Do you go back to sourcing a fresh batch of candidates every time a new client requests to fill a position?
How often do you have to settle for a candidate just because no one better showed up?
It all boils down to poor recruitment database management!
When you don’t have organised software to store and manage your past recruitment data, and locating a specific spreadsheet takes great effort, you’re losing out on fantastic potential hires.
You need recruitment database software to make the job easier and quickly source candidates from the database that match the job profiles perfectly.
This article will discuss various topics to help you understand what a recruitment database is and how you can utilize it to enhance your efficiency and productivity:
- What Is a Recruiting Database?
- Why Use A Recruitment Database?
- What Are The Key Features Of A Recruiting Database?
- How To Choose The Right Recruiting Database Software
- How Do You Maintain A Recruitment Database?
What Is A Recruiting Database?
A recruitment database is an essential tool for managing your hiring process efficiently. It acts as a centralized repository for job postings, candidate resumes, contact information, and communication history. With the right recruitment database software, you can easily filter and sort through candidates based on specific criteria, track their progress through the hiring funnel, and collaborate with your team to make better hiring decisions.
By implementing a recruitment database, you can streamline your hiring process, save time, and find the best candidates for your organization.
Let’s say a candidate applied for a job you posted. However, their skillset and experience didn’t fulfil your criteria for hiring at that moment. By keeping that candidate’s information stored in your ATS, with proper notes and comments about their application, you can easily access the information when hiring for future roles.
When you find a more appropriate role, you can directly search your recruitment database and start the recruitment process with a great match.
Why Use A Recruitment Database?
Bullhorn’s recruitment database example
According to Jobvite’s recruiter nation survey 2021, recruitment priorities have drastically changed for recruitment agencies—our priority is improving hiring and the time-to-hire quality.
A recruitment database system fast-tracks the recruitment process and brings structure to it:
- Searching a candidate’s data in a recruitment database is much easier than cramming through spreads and trying to track down information on external drives.
- Streamlines the recruitment process for good—primarily when recruiting in high volume. You can automate the redundant tasks and develop templates to speed up the process. For example, you can integrate Allsorter to automatically reformat resumes and eliminate bias.
- Using a recruiting database makes it convenient to track passive candidates (who weren’t previously looking for a job) and try again to convert them.
- Helps you reduce costs and save time you’d have spent scanning various job sites, reaching out to each candidate and scheduling interviews.
- You don’t have to start the process from scratch—pick up where you left off and access all the information at your fingertips.
- With access to documents, notes and conversations from past recruitment drives, it’s easier to follow recruitment compliance standards and conduct fair recruitment practices.
What Are The Key Features Of A Recruiting Database?
Resume Screening and Reformatting: When you automate mundane tasks like resume reformatting, you get more time to strengthen your recruitment process and hire better candidates. Invest in a recruitment database software that integrates with a resume reformatting tool such as Allsorter to reformat high volumes of resumes in no time!
Integration with Other Tools: Your ideal recruitment database software should easily integrate with external or third-party tools such as applicant tracking systems, job sites, or automation tools to help you scale.
Recruitment Databases Should Offer Templates to Standardise Communication: Sending out repetitive communication, such as application emails, interview communication or offer letters, doesn’t need to be all manual. Software that provides templates covering the basics and helps you save time is exactly what the recruiter ordered!
Advanced Search Functions: A simple type-and-enter search functionality won’t suffice in recruitment database software. You need software that can perform advanced boolean searches to fetch even the most intricate details from your database. Moreover, a good tagging and filtering functionality always comes in handy.
Security and Compliance: Conducting fair recruitment practices and protecting your candidates’ privacy is critical for hiring the best candidates and maintaining your agency’s reputation. You need software that takes care of that and helps you stay compliant. Allsorter helps remove bias from your recruitment process and anonymises sensitive information from candidates’ resumes.
How To Choose The Right Recruiting Database Software
The problem with most recruitment software is that most cater to a broad set of audiences—in-house recruiters, recruitment agencies, or headhunters.
Often, with the plethora of choices available in the market today, it’s challenging to decide on a single recruitment database tool. It helps when you know your recruitment goals and find software with aligned features.
When selecting a recruitment database software, consider these points:
- Do you only wish to build a candidate repository for conducting sourcing and the initial hiring processes, or are you looking for a full-fledged solution?
- Can you optimise candidate communication and nurturing with the tool?
- Do you need the functionalities of both a recruitment database and a CRM in the software?
- How will you be accessing the software? Aim for tools you can easily access from mobile for recruitment on the go!
How Do You Maintain A Recruitment Database?
Investing in recruitment database software is only the job half done. If you don’t systemically manage your database, it may soon go haywire.
To avoid that, follow these best practices:
- Have a dedicated funnel to map out every stage of recruitment—make sure you have a plan in place to move your candidates down the funnel and find your best fit.
- Avoid duplicate entries in the database to keep it organised.
- Segment your candidates into different categories—based on their skills, location, experience, etc.
- Update the templates as per the employer’s branding, and incorporate bias-free and gender-neutral language in them.
- Analyse metrics in your recruitment process, including time-to-hire, the number of candidates who applied, ghosted, rejected the offer, etc., to identify improvement areas.
Streamline Your Recruitment Agency Database
Hiring has never been easy, but it’s become even more challenging since workplaces went hybrid. It’s hard for a recruitment agency to have (and keep) all its ducks in a row when juggling multiple positions.
However, when you have an easy-to-access recruitment database full of suitable candidates to tap into with every new job, you’ll have a significant portion of your hiring process sorted.
And for bonus points, pair your recruitment database software with Allsorter’s resume reformatting tool to process multiple resumes at scale and present well-polished resumes to your clients while preserving the data.
Did you enjoy this post? Here are some more recruitment topics you might be interested in:
- How to reduce time to hire
- Guide to high volume recruiting
- How to address biases in recruitment
- Top 5 high-volume hiring strategies