Every time you get a job requisition request, you will find something written in bold & capitals, “we need a unicorn candidate who can join tomorrow morning, and can start showing great results from the very first hour.” The best part, you’ll get this on a Friday evening, right when you have zipped your bag and are just about to swipe your employee card at the exit. The second best thing is that the requisitions would never have enough details to let you do your research about the role. Do we even need to tell you how a poor understanding of the role would lead to a crappy job description? Do you think with inaccurate job descriptions you can attract good-fit candidates? Maybe, in rare cases. But on average, that’s never happening. If you’re in an early-stage startup, maybe you can tap into your network a few times to find good hires. But eventually, you will run out of candidates to hire. Things will be on stall, the time to fill will start breaching new highs every day, and the pressure to hire quickly will just keep crushing you. In fact, 54% of organizations reported a talent shortage in 2023. What’s the solution? Well, ideally your organisation should fix the job requisition process, but who has time for that? So, being realistic, the best you can do as a recruiter is to build your recruitment database so vast that no matter what and how many hires you have to make, you can always rely on it to help you find the right candidates.
“What’s a recruitment database?” you ask.
Read this insight, and enlighten yourself about-
- What is a recruitment database?
- What are the advantages of using a recruitment database for recruiters?
- Intro to Skima AI— your ultimate sourcing database
In part 2 of this article, we shall look at
- What are the features to look for in a recruitment database software?
- How to build your own recruiting DB?
- What features of Skima AI make it the best choice for candidate resume database software?
Meaning— What Is A Recruitment Database?
Fundamentally, a recruitment database is a repository of candidate resumes or CVs.
While that’s the core USP of a recruiting database, the idea is extended to include job descriptions, a reservoir of ready templates for email & text communication, interview & candidate notes, hiring manager feedback, candidate status reports, skills & experience to salary mapping reference documents, tentative & final offer letters, and everything else that helps fulfil a job requisition.
In short, a recruitment database is more like a document warehouse for recruiters.
However, a recruitment database is just not enough. Assume that you and your team hired about 350 candidates in the last month. Imagine how hard it can get to find the ground for hiring a specific candidate alongside whom teams struggle to work with. Now, try to sense what a pain it would be if the number of hires were as high as 3500. Enters recruitment database software.
What is it?
Recruitment database software is a digital approach to storing, searching, accessing, updating, and sharing organizational recruitment data. Its core USP is to store candidate resumes in a systematic and structured way and make them searchable. We shall see what are the top features to look for in recruitment database software, but first, let’s list down the benefits of using one.
Benefits— Why To Use A Recruitment Database?
Recruitment is lately being disrupted by tech. HR digital transformation is a key priority in enterprises, startups, and SMEs. The top staffing agencies across the world are also continuously upgrading their recruiting stack to fulfil ad hoc recruiting demands in real time. A recruitment database is a core pillar supporting this transition into a more agile and efficient hiring process. Here are the key benefits of using a recruitment database-
Supercharges skill-based passive recruiting strategies
Skill-based recruitment increases a recruiter's talent pool by 10X.
When you have a resume database of candidates, you won’t just have to be dependent on applications received from the job boards or partner agencies, rather you can rely on your own database to find the relevant candidates.
For example, let’s say you have a USA recruitment database for developers, which basically comprises entry-level or associate-level junior developers, now if there is a requisition for Python developers, you don’t really need to put a job post on developer-focused niche job boards. Instead, you can first look for a role-fit candidate in your recruitment database, and only when you have no relevant candidate, you can start tapping into other sourcing channels.
Shorter time-to-fill
With an in-house comprehensive CV database for recruiters, hiring teams can close job role positions with a shorter time to fill. Open positions, especially in case of a replacement can cost a company good fortune, it disturbs the project cadence as well. The toll on a team’s productivity and morale is sometimes irreversible.
For example, let’s say there was a job requisition for a support machine operator in the pulmonary department of a hospital in Canada. Now, scans (X-rays) are a key part of the treatment for most chest-related diseases. If the operator for the X-ray machine is not replaced on time, the entire patient experience becomes jittery. This friction leads to bad reviews and ultimately patient attrition. Subsequently, all this hurts the brand and the business’s bottom line. However, imagine how the process would never be interrupted at all if you had a Canadian recruitment database. You could have closed the position in record time, enabling the health providers to continue servicing the Canadian citizens with top-notch healthcare services.
Reduced cost-per-hire
If you don’t have an in-house talent database, then you would need to invest comparatively more money and resources into finding the right-fit talent. Irrespective of the means, then be it recruitment ad marketing, distributing job posts to a large number of job boards, or recruitment process outsourcing, the cost-per-hire will always be costlier. On the contrary, if you have a recruitment database for recruiters, the savings can compound over time. The larger your candidate pool becomes, the more talent you will have at your disposal to choose from and close requisitions.
For example, let’s say an educational institution is looking to foray into digital learning platforms. And for that, they need qualified educators who are comfortable with online course material creation. Now, this is a typical industry-focused niche talent requirement. If you’ve not been building a talent database of educators, this could be a very time-consuming and resource-intensive project. However, if you’re someone who has a qualified educator recruitment database, the story script would be completely different. You would just need to launch an email campaign or some other communication channel to let the pool of qualified educators know about the opportunity and the relevant ones would voluntarily reach out to you. This would significantly bring down the cost-per-hire.
Improved candidate experience
The benefits of a resume recruitment database also positively influence the overall candidate experience you deliver.
- First off, having a CV database reduces the sourcing load on your hiring team, and thus, your recruiting resources are judiciously utilised. So, you would mostly have enough available resources at your disposal to ensure smooth hiring operations.
- Second, Your hiring team can do better candidate tracking, and thus if an individual or set of candidates are stuck somewhere in the process, the bottlenecks could be identified and resolved at speed.
- Third, with robust candidate communication channels, you can always keep the candidate in the loop. It improves the candidate experience if you keep them abreast of their application status.
Besides, it’s not like you would just store candidate resumes in the database, and leave it until a relevant requisition is raised. Ideally, good recruiters, continuously engage with their recruitment database and share resources that help individuals in their career growth. This not only improves the candidate experience but helps establish a personal rapport too- a key recruiter skill in an AI-driven HR industry.
Compliance & security
Legal complications can derail your growth plans if taken lightly. A recruitment database keeps a trail of candidate communications and other activities like consent to use the data. This comes in handy for maintaining compliance with data protection regulations effective in your region.
For example, if you’re maintaining a UK recruitment database for B2B executives, you would need to be compliant with GDPR rules. Data Protection Act (DPA), Privacy and Electronics Communications Regulations (PECR), Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidelines, and anti-discriminatory laws for hiring are some of the other compliance requirements that you should take seriously into account.
Scalability & revenue
Lastly, in business, growth is the ultimate goal. Without scalability, growth is unimaginable. The more requisitions you can close, the faster you can drive revenue for your organization, and steer it on a trajectory of exponential growth. This is applicable to both internal and external recruiting teams.
Meet Skima AI— AI-powered Recruitment Database For High-performing Recruiters
Primarily, Skima AI is a recruitment automation platform that helps you with sourcing and finding the right talent, engaging with candidates, automating hiring workflows, and finally hiring them. As part of sourcing, it provides recruiters with a global recruitment database of 500Mn+ professionals to source quality candidates for vacancies across business verticals and regions. It exploits artificial intelligence under the hood to identify the best-fit candidates for any job role in any region. You can also use the platform to upload resumes of your own candidate pool and leverage the in-built resume screening and AI matching score feature to find high-quality hires.
Try Skima AI now.
Happy recruiting!
