7 Steps To Build The Best Recruitment Tech Stack

These days, recruiting employees without the help of technology is almost unthinkable. With new recruitment solutions popping up almost every day, recruiters and their teams might find themselves feeling lost and overwhelmed when selecting digital solutions.

And despite their best efforts to select the right tools for their toolbox, many recruiters find themselves armed with solutions that just aren’t a good fit.

While there’s no ultimate solution nor a universal recruitment tech stack for all companies, as each has its own unique hiring needs, it’s still possible to pinpoint certain commonalities in what organizations need to do to choose the right recruiting software mix.

That’s why we created a comprehensive guide on how to build the best recruitment tech stack.

Identify needs and challenges

To choose the best recruitment technology for your business, you have to consider your business needs first. You can do this by defining what recruitment challenges you’re facing, what business needs have to be addressed, and what problems need to be solved.

For example, do you often hire for the same role? Do you need to hire many people at the same time? Or do you get many applicants per vacancy and you’re scared of good candidates slipping through your fingers?

Once you know what pain points should be addressed, finding a solution will become a lot easier.

Create a technology backbone

One of the best ways to approach building out a recruitment tech stack is to create a “technology backbone” of your recruitment process. Most recruiters will agree that a quality applicant tracking system (ATS) is essential in their recruitment process and that choosing a flexible ATS will make your work much easier in the future.

The platform you choose should be mobile-friendly, with strong built-in analytics and the ability to integrate with other solutions. For instance, pre-employment testing platforms, recruitment marketing platforms, sourcing tools, and other important systems you’ll need in your tech stack—even if you haven’t picked specific ones out yet.

Examples of ATSs:

• Jobvite helps you streamline your hiring process and lower your time-to-fill.
• Greenhouse improves the hiring process for all parties involved – candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers.
• Workable is a flexible, mobile-friendly platform to make your hiring easier.
• Recruitee allows you to adopt data-driven hiring and automate many manual tasks.

Review the available solutions

With your unique recruiting challenges in mind, you should review what sorts of solutions are available to address them. Here are the different tools you can include in your tech stack to help manage each and every area of the recruiting process.

Sourcing

Getting sourcing right is essential to hiring success—but it also comes with challenges. From not finding high-quality candidates to having trouble making contact with them, sourcers deal with a plethora of issues every day.

Candidate sourcing tools use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the search for potential hires and streamline the sourcing process as a whole. For example, some offer programmatic advertising for buying and optimizing job advertisements—ultimately making sure the right candidates see the right open roles.

Sourcing tools:

• ClickIQ allows you to reach candidates on job boards and social networks.
• VONQ uses data to pinpoint the best media channels to promote open jobs.
• Joveo is a click-to-hire tool for advertising across job boards, search, social, and display.
• CareerArc helps you recruit employees and build employer brands on social media sites.
• Recruitment Edge allows you to search for candidates with specific skills.
• HiringSolved automates candidate matching to find the most qualified job seekers.
• TalentBin is a talent search engine that finds candidates where they’re active online.

Recruitment marketing

Recruiters use recruitment marketing tools to advertise job openings, engage with candidates, and nurture interest. These systems have social recruiting and candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities and are typically used to help build talent pipelines as companies grow.

The right recruitment marketing tool helps optimize employer branding on career sites and job portals, streamline marketing for new jobs, help track and organize candidates, and facilitate employee referrals.

Recruitment marketing tools:

• Jibe helps engage candidates with personalized career sites and an optimized application experience.
• Smashfly lets you revamp career sites and make the most of recruiting events.
• Beamery helps nurture passive candidates and build attractive marketing engines.
• Phenom People lets you create personalized career sites and manage the entire candidate pipeline.

Candidate screening

Screening candidates is an essential part of recruitment—but it’s also time-consuming and challenging to get right. From endless phone interviews to time wasted on candidates that don’t fit the role or the organization, there are many ways the candidate screening process could improve.

Luckily, there are a few different options available to help ease the process. CV scrapers help screen candidates by scraping resumes for important keywords and skill sets. They’re especially useful for companies that engage in high-volume hiring, as they help automate the lengthy process of sifting through CVs manually.

Video interviewing tools are an excellent resource for screening candidates digitally. They’re more efficient than interviewing candidates in person and are extremely helpful for hiring out-of-town and remote employees from a distance.

Candidate assessment

Even after the most effective, detailed screening process, you can still find yourself having candidates that just aren’t the right fit—whether for the role, the company culture, or both.

By making smart use of pre-employment assessment and predictive hiring technology, you can better match people to jobs, reduce turnover, increase employee engagement, and improve the quality of hire at your organization.

There are many different types of candidate assessments, including tests on technical skills, communication skills, cognitive ability, and situational judgment skills. You can also give a personality assessment to determine whether candidates are a good organizational fit.

Some assessments are more effective at testing for certain roles than others. For example, situational judgment tests are often used to evaluate candidates for customer service roles, while technical skills tests are most often used for roles in IT and software development.

Candidate assessment tools:

• Harver, our solution, allows you to build a custom candidate experience with videos and interactive gamified assessments.
• Hundred5 pre-qualifies candidates by using different filters in the job application process.
• Pymetrics matches qualified candidates to opportunities with neuroscience games and bias-free algorithms.

A situational judgement test that is company- and job-specific can also be a part of your candidate assessment. 

Onboarding

Of course, recruiting doesn’t stop with candidate selection. An amazing onboarding process makes for an amazing new hire experience—and ultimately sets the stage for what’s to come.

Onboarding software is a must-have to guarantee warm welcomes and happy new hires. It helps you automate onboarding processes and offers new employees an organized, seamless first week at your company.

Onboarding tools:

• BambooHR allows you to create welcome emails and automate new hire paperwork.
• Enboarder creates personalized onboarding and learning experiences for new hires.
• Talmundo offers a unique pre-boarding and onboarding solution that engages employees early on in the process.

Other solutions

Depending on what your company wants to improve, you might need to look beyond the scope of the solutions in the above-mentioned categories.

Maybe you want to extend the scope of your employee referrals, use technology to increase diversity, implement a dedicated tech recruitment software solution, or employ a chatbot to improve communication with candidates, and you can find respective solutions for all your needs.

The use of AI in recruitment continues to grow and it is more than likely that we will see more and more of its applications further down the road.

Make key considerations

There are several key considerations you should make before purchasing new recruiting technology. If you missed the article on which key considerations to make before you make a purchase, check it out.

Here are key considerations before purchasing a recruiting tool:

• How has your current recruiting technology performed?
• Does the tool integrate with your existing technology?
• Is the tool easy to use, and what training will it require?
• Will the tool require maintenance over time?
• Will you be asked to pay for unnecessary features?
• Is the technology optimized for mobile use?
• What does the tool cost and what’s the estimated ROI?
• What happens if you want to stop using the tool?

Overall, the most important consideration is to make sure all of the solutions in your tech stack can be integrated, work well together, and complement each other.

Furthermore, don’t forget to check out to what extent the solutions are customizable and will do justice to your employer brand.

Look for relevant examples

Another important thing you should do before making any purchases is to look for relevant examples and case studies. Consult with fellow recruiters who have experience with the technology in question to learn from their experience and ensure you find a platform that checks all your boxes.

By learning more about how companies with similar needs or issues as yours used a certain solution and what results it brought, you can better determine which systems are a good fit for you—as well as which ones might not be.

While researching review sites, case studies, forums, and comments, you might find a detail or red flag that sends you in a completely different direction.

Ask the vendor you’re considering for a case study that relates to the similar challenge you’re trying to tackle or describes how a business similar to yours used the solution to get a more accurate idea about the capabilities of the technology.

Start using the technology

Once you implement the new technology, you should start using it and keep experimenting as you learn to work with the tool. Also, continue to look for ways to improve your recruitment tech stack—you might find that there are holes in the stack you’ve built.

As you use the technology and begin to recognize these gaps, think of how your stack can be adapted to close them.

What needs do you have that aren’t being met? What processes are inefficient? Where are your recruiting efforts falling short? By answering these questions, you’ll be able to identify key features that you’re lacking in your recruitment tech stack and make adjustments accordingly.

Consider future needs

An important thing to keep in mind is that the needs of your company might change over time. Even if you’re completely satisfied with the technology you’re using, there may come a time when you decide it’s no longer making the cut. Should that happen, that’s when you should start rethinking the solutions you’re currently using and investing in new technology to transform the way your company finds, recruits, and engages job candidates.

With that said, transitioning from the old system to a new technology solution can either be a smooth and simple process, or a complete and total headache. That’s why it’s so important to avoid unnecessary difficulties by talking with vendors about an exit strategy before making a purchase.

A final thought

Today’s recruiting technology market enables you to build a recruitment tech stack according to your unique needs and challenges. Don’t hesitate to start the quest of building or improving yours as soon as possible!