The Best Tracking Tool For Recruiters And Jobseekers
Have you ever felt that you missed some great opportunity or great candidate just because you were a few hours or days late? As a jobseeker, maybe you missed some great job opportunity because the company posted the role only on their website and not on LinkedIn. And their recruiter found somebody else there, only because your LinkedIn profile doesnât have the right keyword in it.
If you are a recruiter or jobseeker and you donât want to miss the next opportunity or great candidate, these tools will help you lower the possibility of being late again next time. You can also use them for many other things; for example, you can track the price of the phone you would like to buy, track the sites that are planning to sell tickets for your favorite band performance that you donât want to miss, or you can turn these apps into powerful tools that could help you to be better than your competitors.
Why You Should Start Using Tracking Tools
Agency recruiter
Companies usually have many agencies to choose from and you are probably always looking for something that will give you a competitive advantage over your competitors. And in this business, if you have information faster than others you can have the competitive advantage that you are looking for â well if you know how to use it.
Tracking changes on the career sites of your clients could give you two distinct opportunities to be faster than your competitors. First, if your competitors are only checking job boards for new roles or clientsâ career page once per two weeks, you can already have info about a new position few days before your competitors, thanks to these tracking tools. Second, not every company posts all of their open vacancies on job boards or LinkedIn; many job postings could be found only on the career pages.
Additionally, these apps also save you lots of the time that you would normally use to check clientsâ sites for new roles because you donât want to wait till your clients reach out to you to let you know about the new opening.
Tip: You can use these apps to track some future clients, and if you see a spike in their number of open roles, then there is a chance that they will need your help and sign the contract with you.
Company Recruiter
Our field is about information (as I already mentioned); the person who has them and is able to use them will have the right advantage over his competitors. If you are a company recruiter and you are not tracking your competitors, you are missing a great opportunity here. Based on their open roles, activity of the company and activity of their people, you can learn that the company is building new teams so your employees could be a target, or you can learn what roles they are trying to fill and after few months when you are starting to build a team with similar technology, you know when to find the right people for it.
Also, checking every single website of your competitors is very time-consuming and ineffective, but if you want the advantages it gives, you need to get information.
The best way to do that is to start using RSS reader (like Feedly.com) and add RSS of your competitors, set up Google Alerts so you are not going to miss any interesting information, but if your competitors do not have any RSS feeds on their career page you need to find a way to track their sites.
You can create your own RSS with tools like https://feedity.com or http://fetchrss.com, but this method doesnât work every time. The best way, again, is to use tools to help you track changes on the website of your competitors.
Tip: If somebody has a public LinkedIn profile, you can easily get their profile link and track it. So if that person makes a change on their public profile or changes text âI am not interestedâ to âI am availableâ you will get a notification. Also, when you learn the typical signs showing when the person is open for a career change you can reach them when the time is right.
Job Seekers
You applied for a job, but the recruiter tells you, âWe are sorry, but we already have the candidates in the final stage.â Your response could be âI just found the role on LinkedInâ, but in reality, the role might have been posted on the companyâs career page for weeks and when you saw it on LinkedIn it was too late and you didnât apply at the right time or you were just not fast enough.
And because not every company offers RSS feed you need to find a way to get information about new roles sooner. (There are many reasons why companies are not adding RSS feeds.) So if they donât have any RSS feed and they also donât have any job alert option like newsletter informing you about open roles matching your needs, what else do you need to do if you donât want to miss new and interesting opportunities? You will need to use some tracking tooks.
Tracking Tools for Recruiters and Jobseekers
There are countless hacks, apps, and techniques on how to handle all the tracking. These apps will save you time and become a shortcut towards getting information that could become the competitive advantage you are looking for. Listed below are three apps that can give your productivity the much-needed boost, and you will see that every app could be turned into a recruitment tool that could help you to be more effective in your job.
VisualPing
I discovered VisualPing some time ago and I love its simple design. It is a very easy-to-use tracking app that doesnât require any registration. You will need only your email address, where youâll get notifications about changes on the website that is being tracked.
You can select which part of the site you would like to track and setup trigger option on tiny, medium or major changes on that website. Based on your settings, VisualPing will send you a notification email if there is a change on that website. This email will have two sets of images; one image before the change and the other after. So you will easily see the changes on the website. You can also track only single elements on the site.
You can set these notifications to come in hourly, daily or weekly.
You can also use Chrome Extension to monitor directly from any page (Then choose Server or Browser after you install this app.)
Price: Free and Paid option
Versionista
Versionista offers a rich platform to help monitor, archive and alert you to changes to sites youâre monitoring. Itâs also a more advanced tool than the above-mentioned Visualping.
If you would like to start with Versionista you need to create an account. You can track a single site, but this tool also scans the pages within the site but donât worry, you can disable this option if you donât need it.
Versionista also offers a comparison viewer to see the actual changes. Comparison viewer will show you a side-by-side comparison of each version. It will highlight in red text (and images) that were deleted from one version and highlight in green those newly added.
They also provide lots of ways to get email alerts for content changes; you can get email summaries or instant content change alerts.
You can also filter out numeric changes (dates and times), ignore any HTML, CSS, and JS changes, any punctuation changes, HTML comments or ignore identifiable headers, footers, and menus
This app is also great for its Focus option. This option will help you to monitor, for example, addition/deletion of certain words or phrases. Itâs especially useful when you are looking for Open for new opportunityâ
Price: Try a free 7-day trial of any paid plan
Wachete
This tool will probably become the number one on my list very soon. It is especially useful because of its integration with Zapier. (Zapier is an online service that lets you create automated actions connecting.)
You can easily send alerts about web changes to hundreds of other apps with the Wachete integration on Zapier and post Slack channel messages with new changes to a web page monitored by Wachete. You can also create your own custom workflows, or get started with any examples that they are offering. You can monitor part of the web page, whole page or media file.
Monitoring intervals are 24 hours and 1 week for the free subscription plan. But for the paid plan you can schedule your monitoring for 10 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours and of course for 24 hours and 1 week.
They offer mobile apps for Windows phone, iPhone or Android. And what I really like is the variety of Browser extensions they offer: Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
The free subscription plan offers monitoring option up to 10 web pages, checks every 24 hours and 10 email alerts per day.
Price: Free and Paid option
Summary
There are many other similar tools for tracking changes on websites. Using these mentioned tracking apps is very useful especially when time is of the essence to you.
Hopefully, in this list, youâve discovered some new tools â and how to use them â and they will save you precious time and help you to be more productive. But bear in mind that no tool in the world is going to make you successful at your job. Success comes from all the intangible stuff inside youâ â âthings like motivation, work ethic, and a commitment to self-improvement.
People lose many great opportunities every day because they are late, so you need to be proactive if you have some dream company where you would like to work. So I encourage you to go to Google and start searching for some alternatives to these tools and maybe you will find some other helpful tools. And if you do, let me know, because I am always interested in testing new apps. ð
If you are a recruiter, enjoy these tools and I hope they help you in your job. And you can join other recruiters on Recruitment.Camp
If you are a job seeker, I wish you success in your career search and I hope that next time you are going to be on time and be the first person to apply for your next dream job. ð
Last Updated on January 16, 2024