The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause once-in-a-generation struggles with devastating global impact, especially to the world’s economies. In this environment, the labor market has seen a dramatic shift from “Depression-era” unemployment levels to currently over 10 million open jobs in the United States (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Compounding this tumultuous hiring economy is “The Great Resignation,” a workplace phenomenon in which millions of employees are resigning. In April 2021, over 4 million people (2.7% of the U.S. workforce) quit their jobs, believing they could find better ones. 
Adding to these challenges is the fundamental changes to the workplace, where many companies are deploying a new hybrid work environment. As companies look for the right balance, 75% of their workers believe flexible work should be a standard practice rather than a benefit.
For recruiters, finding ways to rapidly adjust to this new normal is both a productivity challenge and an important business issue. Competing against other companies to locate, recruit, and close quality candidates in a timely and efficient manner has become a business imperative. Recent reports indicate that despite the millions of unemployed workers in the country, companies simply can’t find enough people to hire.
With administrative tasks and communications processes serving as two major roadblocks to hiring and onboarding employees efficiently, enterprise communications solutions can help teams optimize their processes in three distinct ways:
- Driving increased productivity and operational efficiency
- Creating streamlined employee onboarding processes
- Fostering an enhanced client and recruiter experience
Driving Increased Productivity and Operational Efficiency
Experience has taught us that recruiters across industries face a common challenge: Time spent on administrative tasks reduces their bandwidth to connect with potential employees and clients. Increasing the degree of difficulty is having to operate within a remote or hybrid work environment, where recruiters are physically separated from colleagues and much-needed infrastructure.
Collaboration tools can help recruiters make the best use of time spent communicating directly with candidates and all required parties to source, select, close, and onboard talent. When getting in touch with candidates and clients, recruiters often manage several apps for calling, meeting, and messaging, adding to administrative overhead and taking away from true value-add activities. However, unified communication tools can streamline this by including all features in one app, enhancing collaboration between recruiters, account managers, candidates, and clients. This allows recruiters to centralize these essential communications tasks into one platform and accelerate the entire recruiting process, regardless of employees’ physical location.
Additionally, the right unified communications software should seamlessly integrate with apps such as Salesforce or Bullhorn. This allows for workplace communication tools to automatically show on-screen notifications for incoming calls, with information on candidate profiles, previous call notes, updates, and more all in one application. This ensures recruiters have all the most important details for any candidate or project immediately available to them, increasing the quality of each interaction, cutting down on administrative time, and giving them more bandwidth to fill roles and onboard employees.
Creating Streamlined Employee Onboarding Processes
While recruiters often focus on the successful onboarding of the candidates who accept our offers, we need to also consider the rapid and effective onboarding of new recruiters. Turnover in our industry is traditionally high, so it’s important new employees get up to speed quickly. Onboarding is a key contributor to both outcomes.
One of the factors that gets in the way of rapid assimilation is that our infrastructure often requires our employees to juggle various software and communications protocols; thus, the onboarding and training process can be strenuous. These processes prevent new hires from getting to work quickly and take time away from the employees who train these new hires.
Unified collaboration tools help cut down on this transition time and allow employees to adjust to all the software they need quickly. These streamlined systems also cut down on training tasks for long-term employees, enhancing productivity across multiple dimensions.
As recruiters spend less time on this training and administrative work, they have more time for day-to-day priorities. This accelerated assimilation leads to increased speed to productivity and feelings of growth and competence and ultimately leads to a satisfied employee who is more likely to be happy with his or her current role.
However, it’s important to note that successful onboarding is just the first step in a successful engagement strategy. Managers still need to check in on new employees’ progress in their roles. Well-designed communications software incorporates coaching and supervision features into its functionality and gives managers access to remotely check in on individuals, teams, or department statistics and schedule reports for updates. This helps employee growth and streamlines feedback processes to shorten adjustment periods once new employees join teams.
Fostering an Enhanced Client and Recruiter Experience
In today’s distributed work environment, providing an optimized communications experience for candidates, clients, and recruiters is a key differentiator. Recruiters must be able to source, recruit, schedule interviews, and negotiate offers across many different roles within the same time frame, all while delivering a positive candidate experience.
To support virtual recruiting tactics, agencies and recruiting teams need collaboration tools in place that enable them to effectively find, contact, and evaluate a candidate and recreate that in-person interview experience in a hybrid work environment. Recruiting communications software is a significant factor in creating that type of interview experience—and will continue to be so as we enter a new era of work. Utilizing technology that helps recruiters spend less time on administrative work and more time on qualifying candidates, making offers, and onboarding new employees is vital to the future of the industry.
Similarly, recruiting teams benefit from the increased support of these unified tools, as they provide everything recruiters need in one accessible place and eliminate the clutter of workplace tools. Using effective collaboration solutions achieves streamlined productivity from a recruiter’s first day on the job to supporting hundreds of prospective candidates and helping organizations fill talent within a hybrid work environment.
Brian Powers is VP of Talent Management and Acquisition at Fuze. See the company’s latest research here.