10 Reasons to Ditch Outlook and Excel for Recruitment

10 Reasons to Ditch Outlook and Excel for Recruitment If your recruitment process relies on Outlook and Excel then you could be losing good candidates, and worse still, having a negative impact on your bottom line.  As anyone recruiting with Outlook and Excel will know, providing a seamless and standardised recruitment process is difficult. And because of this, losing good candidates and potentially their business as a consumer â€" is a very real and present danger. But it doesn’t have to be this way technology is freely available to help you streamline your recruitment process. It won’t cost you anything but will bring huge benefits. If you are still finding it hard to give up on Outlook and Excel, then we have created a list of 10 reasons to let go of the old ways of recruiting in order for you to embrace the new: 1) You are losing candidates in the process: Keeping track of candidates and where they are in the recruitment process is a tricky business. This is made worse when you lose sight of which hiring manager they have spoken to and when. The upshot is that candidates can quite literally get forgotten and end up dropping out of the process. 2) You are wasting time repeating the same tasks: Recruiting using email and a spreadsheet means that you have to spend a lot of time copying and pasting. From job descriptions, to email confirmations, the recruitment process involves many repetitive tasks.  By automating these tasks you could be spending more time on the tasks that really matter. 3) You provide a low-quality candidate experience: If your recruitment process has gaps in it, then think about what that’s like for the person applying for your job. The candidate experience is critical for recruitment, and business success at the very least candidates expect timely updates on where they are in the recruitment process. Currently, 58% of them say they don’t receive those regular updates. 4) It is difficult to promote your vacancies: As if the internal admin wasn’t difficult enough, you then have to promote your vacancies. This will include manually uploading jobs on to career sites and amending job ads as and when required. Despite the effort, you won’t realise any benefit from your content through search engine optimisation. 5) Staying compliant is a real challenge: The recruitment process â€" like many other business processes â€" comes with its fair share of rules and regulations. That means your recruitment efforts need to comply with local employment laws as well as following data protection regulations. Recruitment technology helps you stay compliant and ensures candidate profiles are only accessible to relevant colleagues. 6) It is almost impossible to report on your recruitment activity: Disparate systems make reporting on recruitment activities nigh on impossible. And without measuring your activities and their impact you have no way of understanding what’s working, what’s not and how you can improve things. The new breed of free recruitment technologies offer reporting as standard, so you can immediately find out how well your recruitment efforts are working. 7) It is hard to create a talent pool: How easy is it for you to identify the right talent when a new job has been created? Are your email folders and/or spreadsheet a help or a hindrance when you need to review previous candidates? Chances are your talent pool is simply an Excel list of names which in itself will tell you very little. 8) Recruitment admin takes up too much time: If you use Outlook and Excel to recruit then you will be spending too much time on recruitment admin. If you automate the tedious admin tasks you then have time to focus on what really matters: sourcing and interviewing high-quality candidates. 9) Your time to hire is longer (and therefore more expensive): Using disparate systems to recruit will make the process longer. As well as having a negative effect on the candidate experience you could end up incurring costs as a result of having to hire temp staff or contractors. Cut the time to hire and you immediately save money. And having all your stakeholders connected to one single solution makes collaboration much easier, thereby reducing the time to hire. 10) You are wasting valuable business time: Remember, the more time your colleagues spend on recruitment admin, the less time they have to spend on their day job. Centralising your recruitment process means line managers do not have to be so involved in the recruitment process â€" and that will be good for business. Outlook and Excel make for an inefficient recruitment process and a poor candidate experience. But no organisation wants to spend more on recruitment than it absolutely has to and no organisation wants to get a reputation for having a poor recruitment process. The answer is to invest in the new breed of recruitment technology that streamlines recruitment admin, keeps you on the right side of the law and that provides all the recruitment tools you need to create a great candidate experience. Author: This blog post is provided by Remy Verhoeven, Co-founder of Qandidate.com.  Feel free to drop me an email at remy@qandidate.com or follow me on Twitter @remyverhoeven.