How to be a happy recruiter

December 12th, 2017 | Industry News

Recruitment experiences different pinch points throughout the year and at the end of the summer but before Christmas there tends to be a rush of candidates seeking new jobs before the new year. The good news is that a recent survey revealed that there has been an 11% increase in advertised vacancies over this period in 2016. The bad news … those applications tend to be rushed, incomplete and inexact.

Recruitment software that can’t recognise such inadequate CVs leaves recruiters with a headache. Any applicant tracking system that doesn’t support recruitment agencies or HR departments in sifting heaps of applications is almost worse than useless because it creates the impression that it’s speeding up the recruitment process whilst in fact it’s leaving recruiters with a pile of useless candidate profiles that still have to be trawled through as the ideal candidate could be lurking within the heap.

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Recruitment’s elephants in the room

November 20th, 2017 | Industry News

It’s been an unusual month for the recruitment industry which has – on several fronts – faced a hard reality check. One development will soon be adding extra pressure to the work of recruitment agencies dealing with construction and HR departments in the building and construction industries. A campaign to convince up to 1500 overseas construction workers to move to New Zealand is offering fast track visas and ‘experiences’ including fishing, surfing and cultural activities to qualified construction workers. This talent trawl is designed to entice building professionals who are feeling worried by Brexit, and recruitment professionals in the UK will need to have a clear and comprehensive offer to compete.

This means working with a recruiting platform that does much more than simply track candidates: hiring and keeping skilled trade professionals inside the UK will require recruitment software that identifies key candidates as soon as they become available and processes them through an applicant tracking system that creates a conversation between recruiter and candidate. Above all, in an industry like construction where downtime is expensive, cloud recruitment software may be vital to effective candidate adherence – building professionals seek rapid and professional placement and one key offering that could keep workers in the UK is being placed speedily into a new job, rather than waiting for visa application and clearance procedures to move abroad.

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Recruitment – agency culture, cyber attacks, software

November 10th, 2017 | Industry News

Accountancy Age suggests that the 2008 financial crisis has caused a massive but almost undetectable change in the recruitment industry. According to a recent article, it says ‘recruiters are failing to speak to candidates directly’ which means that candidates don’t benefit from conversations with a recruitment consultant and therefore aren’t given the advice on career development that would previously have been available.

While it’s certainly true that recruitment has both globalised and intensified, with many consultants never meeting the candidates they place, we think they are missing some of the substantial developments that make modern recruiting practices more personal rather than less so:

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Recruitment innovations

October 31st, 2017 | Industry News

The decline in job applications in the past year has been a clear response to uncertainty over Brexit and a clear desire to hold onto employment. For 2018 this suggests that successful recruitment consultancies will need to be:

1. Technologically adept – for example online recruitment software will need to make better use of real-time activity. Programmatic advertising (which uses algorithms to buy advertising space in real-time) requires applicant tracking software that can both recognise the best candidates and redirect less attractive ones to other vacancies without dropping them from the recruitment pipeline.
2. Brand driven – in a candidate led market, brands need to be highly attractive to the applicant and that’s not just the client brand, recruitment agency brands also need to be clearly differentiated and appealing to individuals who want to be confident about their recruiting platform.
3. Communicative – the old system of only contacting candidates when a job is on offer and only speaking to clients when they have vacancies is dead. There is no such thing as pipeline information, instead webs of knowledge link candidates to clients to agencies and regular communication in all directions not only keeps a recruitment database current but ensures agencies can plan ahead for horizon events such as changes in legislation, business practice or even likely changes to organisational culture as major players move on, or up.

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Why recruitment consultancies fail to upgrade

October 16th, 2017 | Industry News

Like many software providers we’re keen to discover what causes people to use our software – but we’re equally fascinated by what stops them! While we have a substantial amount of information on the first group, it’s difficult to find out about the second, but by aggregating information from a number of high profile cases we are able to discover a few key problems that keep businesses from reaching their full potential.

Complexity creates fear of recruitment software

Any change to business practice can create fear in users – maybe they won’t understand the new system, perhaps processes will take longer than with the old one, or it might even be that users fear losing data. That’s why we’re called Recruit So Simple – because we know that for recruitment agencies to choose our SaaS recruitment software, it has to be three kinds of simple:

• Simple to set up
• Simple to learn
• Simple to use

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Recruitment industry ‘megatrends’, UK confidence levels and AI

October 4th, 2017 | Industry News

Adecco, the world’s largest staffing organisation, has identified a number of ‘megatrends’ influencing the nature of recruitment in recent years. None of them will surprise the well-informed recruitment consultant or HR manager, but when aggregated together they reveal a substantial change in the nature of recruitment. The mega-trends are:

• Businesses favouring flexible workforces in an increasingly fast changing environment
• An ageing global workforce
• More people freelancing
• The need for lifelong learning in the workplace
• The opportunities presented by automation.

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Crossroads in recruitment – a round up from Recruit So Simple

September 15th, 2017 | Industry News

Recruiters to benefit from better pay

In the last couple of months we’ve seen some game-changing initiatives in the recruitment industry – the first of which will definitely please the recruitment consultants: pay increases!

The latest Glassdoor pay report shows that recruiters are likely to benefit from substantial pay rises in the next 12 months – with the most successful obtaining an average of 8.4%. It’s an interesting development, given that automation of recruitment processes is supposedly cutting down the number of recruitment professionals actually in the industry.

So why the pay rise? Apparently it’s because top companies are relying more on relationship management professionals to find the best talent, particularly in the USA, but also in the UK where Brexit concerns are making some organisations jittery about the maintenance of a talent pool for the future. Where the talent of candidates is a vital concern, the talent, and skills of the recruiters, are also highly valued.

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Recent Improvements

August 31st, 2017 | Company News

We’ve released a few new features and improvements to our recruitment software including:

• It’s now easier to see if a candidate is also a client in your database
• The process to merge duplicate records into a single updated record is now even quicker
• A brand new report has been added which will search your database for potential duplicate records
• The screen that lists each client’s offices has been improved to show more relevant information

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Seven ways cloud-based software helps you recruit the right candidate

August 29th, 2017 | Industry News

At Recruit So Simple, we’re completely confident that cloud recruitment software is one of the greatest benefits to the recruitment industry since the rolodex was invented – and we don’t think you’d find many people arguing to the contrary! However, a much less well explored question is just how online recruitment software can benefit all recruiters by helping to identify the best candidate for each position. So we thought we’d share the seven reasons that SAAS (software as a service) recruitment software can really solve your recruitment problems:

• Speed – the best candidates go fast. Recruiters, whether consultant or in-house, tend to operate at a slower rate than a good applicant tracking software system, which can mean that the best person for you has been snapped up before you even get to evaluate their CV.
• Prejudice – we’re not talking about overt prejudice here, but the kind of inherent or unconscious bias that can cause human administrators to reject certain candidates or promote others, completely unaware of their personal foibles.
• Administration – it’s easy to become controlled by filing cabinets and stacks of paper. Cloud based employment software removes the tendency to hide behind paperwork and gives recruiters plenty of scope to focus on what they’re hired to do – find the right person for the job.

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Recruitment under pressure

August 16th, 2017 | Industry News

Brexit is causing pressure in all directions – Theresa May is under pressure from sectors of the recruitment industry because of the failure to outline a coherent post-Brexit immigration policy. Over 600 employers were surveyed and 87% said they were being forced to maintain or increase use of temporary staff in the next six months because of the uncertainty over Brexit.

A third of London’s construction industry employees come from the EU – and recruiting platforms are being scoured to find alternative skilled labour if these individuals are likely to be available. Concern is being expressed that at the time businesses are being most encouraged to deliver growth to ensure a ‘strong post-Brexit’ economy, the current UK workforce will not be able to meet demand. Sectors likely to experience such shortfalls, alongside construction, include education and engineering.

Permanent vacancies on the rise, uncertainty over IT

The Association of Professional Staffing Companies has interesting survey information for recruiters. Professional recruitment is showing much wider variations in sectors than in previous years and applicant tracking software is increasingly being used to differentiate ‘professional’ calibre permanent vacancies from ‘churn’. Churn features in contracting in particular, where vacancies have fallen by 13% across all sectors, showing that non-permanent staffing is less attractive to employers than sourcing and retaining high quality permanent candidates.

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