

If you need some help recruiting happy employees, check out PCRecruiter.

If you’re not using social media to complement your hiring efforts yet, then you’re seriously falling way behind the trend.

Earlier this summer, Jobvite unveiled its annual Social Recruiting Survey, which found that social media has become an essential recruiting tool for successful HR teams. Currently, 92 percent of companies are using social media to recruit new employees, which is up from 78 percent five years ago.

Survey results are based on answers from more than 1,000 human resources and other recruitment professionals who were asked about their social media recruiting activities and intentions.

Some key findings of the survey include:

  • LinkedIn remains the most popular social network among recruiters, with usage increasing from 87 percent in 2011 to 93 percent in 2012.
  • 66 percent of recruiters are using Facebook, up 11 percent from last year.
  • 54 percent of recruiters are using Twitter.
  • 73 percent of employes have successfully hired a candidate through social media, up from 63 percent in 2011 and 58 percent in 2010.
  • 89 percent of recruiters have hired through LinkedIn, 25 percent through Facebook, and 15 percent through Twitter.
  • 49 percent of recruiters have seen the size of their candidate pools increase since adopting social media.
  • 43 percent of recruiters think social media leads to better quality candidates.
  • 20 percent of recruiters say hiring through social media is quicker than through traditional channels.
  • 71 percent of recruiters consider themselves moderate to exceptional social recruiters.
  • 48 percent of recruiters always check a candidate’s social profiles.
  • 80 percent of recruiters like candidates who belong to professional organizations.

“The rise in social recruiting has allowed both candidates and employers an easier way to find the best match,” Dan Finnigan, president and CEO of Jobvite, said in a press release. “We continue to see social recruiting gain popularity because it is more efficient than the days of sifting through a haystack of resumes. It also increases quality referral hires, which our own data on Jobvite proves are hired faster and last longer.”

How does your small business recruit? Recruiting can be filled with endless requirements that can eliminate some of the dynamic potential of the process.

Taking a look at advice from Johnny Laurent, vice president and general manager for the Sage Employer Solutions business unit, there are “six rules of wise recruiting” that can help small businesses manage such an important process:

  1. Look back to go forward: Take a look at how your business used to hire talent. What did and didn’t work? These lessons can help you learn from the past, improve what’s broken, and move away from what needs to be forgotten.
  2. Hire for attitude, train for skills: Laurent advises businesses to observe the dynamic potential of an interested employee. After all, you can always train an employee on the changes in software, but their attitude toward work probably won’t be so amenable.
  3. Past performance does predict future behavior: Take a deep look at the prospect’s background and remember that “unclear answers from former employers shouldn’t be accepted.” Laurent also advises you to ask what the person was like in a particular situation.
  4. Become the employer of choice: The “number one recruiting strategy,” according to Laurent – is a goal that your business should strive to be recognized for in recruitment. When resumes start coming to you, Laurent says, you know you’re on the right track.
  5. Put them in the book – it’s important to keep a reference guide: Pay attention to who’s in your business right now. Keep tabs on your current employees and the directions they’re moving. You can keep tabs on your own organization as well as others.
  6. Hire hard, manage easy: Laurent uses this quote from Alan Davis, chairman and co-founder of Alan Davis Strategic Recruiting. If the right amount of energy is put into CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE, the rest “is a breeze,” in Laurent’s words.

Take these tips from Laurent and use them in your own recruitment process. Blending dynamic potential and conventional wisdom, the advice merges the best of both worlds for organizational success.

Recruiting those really exceptional, ‘extraordinary’ people won’t ever happen if you stick to legacy notions of simply matching skill levels to the company’s job description.

What’s important is what Geoffrey James, a staff writer for Inc’s SalesForce column, came away with from a leadership conference attended by numerous “CEOs and sales execs.”

“How to Hire Extraordinary Employees: 7 Rules” is not a randomly acquired list; the thoughtful tips go beyond the traditional skill-matching process to incorporate a deeper understanding of the applicant’s desires, wants, and even disappointments.

  1. Define your “Extraordinary Employee” – This step requires you to focus on the successful employees in your organization and understand their “talents and skills.” Interview questions around these traits will bring out any skills and character attributes that look to be “exceptional in your specific organization.”
  2. Always be Interviewing – Instead of waiting for the day you need to fill that opening, always be looking ahead and creating an inventory by “interviewing candidates all the time.” Use this along with your social media channels – and email – as a way to find applicants who look like they have that something “extraordinary” to contribute.
  3. Ask Questions That Reveal Character – Don’t throw them the ‘ol soft-ball question, like “What was your greatest achievement?” Get deep-in-the-weeds with this one and ask them to bring up “achievements from grade school, two from high school, two from college … ” and make sure they can tie-in a business-related achievement as well.
  4. Seek People Who Have Overcome Disappointment – You’re looking for those telling and “defining moments” that show they possess resiliency, which is crucial to assessing how they will cope in your business environment.
  5. Don’t Confuse Success with Motivation – How many times have you heard that almost-cliché-type phrase, “self-starters”? Make sure the “self-starter” mantra is only working when heavily supervised.
  6. Hire for Attitude, Not Experience – Hiring based on the applicant’s past track record is not enough; instead you should decide if they have the right mojo and the right attitude to contribute to the company’s future.
  7. Get a Real Reference – Step away from the candidate’s resume when checking references and do your own sleuthing to find the references you need … ”rather than simply calling the ones on the … resume.”

HR departments are historically considered to be boring and conservative, but some of the cutting-edge policies being created in big companies are giving recruiters a new reputation.

It’s hard enough to find – and keep – good employees in today’s world, and having a good recruiting team and good recruiting software (https://www.pcrecruiter.net) is no longer enough, so a lot of companies are going above and beyond the ordinary tactics to draw potential candidates. From unlimited vacation to bolder branding ideas, employers are pulling out all the stops to bring new people on board.

Here are five of the craziest policies that are setting some companies apart:

  1. Extraordinary benefits – Most companies offer some form of medical, dental, and vision insurance, but some companies are going way above and beyond to make sure their employees are well taken care of. Take Google for example – if an employee dies, the company’s life insurance policy will pay their spouse or domestic partner 50 percent of that employee’s paycheck for the next 10 years.
  2. Unlimited vacation – Employees of most companies – especially the bigger, more corporate ones – typically only get a couple weeks of vacation each year. However, newer companies like Netflix and Foursquare allow their employees to take an unlimited amount of vacation. These companies realize just how much emphasis the younger generations place on the importance of work-life balance and how much they value their time off.
  3. Better health incentives – A lot more companies are focusing on the skyrocketing cost of healthcare and are finding new and innovative ways to keep their employees healthy. Some of the top companies have employee exercise spaces or group classes on-site, while others offer monetary incentives for employees who improve their health and in turn drive down the company’s overall insurance costs.
  4. Intrinsic benefits – We’re seeing a lot more companies acknowledge the importance of intrinsic benefits and implement new ways to appreciate their employees – including everything from setting up game rooms and snack lounges where employees can take a much-needed break throughout the day to offering telecommuting opportunities so employees can work from the comfort of their own home.
  5. Referral bonuses – Some of the best new hires come from the networks of your existing employees, and companies are beginning to place a higher value on this. It’s not unusual for companies to offer a referral bonus of $100 or so, but some companies are offering bonuses in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

It takes a lot of work to find the best employees for your company, but that goal can be met a lot easier if you have a great recruiter on your HR team.

So what makes someone a great recruiter as opposed to a mediocre one? In fact, there are several qualities that set high-performing recruiters above their lesser-performing counterparts.

Here are four essential qualities of a great recruiter:

  1. Good salesperson – Part of your job as a recruiter is to sell your company and your company’s job openings to potential candidates. You have to sell the idea of working for your company in the same manner that you’d sell someone a new product or service, which means you need to have the ability to prove why your company is so great and why someone will want to work there.
  2. People person – As a recruiter, it’s inherent that you’ll be dealing with people on a consistent basis, so you need to be comfortable interacting with all different types of people day in and day out. Since you will most likely be the first point of contact for a potential employee, your attitude and demeanor will essentially provide a first impression of the company, meaning that you need to be able to put on a happy face regardless of what might be going on in your personal life.
  3. Organized – There is a lot going on in the world of recruiting, from writing up job descriptions and reading resumes to calling people for interviews and conducting background checks on potential hires. So as a recruiter, you need to be extremely organized in order to keep track of all of these things, so you can ultimately get the job done.
  4. Technologically inclined – As we mentioned above, there are a lot of tasks that fall at the feet of recruiters, but luckily there are some great technologies out there to help them stay on track. Whether you’re using your company’s applicant tracking system (pcrecruiter.net) to review resumes, scheduling interviews through Google Calendars, or conducting a background check, you need to know how to use the latest technology in order to make your job more efficient.

Keep these important qualities in mind when hiring your company’s next recruiter. With any luck, you’ll snag someone who can entice some of the best employees out there to join your company.

Sometimes employers become overly egocentric when it comes to recruiting, deciding that in a weak economy they have the pick of the litter when it comes to job seekers. However, job seekers are often no better at focusing their resumes around the old-fashioned idea of an objective and expecting employers to meet their personal needs by offering them their dream job.

The fact of the matter is that recruiting needs to be a give-and-take situation. That doesn’t mean one side gives and the other takes. It means there should be a balance on both sides.

In the article, “The Importance of the Give-and-Take Job Interview,” writer and human resources consultant Deborah S. Hildebrand suggests
that:

… job seekers (and employers) should focus on creating the type of give-and-take environment that naturally lends itself to a quality fact-finding session. Because that is what job interviews are supposed to be all about. It’s just business professionals gathering information.

In a truly idyllic job interview, both sides would feel confident in what they bring to the table and be able to discuss openly the benefit of what they each offer. It would be, as Hildebrand suggests, a more level playing field.

For employers, writer and speaker John Picoult sees it this way in his Monster.com article, “Does your Hiring Process Sentence Applicants to Hard Labor?” Employers need to consider how their company treats customers and apply these same rules to job seekers. After all, customers are just job seekers on their day off.

Consider this: if you make the shopping experience uncomfortable or difficult for customers, they are likely to stop patronizing your business, right?

The same principle applies in the recruiting arena. If it’s unreasonably difficult and onerous for candidates to interact with your firm, they’ll be inclined to look elsewhere for employment. (And no matter what the state of the job market, talented people will always have other alternatives.)

Making the recruiting process as free of stress and friction as possible should be your goal. It’s our goal. That’s why we offer a complete recruiting software solution for your applicant recruiting, sourcing, and tracking needs. Check out PCRecruiter for more.

If you’re not using social media as part of your recruiting efforts yet, here’s some motivation: revenue from social networking sites is expected to rise a whopping 43.1 percent this year, hitting a total of $16.9 billion.

That’s according to a new forecast on social media revenue from Gartner, which examined past revenue from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and asked analysts how that revenue will grow over the coming years.

What does this have to do with recruiting? It means that more people are going to be using social media sites and more companies are going to figure out how to monetize the actions from those users.

So it only makes sense that you establish a presence on all the popular social media sites now, so you can interact with the online community and find some great candidates by advertising your jobs or tapping into your networks’ connections.

Here are some interesting facts from the report:

  • Social media revenue is expected to rise from $11.8 billion in 2011 to $16.9 billion this year, making for an increase of 43.1 percent.
  • Revenue from social networking sites should reach $34 billion by 2016.
  • Advertising accounts for the largest portion of revenue from social media sites, expected to hit $8.8 billion this year, followed by social gaming at $6.2 billion, and subscriptions at $278 million.
  • The number of people using social media will grow at a moderate pace as competition and new technologies keeps people engaged.
  • Marketing departments are going to spend more of their advertising budgets on social media sites.

“New revenue opportunities will exist in social media, but no new services will be able to bring significant fresh revenue to social media by 2016,” Neha Gupta, a senior research analyst with Gartner, said. “The biggest impact of growth in social media is on the advertisers.

“In the short and medium terms, social media sites should deploy data analytic techniques that interrogate social networks to give marketers a more accurate picture of trends about consumers’ needs and preferences on a customized basis,” she added. “In the meantime, however, they should also continue to exploit other channels of revenue like mobile advertising and social commerce.”

We live in a society where the line between work and free time is too easily and too often blurred, but most employers still don’t have a policy in place to deal with working after hours.

“Technology and Its Impact on Employees During Nonworking Hours,” a new report from SHRM, found that a large majority of employers don’t have anything in writing dictating what their staff members can and can’t do when working outside of the office.

However, most typical employees still feel guilty if they don’t respond to emails at night or on the weekend, even if doing so is not technically part of their job description. That’s because most companies rely on organizational norms, not written policies, to dictate such behavior.

“Employers are not creating policies that delve into employees working outside of the traditional workday,” Evren Esen, manager of SHRM’s Survey Research Center, said in a press release. “Whether an employee responds to email at night or during the weekend is usually linked to organizational norms. If there is such an expectation, then employees are likely to follow suit.”

Some highlights of the report include:

  • Only 21 percent of companies have a formal policy in place regulating the use of wireless communication devices during non-working hours.
  • About 26 percent of organizations have an informal policy in place, while 81 percent of those rely on managers to relay rules to employees.
  • Of the companies that don’t have any policy in place dealing with working after hours, 87 percent allow employees to set their own limitations.
  • Employers are more concerned about how much their employees are working after hours if the work is being done on a company-owned device.

Ultimately, employers should make it a priority to develop an after-hours working policy, whether the employee is using company-provided equipment or not. Companies that have no policy in place could be leaving themselves open to lawsuits for not paying proper overtime.

There is lots of advice out there about how you can find your next job on Facebook, but now it seems that the popular social networking site is going to make that task even easier by launching its own job board.

A recent article from NASDAQ claims that Facebook is planning to launch its own job board later this summer, although the article couldn’t credit its source, saying only that the information came from “people familiar with the matter.”

If it does become a reality, the job board could pose a huge threat to competitors – specifically LinkedIn – as well as other companies that develop apps to help companies showcase their jobs on Facebook.

“In recent years, the success of sites like LinkedIn, which merge users’ personal and professional histories with information about jobs, have put pressure on once-dominant sites like Monster.com,” the article notes. “While job seekers once considered sharing information on Facebook to be a liability when finding a job, today a host of companies, including those partnering in the new job board, have popped up promising to better match job seekers and recruiters using profile information from Facebook users.”

According to NASDAQ’s sources, the job board will aggregate job openings from other third-party providers, making those jobs available to all users. Facebook also plans to involve BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs – all of which currently use Facebook for recruiting purposes – in the new effort.

Not much else is clear about how the new job board will operate, although Facebook does plan to make the service available for free, at least initially.

As everyone anxiously awaits tomorrow’s employment numbers, a separate report is showing that companies are making the lowest number of layoffs in over a year.

The most recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that employers made 37,551 layoffs during June, a whopping 39 percent decrease from May, and marking the lowest number of job cuts in the last 13 months.

Although we’re not out of the woods yet, this is a huge step in the right direction, and offers a glimmer of hope at a time when many people are predicting that the economy is still getting worse.

“Even with recent signs that the economy is headed for another summer slump or worse, including the first contraction in manufacturing activity in three years, employers appear reluctant to shed too many workers,” Challenger CEO John A. Challenger said in a press release. “While it does not take long to shrink payrolls, it can take a significant amount of time to rebuild them, particularly as reports of the growing skills gap becomes more widespread.”

Even more encouraging is that the biggest job cuts in June were in education, just in time for schools and universities to wrap up things for the summer. And even that industry’s 6,569 layoffs were down 36 percent from last year.

“Continued weakness in the recovery will further delay hiring, which will, in turn, further delay the full recovery,” Challenger said. “Whether or not we see an  increase in job cuts depends on the length and severity of the recovery’s slowdown.

“However, barring some major economic catastrophe, companies in  the U.S. are likely to hold steady for the remainder of the year,” he added. “We probably  will not see a major ramp up in hiring or firing; certainly, not before the November elections. Even after the election and regardless of who wins, it  could be several months until companies understand the full implications of  the outcome and how to plan for the future.”

Check out the full report for more info on what industries and states are seeing the most layoffs, the top reasons companies are letting people go, and the industries planning to hire in the coming months.

The Olympic Games are a time-tested tradition enjoyed throughout the world, but beyond the athletes and the competition, it’s the employees behind the scenes who keep the event running smoothly.

Traditionally, the Olympic Games are held every two years, alternating between summer and winter events. The host city changes for each event as well, with this year’s games being hosted in London.

The Olympics regularly attract participants from more than 200 nations around the world, which means there is a huge influx of visitors to the host city. It is estimated that the London games will cost $14.8 billion.

But that cost is well worth it for the city, which will see plenty of business before, during, and after the games take place. Obviously, Olympic Park itself will see most of the business, but patronage will flow all throughout the city as guests book rooms at local hotels, make reservations at local restaurants, and tour around local landmarks.

Given the amount of business the games will bring to the city, it’s imperative that local businesses ramp up their hiring efforts in order to meet demand. That means figuring out a way to hire a large number of talented employees within a small period of time.

To help with the hiring efforts, game officials have established a program that will help unemployed people and students find a job related to the games. A total of 100,000 people are expected to nab paid positions in catering and hospitality, cleaning and waste, event services, retail, and security.

“The vision of London 2012 is to use the power of the Games to inspire lasting change. Part of that vision is inspiring lasting change in London’s communities, particularly in the east of the capital where much of the Games is being held. Getting people into work – some of whom might have been unemployed for a long time or may have never had a job before – is a key element of the area’s regeneration.”

Opportunities are also available with the ceremonies department, which is in charge of putting together the actual opening and closing ceremonies, and the London 2012 Organizing Committee.

The unemployment rate in 2010 for veterans who have served since September 2001 was at 11.7%, while the August 1, 2011 TIME.com article, “More Young Veterans Jobless,” put the current unemployment rate for veterans at around 13%. Both numbers exceed the current national average of 9.2%

The most recent unemployment rate, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 8.2%. Yet, that number is higher for veterans.

In the article, “Veteran-Friendly Job Resources to Ease Vets Back into Job Market,” writer and human resources consultant Deborah S. Hildebrand notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

Unfortunately, the unemployment rate in 2010 for veterans who have served since September 2001 was at 11.7%, while the August 1, 2011 TIME.com article, “More Young Veterans Jobless,” put the current unemployment rate for veterans at around 13%. Both numbers exceed the current national average of 9.2%

The experts say that the most likely reason is that many companies don’t make the connection between military experience and recruiting candidates for their open positions.

Granted, much of the problem has to do with how veterans view themselves. When they develop their resume, they often use military acronyms and a government formatted resume that is foreign to private human resources professionals and hiring managers. Veterans need to learn how to translate their years of experience and skills into the right words.

Beyond that, employers need to rethink how they look at the men and women who served this country. Defense contractors, for instance, often hire veterans with security clearances who can work on top-secret projects.

For other employers who are not as sure about recruiting veterans, there are tax benefits as well as government funding for training and worker relocation, such as VOW to Hire Heroes Act of 2011.

This initiative made changes to the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) by adding two new categories. It allows for-profit employers to claim a credit of up to $9,600 for qualified veterans who begin work before January 1, 2013 or up to $6,240 for qualified tax-exempt organizations. For more information, visit the IRS website.

Additionally, the Employer Assistance and Resource Network (EARN) offers resources to assist employers in hiring veterans including a Veteran’s Hiring Tool Kit and no-cost consultation and technical assistance.

What this country needs is more small businesses. So the U.S. Department of Labor recently announced it was providing $35 million for states to help develop, enhance, and promote Self-Employment Assistance programs to encourage unemployed Americans to realize their dreams of business ownership.

The program allows “participants who are currently receiving or eligible for federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation and Extended Benefits” to receive “financial assistance equal to their Unemployment Insurance benefits while they receive important entrepreneurial training and resources to help launch their own businesses.”

Small Business Vital to Recruiting

Small businesses not only create opportunity for their owners, but they create opportunities for other small businesses, as well as job seekers in the community. As the Small Business Administration suggests:

“… The overall importance of the small busi­ness community has been well documented and the importance of new venture creation is widely recognized.”

And nowhere is this more important than in the creation of new jobs. In fact, as of 2010, the SBA reported that small businesses (fewer than 500 employees per the SBA) accounted for 75 percent of net new jobs in the U.S.

Additionally, a study conducted by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) suggested that entrepreneurship is a major factor in any country’s well-being in both economic and job growth.

Technology Makes Small Businesses Competitive

However, the difficulty for many small businesses and entrepreneurs is in competing with larger organizations. That’s where technology can provide an advantage.

Technology makes small businesses competitive. As Stephanie Faris suggests in her article, “Technology Helps Small Businesses Restore Competitiveness to U.S. Economy”:

“Thanks to technology, those smaller companies can now compete with the largest corporations in the country. Cloud services are leveling the playing field, allowing small and mid-sized businesses to tackle larger projects …”

And one such large project is managing the recruiting function. That’s where PCRecruiter can help.

We offer tools that enable human resource and other business professionals to manage the entire recruiting process, from requisition approval and submission to resume database management and diversity tracking. Whatever you need to streamline staffing, we have the recruiting software tools that are right for your current needs.

Is the economy headed for another meltdown or are we just experiencing a hiccup in the national recovery?

That’s what experts are asking after after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest employment numbers for May at the end of last week, which were much lower than the anticipated addition of 150,000 jobs.

Overall, the nation added only 69,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 8.2 percent. There were a total of 12.7 million unemployed people, with the number of long-term unemployed people rising from 5.1 million to 5.4 million.

Lawrence Creatura, a stock portfolio manager with Federated Investors, told the Associated Press:

“The jobs report was just bad … What we’re seeing is that the job market, post-financial crisis, has not been able to reignite itself. It hasn’t been able to set off that chain reaction where an improving economy creates more jobs, and more jobs improve the economy, creating more jobs. That hasn’t started yet.”

Most major industries didn’t see a lot of movement in terms of employment, with employers in the healthcare, transportation and warehousing, and wholesale trade industries being the only ones to add a significant number of jobs. On the downside, the construction industry took a turn for the worse.

Unimpressive Numbers

Including the May employment numbers, the U.S. has added an average of 96,000 jobs during each of the last three months, which is down from the 245,000 average gain between December and February.

In addition, experts point out that the main reason the increase in unemployment was so small is because a lot of people stopped looking for work, so they’re no longer counted among the unemployment rolls.

And even worse – the BLS revised its employment numbers for March and April, dropping them from 154,000 to 143,000 and from 115,000 to 77,000, respectively.

Sheila Dewan at The New York Times notes:

“Economists can explain away a month or two of dismal numbers, but a three-month run is difficult to ignore. The economy now seems to be following the spring slowdown pattern of the last two years — a bright spot of accelerating growth followed by a slump. The news on Friday even raised mentions of a possibility that dogged last year’s forecasts but did not come to pass: another recession.”

Of course, the weak employment figures are having an effect on the entire global market as well, especially since they came shortly after other data that points to weakening economies in Europe and Asia. Financial markets from Wall Street to Germany took a dive today.

A Few Positives

The good thing is that a few key industries did continue adding jobs during May:

  • Transportation and warehousing – The industry added 36,000 jobs over the month, with ground passenger transportation accounting for most of that gain.
  • Healthcare – With an addition of 33,000 workers, the healthcare industry continued its ever-growing trend, with much of the employment gain coming from the ambulatory healthcare services sector.
  • Manufacturing – One of the most important industries to our economy, manufacturing added 12,000 jobs last month, with employers in fabricated metal products and primary metals hiring the most workers.

Mostly Negatives

Aside from the overall paltry employment figures, the BLS report found that most industries saw little to no change in employment, while one of our most significant industries actually lost workers.

The construction industry, which along with manufacturing has long been a primary indicator of the overall health of the economy, lost 28,000 jobs during May. Payrolls were cut in specialty trade contractors and heavy and civil engineering construction.

Most of the other industries that we pay close attention to on a monthly basis – professional and business services; mining and logging; retail trade; information; financial activities; leisure and hospitality; and government – all saw little or no change in employment last month.

Looking Ahead

In reality, the economy sways back and forth so much that it’s hard to predict what effect the May employment numbers will have in the next several weeks and months.

As Tim Duy wrote over at Forbes:

“Two thoughts come to mind. First, I have said it before and I will say it again: If you become either too optimistic or too pessimistic about the path of the US recovery, you will almost certainly be slapped down in a matter of months.

 

“Second, this summer is looking like a carbon copy of 2011. The US data is turning softer just while the European saga is heating up. This time, we have some additional icing on the cake, with emerging markets faltering as well. And that black box that is China could be in free fall for all we know – commodity prices and cash outflows are pointing to some real distress.”

Many experts think that if legislators in Washington, D.C. don’t do anything to help the economy improve at a faster rate, the Federal Reserve will be forced to step in

Sandra Pianalto, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, told the Wall Street Journal:

“Right now I feel that our accommodative monetary policy is appropriate given my outlook. I always want to balance the risks and costs of doing more. I have an outlook for inflation to remain close to our 2% objective through 2014. It’s important to take a balanced approach on what more we can do for broader economic growth. We need to make sure that we maintain our stable price objective so you have to balance those two objectives.”

Do you have your hands on the resume of that promising candidate that came in last month? Are you buried in paper trying to wade through all those resumes and applications you have collected? Are you just crossing your fingers and hoping that the really sharp guy whose resume came too late for your last posting will respond to your new ad?

So how many job candidates have you lost because of an inefficient processing system in your personnel recruiting office?

Every business can probably point to cases where they have lost potential employees because of processing issues in their personnel management operations. HR staffs try to keep on top of things by keeping resume files on promising candidates and using resume files as a key sourcing tool when job vacancies arise.

Now there is a way to use technology to bring order and structure to your HR recruiting operation and make it more reliable and efficient. Check out PCRecruiter for more information on this.

“Hiring fundamentals that include a systematic process for hiring and consistent execution of the hiring process result in superior employee wins for your organization,” Susan M. Heathfield said in a post at About.com.

Putting an automated recruiting system to work in in your HR department will give you the tools you need to customize a systematic process for your hiring.

The right system will allow you to track and manage contacts, compile a searchable database of prospects, compile candidate profiles, collect required information from candidates, and put your application process online.

With the right systems in place to collect and organize information on your applicant pool, you will have a much better chance of attracting and recruiting the best candidates for your company.

Is your staffing software helping you find the right employees, and more importantly, is it helping the right employees find you?

Recent research finds that employers are able to hire the best candidates when they advertise their job openings in a small number of places. That being said, it’s important for companies to make sure that their staffing software programs allow easy integration with most or all of these sources. Check out https://www.pcrecruiter.net for more info.

Today’s state-of-the-art staffing software solutions are capable of doing much more than just making the recruiting process easier and cheaper for your company. The best solutions will have the ability to integrate your job openings in the places where candidates are looking most, mainly job boards and social media sites.

According to Weddle’s 2011 Survey of Recruiting Trends, a majority of employers still prefer to post their jobs on commercial job boards – more specifically, targeted niche job boards – because that’s where the highest quality candidates are found.

The survey revealed that employers find the best candidates in the following places:

  • 40.7 on job boards
  • 12.9 percent through an employee referral program
  • 11.1 percent by posting jobs on their own websites
  • 9.3 percent on social networking sites
  • 5.6 percent through staffing firms
  • 5.5 percent by advertising job openings in newspapers

Furthermore, 77.3 percent of employers are posting more than half of their job openings online, while only 6.1 percent aren’t using the Internet at all for recruiting. The results have been great, with 50.8 percent of employers hiring more than half of their new employees online. And those employees are pretty talented, with 54.1 percent of employers labeling new hires found online as above average or among the company’s best workers.

So what’s the reason that employers are having such good luck finding high-quality candidates in these places? The answer is simple – because these are the same places job seekers are turning to in order to find work.

When it comes to job seekers, the survey found that:

  • 69 percent find the Internet helpful in their job search
  • 69.7 percent think they will find their next job through an online job board
  • 34 percent found their current job online
  • 58 percent visit at least one job board up to eight times per month

So, if your staffing software provider doesn’t allow easy integration with job boards, social networking sites, or other popular  recruiting sources, it might be time to think about finding a new provider.

The applicant tracking system market is continuing to grow, and as providers offer newer and better solutions, many companies are thinking about switching the service they currently use.

That’s the most important information to come out of “Talent Acquisition Systems 2011: Market Realities, Implementation Examples and Solution Provider Profiles,” a report released last year by Bersin & Associates. The report looked at survey responses from HR professionals and recruiters from organizations of all sizes and in all major industries.

According to Sarah White, who works as principal analyst of talent acquisition for Bersin & Associates, a lot of companies are choosing to work with providers that offer better support and a higher level of integration, and ATS companies that offer a large selection of products are doing the best. It’s commonly accepted that applicant tracking systems are just as important to the recruiting and onboarding process as interviewing and social networking.

Here are some key figures from the survey:

  • The ATS market increased by 11.1 percent to $837 million during 2010, which was slightly lower than the $861 million originally predicted by experts. The difference can be attributed to the slowing economy.
  • The survey predicted that the ATS market would grow by 12 percent to $937 million by the end of 2011, as high-end companies consolidate and low-end companies continue to expand.
  • About 50 percent of companies were planning to switch to a new ATS provider over the year, as new options and new technologies emerge.
  • The amount of time it takes to convince a company to commit to an ATS provider has increased from six months to up to three years.
  • A large majority of ATS providers offer a mobile solution in order to keep up with growing popularity.
  • More and more ATS companies are merging in order to offer a more robust suite of solutions to customers, such as search engine optimization or video services.
  • As social networks continue to become more and more popular, most ATS companies are offering the ability to integrate with LinkedIn, Facebook, or other sites.
  • Analytics have become more important than ever in evaluating a company’s application, interviewing, and hiring process.
  • Learning Management Systems are growing by 10 percent per year, while Performance Management and Succession Management Systems are increasing by 12 percent.

So, as you can see, applicant tracking systems and other similar technologies that make the recruiting and onboarding process easier, cheaper, and more efficient aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. If you’re not already using this technology, now is the time to jump on the bandwagon!

It’s common practice for employers in certain industries to place a strong emphasis on a potential candidate’s work history in order to prevent high turnover numbers. It’s long been thought that candidates who have held several positions in a short period of time will make worse employees and will be more likely to quit.

However, a recent white paper by Evolv shows that work history has very little effect on a candidate’s abilities or likeliness to stay in a position. That means one of the factors employees place a strong emphasis on – in their applicant tracking systems, in the interview process, and in the hiring process – is mostly wrong.

The white paper, entitled “Does Previous Work History Predict Future Employment Outcomes?”, looked at applicant data and employment outcomes of 21,115 call center agents.

Key findings of the white paper include:

  • Almost half of all applicants had two or three jobs in the last five years, while 45 percent had none or one job, and 7 percent had four or more jobs.
  • 56 percent of applicants said they hadn’t held any jobs for less than six months.
  • Survival curves, or the probability that agents reach a given point in time, were almost identical for all groups, regardless of the number of jobs held in the last five years or the number of short-term positions.

“These results indicate that an applicant’s previous work history is actually a poor predictor of employment outcomes,” the white paper notes. “In fact, there is other assessment content that is much more strongly predictive of both attrition as well as performance on the job.

“Clearly, a more nuanced understanding of the applicant as well as his or her personality, aptitudes, work style, technical skills, and fit for the position are necessary to make more informed recruiting decisions,” the paper continues. “Previous work experience must be viewed holistically and placed within a much broader context in order to ensure that a given employer is recruiting the best possible talent.”

Sometimes small-business owners feel at a disadvantage when recruiting new employees because they don’t have the budget to offer big benefit packages and large salaries to attract candidates. Therefore, they wind up with a small pool of candidates.

Sometimes small-business owners feel at a disadvantage when recruiting new employees because they don’t have the budget to offer big benefit packages and large salaries to attract candidates. Therefore, they wind up with a small pool of candidates.

Whether or not your small business is at a hiring disadvantage all depends on how you use what your firm has to offer.

The Best Candidate Doesn’t Always Have the Most Experience

It is important to remember when recruiting employees it isn’t all about hiring the one with the perfect education and work experience. It is equally important to find job seekers who fit with your company’s culture and value system.

In the April 28, 2011, Fortune article, “Is it better to hire for culture fit over experience?” writer Ethan Rouen suggests that because workplace culture varies within organizations the skills employees learn at one company may conflict with those of another. How many times have you told a new employee, “That’s not how we do that here?”

Don’t waste time breaking bad habits. Instead, find candidates that demonstrate the qualities that will make them successful in your firm.

Market Your Firm’s Attributes 

Before you spend hours recruiting, first determine what it is your organization has to offer job seekers. Talk to your staff to get their input. Sell these as benefits on your website and in your recruiting literature.

Continually Network to Attract Candidates

If you’re like most small businesses, your recruiting budget is tight. Finding inexpensive, yet worthwhile sources of candidates requires networking.

Post jobs on your website; network with local groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, non-profit organizations, and professional associations; contact federal and state resources for assistance; and utilize social networking – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – to  its fullest.

Your company may not be in a hiring mode right now, but you should always be recruiting.

By now, most companies know how important it is to have a good recruitment software system in place. But how does your company value that software’s ability to integrate with social media?

Last year, Jobvite released its annual Social Recruiting Survey and introduced the new Jobvite Index, both of which unveil how recruiters are using social media. The data prove that social media is becoming more and more important in the recruiting process.

Overall, the number of companies planning to recruit through social media increased from 83 percent to 89 percent last year. At the same time, 64 percent of companies were using at least two social networks for their recruiting efforts.

“The data show that recruiting departments, like marketing departments, are reaching and engaging their targets in multiple social networks,” Dan Finnigan, Jobvite president and CEO, said in a company press release. “The fastest moving companies increasingly use the richness of profiles in LinkedIn, the power of online connections in Facebook, and the instant reach of Twitter to develop valuable talent pools and make new hires.”

Some other key findings of the survey include:

  • The number of companies that have hired through social media increased from 58 percent to 64 percent between 2010 and 2011.
  • Although companies still claim referrals bring the highest quality candidates, only 30 percent were planning to increase their referral budget, while 55 percent were spending more on social recruiting. Only 16 percent were paying more for job board postings.
  • As we previously noted, 64 percent of companies use at least two social networks for recruiting, while 40 percent of companies use at least three.
  • About 73 percent of social hires come from LinkedIn, while 20 percent come from Facebook, and 7 percent come from Twitter.
  • The fight for jobs isn’t expected to die down anytime soon, as 77 percent of companies anticipate an increase in competition, and 61 percent plan to recruit from their competitors.

“Jobvite’s new data confirms our research that social recruiting has become an essential element of today’s corporate recruiting strategy,” Josh Bersin, president and CEO of Bersin & Associates, said. “The data also points out that referral-based recruiting is a new ‘secret weapon’ for talent acquisition. Companies that focus heavily on referral strategies, enabled by social networks, are delivering the highest quality of hire at the lowest overall cost.”

It should be common sense by now, but it can’t overemphasized: Don’t scrimp on sourcing candidates, no matter what position you’re looking to fill.

It should be common sense by now, but it can’t overemphasized: Don’t scrimp on sourcing candidates, no matter what position you’re looking to fill.

Brad Remillard made the point again just the other day.

“I believe you should conduct a background check on every employee you hire — from the janitor to the CEO,” he wrote in a guest column for the Orange County Register.

It’s cheap insurance considering what’s at stake, says Remillard, who has 30 years as an executive recruiter.

His advice rings true. Once you bring someone into your company and hand them the keys to the front door — maybe even the safe — you’re counting on that person to be honest, ethical and dependable.

How you handle the information you find is up to you, but most employers would at least want to know if a potential new hire been arrested or had money troubles in the past.

“At a minimum,” Remillard counsels, “you should conduct a criminal background check going back at least five years and in multiple counties. Check the Department of Motor Vehicles, verify degrees and pull a credit report. If it’s a public company, depending on the position, do a check with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

He also suggests requiring candidates to sign release forms when they fill out applications — it lets them know right away that you’ll be checking their background. It might even save you time by discouraging some who know you’ll turn up issues.

Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Erin Egan, recently put business bosses on notice that the world’s largest social network is prepared to take legal action against the “distressing increase” in employers demanding employee’s Facebook passwords. This is an interesting position for the social network to take, since most of the time it is fighting off criticism for its own privacy violations.

Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Erin Egan, recently put business bosses on notice that the world’s largest social network is prepared to take legal action against the “distressing increase” in employers demanding employees’ Facebook passwords.

This is an interesting position for the social network to take, since most of the time it is fighting off criticism for its own privacy violations.

“Facebook takes your privacy seriously,” said Egan in an online statement. “We’ll take action to protect the privacy and security of our users, whether by engaging policymakers or, where appropriate, by initiating legal action, including by shutting down applications that abuse their privileges.”

The timing for Facebook’s warning came almost simultaneously as Senator Richard Blumenthal (Dem) of Connecticut released details of a bill that he is preparing to address this privacy issue. The senator’s bill would address the policies of some employers who make requests that amount to an “unreasonable invasion of privacy.”

“I am very deeply troubled by the practices that seem to be spreading voraciously around the country,” Blumenthal said in an interview with Politico.com.

Both the senator and Facebook seem to be responding to a series of reports by the Associated Press that outline several employers asking job seekers for log-on credentials to their email and social networking sites; where the goal is clearly to check-up on the candidates online behavior.

With the advent of social networks, many employers began to examine the social profiles of prospective and current employees; investigating comments, photos and other data available on a person’s “wall” or “profile”. Many job-seekers have caught onto this trend and have begun setting their social settings to private, making it more difficult for employers to gain access. However, due to the tight job market, many candidates are complying and divulging this private information as they weight thoughts of continued unemployment or under-employment.

Currently, these employer policies and actions violate Facebook’s terms of service. But the reality is that those terms of service have no real legal weight and many legal experts feel that the legal waters surrounding this issue are murky.

The Department of Justice does regard these types of violations as federal crimes. Yet, in recent congressional testimony, the DOJ stated that is has no plans on prosecuting any such violations. The DOJ may be force to reconsider its position in light of Facebook’s aggressive statement and Sen. Blementhal’s proposed privacy bill. There will certainly be more to follow as this recruiting issue is moved further into public view.

Nabbing that perfect hire reflects well on your employees. For sure, an ambassador affect kicks in as employees tout your organization as top-notch to work for.

You’ve spent a lot of time pouring over the resumes for a critical job opening at your company. Some fit well, others are the proverbial square-peg-in-a-round-hole applicant.

Time to ramp up the recruiting process.

Approval comes from above to initiate a spiff to company employees for referring apt candidates.

Granted, relying on employee referrals is a great starting point: like-minded people can reduce the unknown factors of the new hire immensely.

However, an article in the Canadian HR Reporter, Problems with Employee Referrals, puts forward a few pluses-and-minuses in “using the workforce” to search for a candidate.

THE GOOD …

… existing employees are unlikely to recommend someone they wouldn’t personally vouch for.

… candidates who aren’t necessarily applying to every online job posting available.

Nabbing that perfect hire reflects well on your employees. For sure, an ambassador affect kicks in as employees tout your organization as top-notch to work for.

THE BAD …

… organizations…can become “inbred” with employees who are too much alike.

… Some people feel employee referral programs are more helpful to employees’ friends and relatives than the organization.

SOLUTIONS …

Set a policy regarding the referral bonuses that says the new hire must stay put for a given period of time before payouts are made.

Also, it only makes sense to give some feedback to your employees if some of their referrals aren’t meeting your requirements.

Oh, and in keeping with full transparency, make sure you tell a referral that your employees are being paid a bonus for rounding up candidates.

In the end, it’s probably best not to fire up an employee-referral system as your only recruitment method. On that note, be sure to check out our web-based recruiting software; it’s by over 2900 companies in more than 60 countries.

College students who spend hours a day on Facebook might not be wasting their time, several studies suggest — they might even find jobs through social networking.

That’s because savvy employers, according to new report, are increasingly recruiting through social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

The report, published in the Daily Pennsylvanian —  the student newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School — cites one study that predicts the number of recruiters using Twitter alone will quadruple this year.

Meantime, applicants are doing the same. LinkedIn reports that students and recent college graduates are the site’s fastest-growing user demographic.

The Daily Pennsylvanian article quotes Shannon Kelly, an associate director of Wharton’s Career Services program, who notes that social networking sites give employers immediate and personal access to job-seekers.

And that can give companies a leg up on their competitors.

“More and more companies are using social media platforms to showcase business culture … it’s no different from hiring a public relations company,” Kelly tells the paper.

Wharton junior Jacob Schulman wound up with two unsolicited job offers via Twitter.

“I wasn’t proactively searching for jobs,” he says in the Daily Pennsylvanian article. “I was just following companies that I liked.”

Seems like a serendipitous outcome — Schulman gets an offer from a company he’s genuinely interested in, and the company has a candidate who’s already proven he’s serious.

Human Resources professionals at most companies are always faced with the challenging task of finding just the right candidates for any open position and that task is even more difficult in today’s economic environment.

Human Resources professionals at most companies are always faced with the challenging task of finding just the right candidates for any open position and that task is even more difficult in today’s economic environment.

High unenployment has dramactically increased the number of job applicants for many firms and created a larger pool of possible candidates on targeted recruiting searches.

Many larger companies aleady employ recruiting software to help them sort, categorize and evaluate potential recruits. That software has been too expensive for small and mid-sized companies. Until now. Smaller companies can now get the same HR recruiting, tracking and organizing packages through web-based services for a fraction of the cost.

The advantages are obvious. If smaller companies have the same tools as the big companies, they can take advantage of the larger pool of talent that is currently seeking work. By being able to access and assess more potential employees, the smaller company has a much better chance of finding the right person to fill any vacancy.

Using web-based employment recrutiing software, enables smaller companies to post jobs, accept applications, evaluate and sort candidates and more.

The Internet has become the go-to source for job seekers. With web-based recruiting software, it will soon be the primary source for job recruiters.

Twitter and LinkedIn are the most popular tools for the recruitment of top company executives. However, twitter sourcing has more benefits than LinkedIn. First, LinkedIn is not as popular as twitter. In the US, the number of twitter users is approximately 14,031,985 while LinkedIn users are approximately 12,699,785. Second, Twitter gives you access to some basic information that is not available on LinkedIn.

Twitter sourcing is one of the recent staffing developments in the world. Human Resource strategies and techniques are changing fast to catch up with hard economic times as well as utilize the most recent technology in the market. Recruitment is one of the most affected practices.

With the social media being the meeting place for job seekers and students, recruiters are using the various social networks to source for the most suitable candidates to fill vacancies in their organizations. The internet has made it possible for employers to carry out background checks for all candidates seeking to for an opportunity to work with their organizations. The following are some of the tools that employers are using to accomplish this goal:

Facebook

This is a social networking tool used to share ideas, and exchange photos. Facebook profiles are usually accessible publicly by those who have your email address. In Facebook, people post an observation, comment on posts by other people, upload photographs or videos and publish notes. The type of content you post on your Facebook wall, the comments you make on the walls of your Facebook friends, the types of images you upload and the notes you publish say a lot about you. For instance, posting confidential information on Facebook shows that you cannot keep secrets. Sharing useful links on a specific subject says that you can educate, inform and lead. Censoring the information you post on your wall and the comments you make shows that you are reliable, responsible, open minded and mature.

In addition, the frequency at which you update your status is also of great essence to the recruiter. If the job you are interested in a sales or marketing jobs, then you need to show your networking expertise. You should be able to reach out to many people. Warm personality and strong negotiation power is demonstrated by the number of comments your wall posts receive. Employers use this tool to recruit employees for entry level jobs.

LinkedIn

This tool is used to recruit executives. LinkedIn users are people who understand the meaning of professional networking and have a solid career path. This network enables employers to view your complete profile and recommendations from previous employers in order to establish your credibility. The types of groups that you have joined and people within your network say a lot about your career goals and ambitions. Employers use this platform to recruit middle level managers.

Twitter

Twitter is the best tool for carrying out employee background search. Twitter sourcing gives the employer access to information about all your internet engagements, including your publications. The employer can view what you do, and when. Twitter only links people who share interests, profession or those whom you know personally. Therefore, the number of followers and retweets can tell how influential and authoritative you are. In addition, Twitter uses a very compact language, and this is enough to tell people about your temperament and suitability for a certain post. Employers use Twitter to recruit company executives.

Tips for Twitter sourcing

In order to obtain the most appropriate information about a candidate, employers have to refine their search skills. All internet background checks begin at Google. Open the browser and then type the name of the candidate. Google will display all the internet engagements, photos, account information, blogs and publications. The results against the Twitter account are usually accompanied by a brief bio.

Twellow, TweetDeck, TweetGrid, Advanced search, X-Ray searching, and Power Twitter are some of the Twitter sourcing tools used to identify the right candidates for specific positions. The tool you use to search is determined by the kind of information you require. For instance, X-Ray search is the best Twitter sourcing tool for employers who wish to view tweets, location and the bio of potential employees.
Benefits of Twitter sourcing

Twitter and LinkedIn are the most popular tools for the recruitment of top company executives. However, Twitter sourcing has more benefits than LinkedIn. First, LinkedIn is not as popular as Twitter. In the US, the number of Twitter users is approximately 14,031,985 while LinkedIn users are approximately 12,699,785. Second, Twitter gives you access to some basic information that is not available on LinkedIn.

This information includes your previous tweets, some of which are links to your blog, articles or favorite content. Employers can follow links and see whether your interests match the expectations of the position you are applying for. Finally, employers can view geo data, personal information, tweeter activities and the skills of any user who fits within their search criteria. Of all the internet recruitment tools available, Twitter sourcing is the most convenient and efficient.

With the countless number of job seekers looking for work in today’s economy, it’s more important than ever for recruiters to pick the perfect person for the position.

In the past, it was easy for companies to publish their job openings in the newspaper or even hang a sign in their storefront window. We all know those days are long gone – so what should recruiters be doing to keep up with the changing times and find the best candidates?

With the countless number of job seekers looking for work in today’s economy, it’s more important than ever for recruiters to pick the perfect person for the position.

In the past, it was easy for companies to publish their job openings in the newspaper or even hang a sign in their storefront window. We all know those days are long gone – so what should recruiters be doing to keep up with the changing times and find the best candidates?

The answer to that question is simple: recruiters should be using web-based recruitment software.

The recruiting process itself has drastically changed throughout the past several years. First, recruiters kept track of potential candidates by keeping massive files filled with resumes and interview information. Then, the first-wave of recruiting software came along, allowing recruiters to download recruiting programs onto their computers so they could more easily keep track of candidate pools. Today, web-based recruitment solutions are more intuitive and efficient than ever before, making it easier for recruiters to do their job and do it well.

Here are some major benefits recruiters will find when using web-based recruitment software:

Cost-effective – Hiring the wrong person can cost an organization tons and tons of money, not to mention the emotional stress placed on the employee and their higher-ups. By allowing for the use of pointed, personalized questions, keyword matching technology, and other high-tech features, web-based recruitment software all but eliminates a recruiter’s chances of hiring the wrong person.

Customization – It’s easy to customize the interview and hiring process, but nearly impossible to find the time to schedule a personlizaed, one-one-one interview with every single job candidate. Most web-based recruitment software makes it easy for recruiters to pinpoint the questions they want to ask candidates, as well as the qualifications and experience they want those candidates to have.

Easy Upkeep – Unlike software that you have to download to your computer and update periodically, web-based recruitment software usually updates on its own without taking away from your time or interrupting your workflow. In addition, web-based software in general is faster, more secure, and easier to handle.

Integration – Long-gone are the days of newspaper classifieds. Most companies today advertise their jobs through an online job portal or a similar third-party job board. Most web-based recruitment software makes it easy to integrate your online job advertisements so potential candidates can simply answer a couple of questions or upload their resume, making it easier than ever for your to see whether they’re a good fit for the position.

Mobility – In today’s corporate world, there’s no such thing as a 9 to 5 job. It’s just as inevitable that you’ll spend time responding to work-related e-mails while sitting down to watch your favorite evening show as it is that you’ll be taking calls from your kids’ school while you’re sitting at your desk. As a recruiter, being able to move flawlessly between your work computer, laptop, and mobile phone is a must when it comes to getting the job done – and you’ll only find that kind of flexibility with web-based recruiting software.

Better collaboration – As opposed to older recruitment software, which had to be installed on every recruiter’s computer, web-based recruitment software makes it easy for the recruitment team to work together anytime, anywhere. This means one recruiter can review a resume and highlight it for another recruiter to read and call the candidate in for an interview.

Build a more productive organization – By using web-based recruitment software, recruiters will be able to do their jobs more quickly, more easily, and more efficiently – all contributing to the overall productiviness of the organization. And hiring the right person for the job the first time around will further enhance overall productivity.

High-tech candidates – The candidates that your company needs to recruit in order to succeed are already online. They’re working, socializing, and looking for jobs on the Internet, so it only makes sense to use a savvy web-based recruitment software that will place your jobs in front of the right high-tech candidates.

So regardless of whether you work for a small mom and pop business or a multi-million dollar corporation, finding the right web-based recruitment software will make your job easier, save your company money, and result in a better company overall.

Recruiting software makes the application and hiring process easier for both job seekers and employers. However, sometimes the process seems so easy that potential candidates are led to make critical mistakes, which may in turn prolong the hiring process for the employer.

Most recruiting software applications allow candidates to quickly input their information and either create a new resume or upload an existing document. Sometimes the process appears to be so easy that job seekers forget to go back and double check exactly what it is they’re submitting to their potential employer.

Simply typing in a bunch of nonsensical information or uploading an old, out-of-date resume can easily get you thrown out of the candidate pool.

Continue reading “Recruiting Software Doesn’t Prevent Resume Mistakes”

If you like working with technology and connecting job seekers with available positions, a career as a personnel recruiter may be right for you.

Personnel recruiters work to find, interview, and screen applicants capable of filling existing and anticipated job openings within their company. They also are responsible for promoting career opportunities within the organization.

There are a number of ways a personnel recruiter might find potential candidates, but one of the most popular and efficient ways is by using a company ATS, which allows job seekers to apply for specific jobs and provide information the company wants to know.

Continue reading “Job Description of a Personnel Recruiter”

As if we needed more proof that supplementing your typical staffing software (Click here) with social networking is a good idea, a new report suggests just that.

The Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2010 found that the majority of companies are using social media as their primary recruiting tool. The report was based on an online survey of 600 participants between May and June.

The majority of companies have learned how to use social networking sites effectively, as 58 percent of survey respondents said they have successfully hired employees by using some form of social media.

Continue reading “Staffing Software Via Social Networking Still a Success”

If your business is continuing to grow and add employees you may want to look into using staffing software.

Staffing software is one of the most efficient and technologically advanced ways to manage employees. According to an article by wiseGEEK, staffing software is a series of applications that automate cleriecal and bookkeeping tasks that would normally be completed by people.

“Letting a computer perform these tasks not only gets them done more quickly – given a computer’s natural ability to multitask to the nth degree – but also frees up the people who formerly did those things for other tasks,” the article notes. “This is an important way for companies to get ahead, by letting technology help them create more time for new challenges.”

Continue reading “Staffing Software Benefits”

While CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE has become a mainstay for many companies’ HR departments, users should beware of systems that don’t work properly.

Nicheboards.com, the world’s largest alliance of employment Web sites, recently conducted a study that found many applicant tracking systems don’t accurately record what job boards are sending candidates to their clients. This means companies that rely on applicant sourcing reports often have inaccurate information when making online recruiting decisions.

Many of Nicheboards’ clients find applicants through ATS, which are designed to help screen candidates and track their progress through the hiring process. ATS also can record information about hiring trends, including where the best employees come from.

Continue reading “Applicant Tracking Users Beware”

If you’re at all involved in the recruiting industry, you probably know what ATS is. If not, here’s a simple explanation.

An ATS, or CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE, is a software application that allows companies to electronically handle recruiting needs.

The purpose of an ATS is to help companies manage their recruiting efforts, including better management of resumes and applicant information. ATS information can be collected from internal applications on the company’s Web site or from job boards, according to an article by Wikipedia.

Continue reading “Applicant Tracking System – What Is It?”

If you’re looking for an information technology job, recruitment software could be working against you.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to convince resume screening programs you have the required skills for an in-person interview, especially in the IT field. According to an article by Network World, while recruitment software makes it easier for those in the HR department, it also may overlook some qualifications that would be noticed on traditional resumes.

Many recruiting software companies offer capabilities that range from recruiting to hiring to employee career development and training. The software, usually an SaaS model, allows recruiters and hiring managers to search out ideal candidates and allows job seekers to search listings, submit resumes and learn about companies.

Continue reading “Recruitment Software a Disadvantage to IT Job Seekers?”

We know that candidate tracking is extremely beneficial and cost effective for companies, but how does it affect job seekers.

While applicant tracking systems have a large number of growing features, it’s easy to focus on those that benefit companies and employers the most. The software helps HR departments consolidate their tasks and keep track of potential hires, as well as save time and money.

However, according to an article by The ATS Guy, it’s also important to remember what features benefit the candidates themselves. Although some candidates feel ATS take away the personal aspect of the hiring process, there are some upsides, such as reassurance that a company has received your resume.

Continue reading “Candidate Tracking – Benefits to Job Seekers”

If you’re a green company looking to hire, or a company looking to go more green, having a good ATS can make all the difference when it comes to finding the right candidates.

There has been a big push on going green lately, with the thought that doing so will not only help to improve the environment, but also will help to create more high-paying and sustainable jobs. Most recently, world leaders met at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to discuss how each nation can become more green.

In the meantime, President Barack Obama outlined a new strategy to stimulate job creation, and one of the central points to his plan is to generate green jobs by building environmentally friendly infrastructure and by providing citizens with the incentive to become more energy-efficient.

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Most companies that are just beginning to invest in recruiting software usually purchase a “core HR software program.”

Core programs provide basic HR services needed by a company, regardless of whether they’re a small business or large corporation. These programs are used to streamline processes typically completed by the HR department, increase accuracy in information and reduce the amount of work required to update employee personnel files.

Several manufacturers have created core HR software programs for businesses, so it’s often hard to choose. But keep in mind that most companies need software that will focus on payroll, employee benefits and attendance tracking. Most core software programs will allow you to add expansion programs later on.

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If you’re an IT job seeker and are soon planning to look for a new job, you should make sure your resume is ready to go through the applicant tracking system gauntlet.

A new study from Spherion Pacific Enterprises found that almost half of the American IT workforce plans to change jobs during the next year. The study further found that IT workers have a higher job-seeking confidence than the overall workforce.

This means that plenty of IT workers are currently polishing their resume in preparation to begin applying for new jobs. For the most part, job seekers in the IT industry run into the same resume issues as other candidates, mainly how to fit all the information on one page and how to know what potential employers really want to see.

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Trying to attract the suited employees to get to work for you might be massively difficult. Many extremely intelligent and coveted job seekers find several job leads, fashioning it even added essential that your personnel not overleap out with the prospect towards your succeeding excellent worker.

Since all, you’d detest for any suited employees nearby to go off to work for your challengers, wouldn’t your business? HR software can serve to ensure that you are cognizant about the desirable methods to fulfil a department opening. Although, with so countless options out at hand, how should you uncover the accurate platform?

First, appraise your business to specify its necessities and however you fancy to manage your recruitment. That which can be of use at a big corporation can represent exceedingly much for a smaller business. Regard where you envision your company heading in the near years in order to make certainly that you could not rapidly outgrow the recruitment package selection you determine to move on. package providers prevail that cater to employers in a kind of career industries with all assorted workforce sizes.

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If you’re looking to brush up your ATS (Click here) and other HR skills, an upcoming workshop may be just the thing.

Ultimate Software recently announced that it will host a complimentary Interactive HR Workshop on June 17 at The Plaza Hotel in New York, N.Y. The workshop will offer step-by-step solutions that other companies have developed in order to solve their toughest organization problems.

“Have you ever wondered how other HR executives are dealing with the business challenges you face every day?” Ultimate Software notes. “What are their secrets for aligning HR concepts with the business strategy, developing a workplace environment that encourages employee collaboration, and maneuvering through a maze of thorny legal compliance issues?”

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For most companies, one of the main goals of implementing staffing software is to save money, so you should make sure the software itself isn’t going to cost you an outrageous amount.

The majority of companies can reduce their software costs by up to 20 percent without changing vendors, according to an article by Personnel Today. This can mainly be done by only paying for what you need and working with what you already have.

“We’re spending more than ever on technology, but we’re not paying attention to where that money goes,” Andy Kyte, a research fellow with Gartner Group, said.

Continue reading “Staffing Software Questions to Ask Your Vendor”

Many companies today use recruitment software, while many job seekers use social media, so doesn’t it make sense to supplement one with the other?

Every employer wants to find the perfect candidate on the first try, but because there are so many talented job seekers out there, it’s tough to rely on just one source and expect to reach that end result. Therefore, companies that are already using recruitment software to target potential candidates can do the same through social networking sites.

Here are six tips on using social media for recruiting, as compiled by Mashable:
1. Create an online presence that reflects who you are – Just as you would create a career center and application portal that’s easily recognizable by job seekers, you want to create a social media profile that will clearly show who you are make people want to contact you.
Continue reading “Recruitment Software Supplemented with Social Media”

Implementing a great HR software system is just one of the ways that companies – and small businesses in particular – can use technology to save time and money. Visit http://pcrecruiter.net/site to learn more.

Business of all sizes are always looking for new and different ways to save money, but small businesses have a more vested interest in doing so, because they typically have less money to spend. Fortunately, according to an article by Mashable, there are some technology-related steps small businesses can take to save time and money.

“By its very nature, technology is intended to make complicated things simple and expensive things affordable,” the article notes. “Think about sending a bill to a customer; back in the day, it took paper, correction fluid, a stamp and a trip to the mailbox to accomplish this task. These days, it can be as quick and cheap as sending an e-mail.”

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If your company is looking to implement an applicant tracking system (Click here), or if you have an ATS but are looking to make upgrades in order to keep up with changing technology, an upcoming Webinar might help you out.

“Talent Acquisition Systems in 2010: The Game Has Changed, have You?” – a one-of-a-kind free Webinar for HR executives and other technology decision makers – will take place from 2 to 3 p.m. May 19th via GoToWebinar.

The Webinar will discuss how, despite the recent economic downturn, the ATS market is experiencing growth and innovation. At the same time, however, many new ATS providers have cropped up, making it harder for companies to decide what software they should use.

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As the economy begins to recover and businesses think about hiring again, now is the time to implement an ATS if your company doesn’t already have one. Visit http://pcrecruiter.net to learn more.

There is a lot of advice out there as to what type of ATS you should buy, and all the options can make it quite a daunting process. A recent article from Onrec provides some great advice from business professionals as to how you should go about selecting and implementing an ATS.

Most experts agree that you should first consider what size and scale of a system your business really needs, so that you don’t end up paying for features and solutions you’re not even going to use. In that same respect, the hiring needs of a small business will differ from those of a large company, so each may benefit from using different ATS.

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Small businesses today are relying more and more on the Internet and online resources to do their work. Employers use the Web for everything from recruiting to marketing and promotions.

On the recruiting side, most companies are already using online HR software (Click here) solutions, and those that aren’t are planning to do so sooner rather than later. Overall, the power that Internet-based resources give a small business are making it easier for most to emerge from the economic downturn.

A new report from Easynet Connect found that 79 percent of small businesses think the Internet is making the road to recovery easier this time than during previous recessions.

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The changing face of the manufacturing industry is causing employers to adapt their hiring processes accordingly. Mainly, employers are focusing more on people than anything else, which is a step in the right direction. There are many tools, such as an applicant tracking system, that are making this move possible.

The nation’s manufacturing industry as a whole has been coping with a decline in resources as fewer graduates are learning the basic technical skills that are necessary to fill replacement positions. That, coupled with the increasing technology in production, is requiring manufacturers to invest more in their employees.

These changes, along with the rising cost of making a bad hire, are reiterating the value of finding the right candidate for the job. With that in mind, employers are working to provide a standardized process that screens a candidate’s skills and behaviors against company requirements.

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Any recruitment software users or professionals could benefit from an upcoming workshop.

Ultimate Software will offer “Essential Strategies from Industry Leaders in an Era of Change,” a free interactive HR workshop, on April 27 at the Hartford Marriott Downtown in Hartford, Conn. The content of the workshop will be most beneficial to companies with at least 200 employees.

The workshop is ideal for leaders in HR, talent management, recruitment, compliance, training and retention who want to interact with peers in an intimate setting, identify short and long-term business drivers, share proven ideas, and learn from others.

Continue reading “Recruitment Software Pros Could Benefit from Workshop”