With unemployment at a stunningly low 4.1%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, ensuring your pallet business is recruiting with the latest social media and Web tools is crucial.
“Job creation has been steadily increasing ever since the recession — forcing recruiters to double up their efforts to fill positions with quality candidates,” said Dan Finnigan, CEO, Jobvite, a Web recruiting tool.
“As a result, recruiters must now go above and beyond — creating a compelling employer brand and an exceptional candidate experience.”
For Lindsey Shean, national accounts manager, Valley Pallet (www.valleypallet.com/), going above and beyond led her to Facebook — a network that has proved most useful in densely populated areas of the country.
“It is very dependent on the location of our plant,” Shean commented. “In our more metropolitan areas, we have utilized Facebook to recruit via local community pages and have had success in targeting our demographic.” CraigsList (https://www.craigslist.org) has also worked, she added.
Vanessa Trondson, a human resources generalist at Green Bay Pallet (http://www.greenbaypallet.com/), said Indeed.com has worked for her. And Meg Sawyer, human resources manager at Viking Engineering & Development (https://www.vikingeng.com/), explained that she’s hired the most new recruits with LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/).
“LinkedIn makes it easy for me to identify connections in my network and the networks of my employees — which can translate into an employee referral,” commented Trondson.
“I like how LinkedIn profiles are consistent with the same formatting for every profile. And LinkedIn also makes it easy to search on a variety of topics, including industry, connections, current and previous companies, job title, location, etc.”
If you’re truly serious about tapping into the full potential of social media and online hiring, there are a number of software tools you can evaluate that will enable you to simultaneously reach out to prospective employees across a wide spectrum of social networks — as well as to prospective employees who visit your Web site.
Essentially, these tools will enable you to largely automate your job postings across a bevy of social media sites — as well as on your Web site — ensuring that your help wanted notice gets extremely wide exposure.
SmartRecruiters (www.smartrecruiters.com) is typical of these ‘simultaneous exposure’ social media tools. “By partnering with platforms that candidates touch every day – such as Facebook and Google Jobs Search – we are making it easier for quality candidates to discover, and then get connected to great jobs,” said Rebecca Carr, vice president of product for SmartRecruiters.
But before you bring one of these dream recruiting tools in-house, be sure it’s able to “integrate seamlessly” with your company Web site, email, and other pertinent legacy systems, suggested Sheetal Kale, a digital and content evangelist at Alcor Solutions (http://www.alcortech.com/), a cloud services provider.
You’ll also want to verify that any social media / Web hiring software tool you opt for is mobile friendly so that both sets of users — the person handling your hiring and your prospective employees — can easily interact with your system on their smart phone, tablet or other mobile device.
“Providing a great user experience can be the difference between attracting top talent and inadvertently pushing applicants away,” said Al Smith, chief technology officer, iCIMS (www.icims.com), a maker of social media/Web recruiting software.
Meanwhile, you’ll also want to be sure your new social media/Web recruiting tool easily manages those ‘most golden’ of job candidates — the referrals you receive from your current employees.
Best-of-breed tools that include this perk ensure that employees who refer excellent candidates to your pallet business are automatically given a bonus. And they also make it intuitive for your employees to log onto your Web recruiting system to post a referral.
Overall, look for a system that is easy to use and maintain, Kale said. That may mean bypassing software imbued with every popular bell and whistle. But in the long run, it’s more important that your Web recruiting system is used, than awed.
Currently, the market is flooded with more than 100 software tools to attract and manage job candidates via social media and the Web.
Here’s a list of the top ten, according to a 2017 report from FinancesOnline.com (www.financesonline.com), a firm specializing in business software evaluation:
Bamboo HR (www.bamboohr.com): Targeted for use by small and medium businesses, Bamboo HR offers a comprehensive system for attracting and managing job candidates online, according to FinancesOnline.com researchers.
The software won FinancesOnline.com’s award for Best HR Management Software for 2016, and is known for enabling small and medium firms to attract job applicants inexpensively using social media and the Web.
Zoho Recruit (www.zoho.com/recruit): This software is specifically designed for businesses with formal HR departments and features strong resume management and interview tools, according to researchers.
Zoho Recruit makes it a snap to attract candidates via job boards, social media and dedicated career pages. Plus, it includes a module to help onboard candidates once they’re hired on. Zoho
Recruit also integrates with a wide variety of in-house and third-party applications. It is competitively priced given its wide array of features, according to researchers.
iCIMS (https://www.icims.com): This is another comprehensive Web recruiting suite that offers separate modules for recruiting, connecting and onboarding job candidates. iCIMS is designed to comb through resumes submitted to your company online to find the best potential candidates based on indicators that you select.
Plus, it also automates your job postings to more than 300 social media job boards and other job-seeker hangouts on the Web and enables you to quickly personalize communication with job candidates who enter your system, according to researchers.
Oracle Taleo (https://www.oracle.com/applications/taleo.html): Backed by one of the most widely respected names in computing, Taleo is specifically designed for companies with formalized HR departments that are looking for an extremely comprehensive Web recruiting toolset.
Taleo is known for setting the precedent in recruitment marketing and automates virtually every facet of the online recruitment process, according to researchers. The software is also designed to be extremely flexible: Users can easily pick and choose modules that work best for them, while leaving others behind.
Jobvite (www.jobvite.com): A long-established name in online recruiting, Jobvite is split into three modules —Sourcing, Hiring and Onboarding.
It’s mobile hiring app is particularly strong, and the software also comes with a reporting and analytics suite, according to researchers. Jobvite can also be used to quickly build your own careers and jobs domain on your Web site and includes the ability to screen job applicants via video over the Web.
Security is also another strong feature: Jobvite comes complete with built-in firewalls, TLS encryption, DOS data mitigation, identity management and alert notifications, according to researchers.
SmartRecruiters (www.smartrecruiters.com): This is probably one of the most easily customizable Web recruiting tools currently available, according to researchers. In practice, this means you should be able to easily adapt SmartRecruiters to the way you already manage your hiring on social media and the Web.
Lever (www.lever.co): Like iCIMS, Lever is designed to comb through resumes submitted to your company online to find the best potential candidates based on indicators that you select. There are also plenty of custom reports available, and the software can sync easily with your calendars and email system.
Newton (www.newtonsoftware.com): Designed for companies with a formalized HR department, Newton offers users the ability to post career pages and job postings along with a seasoned kit of hiring and interviewing tools. It also helps with candidate background checks and governmental regulation compliance related to hiring.
Recruiterbox (www.recruiterbox.com): This software eschews resumes and instead enables companies to design custom online questionnaires that enable them to attract the kind of employees they’re really looking for, according to researchers.
It broadcasts job openings to a wide array of social media job sites and enables everyone in the company HR department to easily communicate with one another about candidates using posts and attached documents.
Greenhouse (http://www.greenhouse.io): Another program designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses, Greenhouse broadcasts job openings across the Web and social media and then enables you to manage prospective candidates with interviews, scorecards and detailed profile evaluations, according to researchers.
The software is also well-suited to managing a large hiring team that is looking to communicate easily and effortlessly on the system.
