Innovative recruiting tools and techniques for modern HR teams

When you let it, technology can streamline your recruiting process. The reign of spreadsheets, email and post-and-pray job ads is coming to an end. Modern recruiting tools won’t displace the human factor in hiring decisions but they can be a critical ally in the search for and selection of talent.

The most innovative recruiting teams are always on the lookout for the best online recruiting tools or recruitment software. These innovative recruitment methods can support every step of the hiring process, from sourcing candidates and posting jobs to managing resumes, to interviews. Additional tools can help you revolutionize your approach to your referral policy, referral systems, social media recruiting tools and onboarding as the final stage of an effective recruitment process. There are tools just for managing your recruiting email inbox.

Here we provide 24 modern recruitment techniques and tools, that can help recruiters and managers raise their hiring game:

Sourcing and recruitment tools

Reddit

Reddit is a community messaging site with a user base running to hundreds of millions. If you’re active in the community, your fellow members may give consideration to your job ad more easily. Its informal tone and the ability to reply to comments from interested people gives you a head start in creating strong relationships with a candidate pool. There are also those who are actively looking for a job through Reddit.

Github

Github is a popular platform among developers for working individually or collectively on projects. Being able to see the work of talented professionals gives recruiters a better idea of who can add value to their business.

Facebook Graph Search

Posting jobs on Facebook is already a popular practice among employers. The Facebook Graph Search, though, can also be very useful in sourcing candidates. This innovative recruitment method allows you to conduct searches that include certain criteria (job titles, education, locations etc.) to reach a talent pool that’s relevant to your needs.

Meetup

Through Meetup, employers come into contact with lots of professionals in a specific field. A few hours among talented people and you’re bound to find someone to catch your eye. Even if you don’t have the time to attend an event, an innovative recruitment technique is seeing which people are interested in a particular event and contact them if they’re worthy prospects.

Snap.hr

Snap.hr operates in London and only for developers, but their innovative approach warrants our attention. Developers that want to speak with companies can sign up and ask for the arrangement of interviews. It’s worth being connected to a great pool of interested candidates.

Networkmonkey

Networkmonkey uses a systematic approach to find talented candidates who may be interested in your position. They monitor social media activity according to your criteria and use predictive analytics to determine whether someone is looking for a new job, pulling their contact details afterwards.

1-Page

1-Page finds the most relevant candidates for you. You only have to let them know what you seek and they’ll search according to your criteria. It’ll provide you with recent information and contact details.

LinkedIn/Twitter

Both modern recruitment methods are very popular as social media recruiting tools. Most people are familiar with their functions and recruiters use them regularly for sourcing talent and making more targeted searches for candidates who are interested in a subject or field.

Referrals

Zao

Zao is an employee referral software. It provides an easy-to-use platform for managing referral rewards and incentives as well as social recruiting. The interesting part is that it does all this using innovative gamification technology.

Download our free sourcing guide to help you craft an effective referral program.

Job posting

Indeed

The most popular job board among job seekers, this mega-aggregator offers a simple pay-per-click model for job posting. Additionally, if you write compelling job ads with the correct keywords, Indeed will find them more easily and display them in relevant search results automatically.

Stackoverflow

Chances of finding great candidates for a position are significantly higher if you post your job opening in niche job boards. Stackoverflow is an online community for programmers. According to your needs, you can also find job boards for startups, internships and many other options.

Jobs2Careers

Jobs2Careers is one of the few job boards that use the pay-per-applicant model for job posting. It can be very cost-effective in certain instances and, with 1.2 billion monthly job searches, it’s certainly worth considering.

Candidate management tools

Workable

Workable is an applicant tracking system (ATS) that automates and streamlines your recruiting process. It has tools to write job ads and post them to a variety of free and paid job boards. When resumes start pouring in, it helps you store them, search them, move candidates across the hiring pipeline and write comments and evaluations. Adding other features such as reporting or bulk actions (e.g. sending rejection letters) and an intuitive user interface, it can be one of the most useful recruiting tools.

Task management tools

Trello

Trello’s interface makes it easy to track processes, tasks and even candidates. The ability to move around entries from one stage to another and assign them to specific people can promote easy collaboration within an innovative recruitment and selection process.

Selection tools

SparkHire

SparkHire is one of a number of companies who specialize in video interviewing. This innovative approach makes things easier for interviewing remote or busy candidates. You can create templates of questions that candidates can answer in their own time or have fully interactive interviews over the platform. The video is recorded so you can review it at a later time with your team.

HireVue

HireVue is a major player in digital interviewing. They pay very close attention to quality of video and audio. Their product is complemented with evaluating interviews through predictive analytics and useful reporting features.

Gapjumpers

Gapjumpers offers a method to hire “using blind auditions” avoiding harmful biases when screening and evaluating candidates. Their technology is designed to help you make decisions according to performance and talent.

Codercred

Codercred has also an innovative approach in hiring coders. Employers can create challenges and invite coders to participate. Codercred will score them so hiring managers can make an objective decision.

HackerRank

HackerRank provides a platform for coding challenges like Codercred. It has a library of coding challenges and offers the ability to customize your own. Additionally, it holds public challenges (“CodeSprints”) that you can sponsor and includes a tool for video interviewing.

SurveyMonkey

People use SurveyMonkey’s templates for a lot of reasons. For recruiting, it’s sometimes helpful to create pre-interview questionnaires to screen out candidates who aren’t a good fit before you spend time and effort in interviewing them. SurveyMonkey is highly customizable, and can be used for proprietary and creative recruitment strategies.

Onboarding tools

Kin

Kin is one of those innovators that ensure you won’t neglect your onboarding process. Through its technology, you can manage paperwork and create individual onboarding processes and checklists for each new employee.

Namely

Onboarding is only one function of Namely’s complete HR platform. Along with functions for payroll and benefits, it helps you create an effective orientation process where paperwork and signatures are digital.

BambooHR

Like Namely, BambooHR offers a complete HRIS solution. Their onboarding function is full of interesting features such as “get to know you” emails for introducing employees and preparing new hires for their first day.

More: 21 HR tools and techniques designed for growing companies