You can use all the tools that I have mentioned here for free. But free tools usually have some limitations and if you use only free tools (to save few dollars) to help in your recruitment activities in the same way as a paid version, you are probably just wasting your time. If you like the tool, after the trial period, my recommendation is to go for the paid version. This applies especially to Hootsuite, if you are serious about branding/marketing.
Disclaimer: I admit that I have fallen completely in love with Hootsuite, so my recommendation is obvious – use it 🙂 There is a free version that you can try first, so test it for yourself, because even though I believe that this tool is one of the best on the market, it doesn’t mean that you will like it too or that it will bring you the same value. There are many alternatives so try them too.
TOOLS FOR RECRUITERS
Hootsuite
Hootsuite could be described as an ultimate social media management tool. Through Hootsuite you can manage all your social accounts on a single platform, especially when you are operating multiple social accounts (company Facebook page, Twitter account etc.). With Hootsuite you can easily share the news about your company / recruitment agency or about you through social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress, Instagram, and YouTube.
You can also easily schedule messages for all these sites, measure ROI for your activities and the tool will also help you to get more followers, because when you are sharing interesting and relevant content you start attracting more people. Scheduling posts or sharing one news item on numerous site in one action will save you many hours that you can then use for your sourcing activities or indeed anything else. With the help of Hootsuite’s bulk composer you can easily upload links to interesting articles (job adverts etc.) on every day of the month, so you don’t have to do it manually, which means that you don’t need to remember to add content to your social site every single day.
You can add RSS from the blogs of your team members, and share their posts on your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn page automatically, at a time of your choice.
One of the reasons I love Hootsuite so much is its ability to track Twitter conversion through hashtags. If there is a conference, meetup, job fair etc. you can see all the tweets with the hashtag and track what is going on. You can also track your company’s hashtag to see if it is mentioned on Twitter.
The second really great thing about Hootsuite is the dashboard. If you connect your LinkedIn account with the Hootsuite dashboard, you can see a live feed of your LinkedIn stream. So you don’t have to visit LinkedIn and select “Recent Updates” every time just to see the latest posts/news.
In the Hootsuite dashboard, you can see what is going on in your network and discover new interesting contacts and news and maybe potential candidates or new clients who need your help with hiring.
As a free version Hootsuite allows you to add three social profiles and two RSS feeds, but you get only limited message scheduling and analytics. However, there is a great tool that works in a similar way to Hootsuite that allows you to schedule ten posts per profile for free, called Buffer. https://buffer.com/
My recommendation here is once again to use the paid version, because it’s better to schedule 100 posts in one action, rather than trying to remember to add ten new posts every week.
URL: https://hootsuite.com
WebClipDrop
WebClipDrop is quite a new project, that could help you to improve your sourcing activities. WebClipDrop easily extracts data from a Google or LinkedIn search. You can easily clip the candidate’s LinkedIn profile, and instead of just copying and pasting the whole profile, this web clipboard will extract all the candidate’s profile data and put everything into normalized fields. You can also add all the data very easily into your CRM or ATS system, which will save you hours of sourcing per week. This simple tool can help you to operate more efficiently.
WebClipDrop is a pretty handy application which you can also try for free. As always, the paid version will give you more options and functionality, than the free version.
URL: https://webclipdrop.io/
Boomeranggmail
With Boomerang for Gmail, you can write an email and then schedule it to be sent at the time that you want. So if you know that your candidate or potential client starts his day at 9 AM, you can easily schedule the time to sending your email for 9:05 AM. Your message will arrive in the mailbox of the recipient just at the right time when he starts going through his e-mails. Boomerang for Gmail lets you take control of the times at which you send and receive email messages and it will help you also with follow-up reminders. You can easily set up reminders and select to be reminded only if nobody replies if you prefer. It’s a great tool for your Gmail.
URL: http://www.boomeranggmail.com
CloudFlare – Every second counts
These days, everything is about speed. If you have candidates on your website, you want to keep them there, but what if you are already losing candidates even before they visit your website? Based on the Kissmetrics report, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. In business page speed affects revenue and in recruitment it affects the number of responses.
Ensuring a consistent experience for all your visitors is very important and if you want to be sure that your visitors/candidates can reach your website from any location quickly, without the need to wait ten seconds for your site to load, you should consider a content delivery network (CDN) service for your website. A CDN is an easy way of delivering content from your website or mobile application more quickly and efficiently, based on visitors’ geographic location. CDNs not only ensure a faster experience for your visitors/candidates, but they also help to prevent site crashes in the event of traffic surges. Your site could stay online even if your server has problems and it’s temporarily inaccessible. A CDN could improve your candidate experience and save those candidates who you currently lose because they are tired of waiting for your website to load.
There are many CDN providers that you can use, some of them are will offer you a free trial or some kind of free service with limitations. My favorite one is CloudFlare, I am trying to use them for all my sites and projects. I don’t want to post a long list of “Why CloudFlare rocks”, but if you are small recruitment agency and you don’t have a big IT team, o manage your servers, you should try CloudFlare. You will see the difference that a CDN can bring to you and your candidates/visitors, and CloudFlare is not only for small companies, everybody can use it.
URL: https://www.cloudflare.com
Collaboration Space
If you are recruiter who is interested in collaboration with other recruiters, you can visit Recruitment.Camp or you can learn about this project here (Collaborative Space for Recruiters)
URL: https://www.recruitment.camp
FOR JOB SEEKERS
Here is one interesting tool that could help candidates to beat some ATS (Applicant Tracking System) algorithms. You can learn more about this topic here.(Modifying Your Resume to Beat ATS Algorithms)
Many companies are using ATS as the major tool for analyzing resumes and scoring them so that the recruiter can see how well they match the position that they have applied for, and filter out those who don’t score enough. This works well especially for roles (or on the markets) where the recruiter is expecting to receive hundreds of applications.
One of the tools that could help you to optimize your resume or LinkedIn profile is JobScan. It could help you to beat the ATS system and be more visible to recruiters.
URL: https://www.jobscan.co
Improving your resume based on keyword analysis could help you with visibility, but it still needs to be about you and a not just a long list of keywords.
If you are a recruiter, enjoy these tools, I hope they will help you in your job.
If you are a job seeker, I wish you success in your career search!
