Imagine you are dealing with an important job order. You craft a killer job description, post it on job boards and social media, and send out an email to all your employees for referrals. You think you have done good job making by making the position look tantalising, and you have paid lots of money to advertise it on various mediums. You relax and expect applicants to flood your inbox with their CVs every time you click the refresh button.
However, you click and nothing happens. After a couple of days, you refresh your inbox and you still see nothing. This was surely not what you were anticipating. Sometimes posting relying on referrals or posting your available positions on social media is not enough when searching for top talents.
It is important for you to invest in a candidate portal for broader reach and personalised recruiting experience.
With Recruitly you can offer a secure and branded self-service portal for your candidates where they can manage their profile, upload CVs, search and apply for jobs and securely exchange their documents. Stay GDPR compliant by offering candidates full control over their consent and privacy settings, and full audit visibility.
This article will discuss the importance of investing in a candidate portal to make the recruitment process easier, smarter, and smoother.
It promotes your brand
An official website with job-board is the best place to get more information about your company. It is the first place to be visited by a job seeker who wants to explore an opportunity These days, job applicants don’t just look at the job description, but they also want to know all about you as an employer.
They want to know all about the work environment, benefits offered, products/services being developed, career growth opportunities, and work culture. A lot of candidates will take a pass on applying to your company when you do not have a stellar career website.
To solve this, you need to improve your hiring quality by developing a candidate portal as an extension of your existing career page. Rather than just listing available job positions plainly, you need to have a branded candidate portal that narrates and reflects your organisation culture, shows the culture of your organisation, and entices a candidate to apply for the position.
With a good candidate portal in place, your company will be known as a place where top talents want to work, which will skyrocket your chances of attracting great talents. This eventually results in more diverse applications and a wide talent pool for you to select.
It makes organising candidate resumes easy
Some companies use different means to get top talents when trying to fill an available position. As a result, they gather resumes directly from candidates, from recruiters, and from employees as referrals. Different resume sources can make it challenging for you to organise the resumes, and it makes it easier for you to miss out on top talents.
With a candidate portal, all resumes are stores in one place. You can tag, share, store, or bookmark the resumes in a folder for fast access and quicker review. This organisation makes it easier for you to track relevant candidates and makes your talent sourcing a transparent process.
It reduces the time and cost of hiring
Top talents become unavailable in the market in a very short time. That’s why organisations have to act fast to get hold of them. A candidate portal will help you save time by automating the process. It will streamline the recruitment process that consists of several forms and keep them in order.
The candidate portal will give users the capability to drill-down on obstacles for instant solutions. Plus, it helps recruiters do conduct a quick overview of the candidates across the hiring funnel. It also bridges the gap of communication between recruiters, HR managers, and candidates.
These features will help in shrinking the recruitment cycle drastically and reduce the time spent to hire talents.
Also, a candidate portal will reduce the cost of recruitment by removing inconsistency and data redundancy across the recruitment process. According to statistics, 75% of employers have been the opinion that hiring a bad fit for a position costs more than keeping the position unfilled.
Therefore companies have a lot to benefit by using candidate portals to select applicants, instead of using obsolete techniques.
It enables you to focus on talents that are highly relevant
You can enhance a candidate’s experience and increase conversions with a good candidate portal. It will help you capture the information of applicants in a well-structured way, which makes it easy for you to search for relevant resumes. You can assess a candidate with your required target industry, educational background, and work experience with robust search filters. A candidate portal contains advanced search features that incorporate keyword searches and complex search queries. The feature helps in narrowing down candidates that are relevant for a position, which will become crucial when you have a large database. Some candidate portal also consists of an auto-screening feature that screens out resumes that are irrelevant. You can set different screen out filter criteria to automatically eliminate resumes that are important to a new folder and de-clutter your talent pool.
It enables you to make more informed candidates decision
A candidate portal gives you the opportunity to gain insight into the personalities of candidates before the interview. You can create a candidate portal that will consist of various behavioural, technical, and psychometric tests to determine the strengths and weaknes of candidates before the interview. You can keep the results objective by adding an automated test scoring feature.
The automated test scoring feature will then help recruiters rank applicants based on their test performance, which makes the comparison of candidate stress-free. Also, you can add an evaluation form template to the candidate portal to aid the internal assessment of applicants. With these features, you will have a clear view of everyone’s feedback on each candidate and all information will be kept in one place.
The effectiveness of your hiring processes will gain more visibility
Advanced candidate portals provide complete transparency over performed actions on the portal. It will store activities performed by users in activity logs, which makes it easier for you to track the efficiency of your team along with the progress of applicants.
The transparency features help in quickly identifying the issues in the recruitment process. You will be able to know if a recruiter or HR manager is stalling on applicant’s interviews due to laziness in processing their information.
Also, a resume source breakdown report will help HR managers to understand the strength and weaknesses of applicants in their talent pool and help them in identifying how close they are to getting the best man for a job.
The report generated by a Candidate portal helps you make informed candidate decision regarding the kind of candidate you want to attract, whether you need to change your recruitment process, or whether the candidate portal was worth it.
It improves efficiency and HR productivity
There are lots of processes put in place when it comes to the recruitment of new employees. A candidate portal simplifies these processes by allowing recruiters to tag resumes with labels to keep track of them. It gives them the capability to record detailed notes against the profiles, which develops a repository of knowledge where users get the same view of the candidate when viewing the resume.
Rather than going back and forth between the candidate portal window and email window, you can directly communicate with applicants via the application interface without wasting time or putting many efforts. The share resume feature of a candidate portal is helpful when trying to forward a candidate to the next assessor or when you have to delegate your task to someone else.
Also, a candidate portal will give you the capability to assign tasks such as verifying budget, resume review, and candidate interviews. This will help you keep track of your task, define your responsibility clearly, and keep the recruitment process transparent.
Things to be included in your candidate portal
In other to boost your brand’s marketability and visibility to candidates, then creating a candidate portal is important. You need to tell a story with your candidate portal. It should tell the candidate about what your company stands for, your company’s culture, and who you are. The following are recommend things that should be included in your candidate portal.
Company Values & Culture
An applicant will want to learn more about a company before applying for an available position. They want to know what your company culture is and what it is like to work there. Including your company values and culture on your candidate portal is a great way for you to show that you’re an employer of choice.
Job Application & Available Job Openings
It is important for you to list all available positions on your website’s career page. Use your candidate portal to keep the list as updated as possible. Even if you’re not currently looking to fill any position, you can solicit interest and resumes for future opportunities. You need to also make sure that the portal is candidate friendly and easy to use.
Employee Benefits
Apart from your company culture, candidates need to know the benefits of working for you. When you list all the benefits of working for you, then passive candidates will be attracted to your company that other companies over others that do not list any benefits. Do not hide any information on your employee benefits, Instead, make it visible and stress-free to find.
Links to social media pages
There are new social media statistics released from different viewpoints every week. The stats are only growing. Let your candidate portal be an advantage by attracting and engaging passive talents using social media platforms such as Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. When you list your job openings on these platforms and ask your colleagues, friends, or followers to share the posts, you will be able to build an audience of passive talents that which contributes to you are the growth of your company’s brand.
Newsletter Signup
Even if a potential candidate is not currently interested in the available job opening on your candidate portal. That does not mean you should miss a chance to build a relationship with them. And a great way to build a relationship with potential candidates is by sending a weekly or monthly newsletter to inform them of newly available positions.
Conclusion
It’s clear to us that a good candidate portal system will not just add a page to your company’s website. You need to understand that people are the backbone of an organisation. Regardless of the age or size of the organisation, it should be mandated that every company adopts a candidate portal solution and kept high on their priority lists. However, it is also essential to have a candidate portal that can grow as your company adapts to the changing market.
