Here Are Some Cool Tools Recruiters Should Check Out

As a former recruiter for Amazon, Yahoo! and Starbucks, Carmen Hudson was one of the early adopters of using the web to find and connect with potential job candidates. These days, as a principal at consulting firm Recruiting Toolbox, she enjoys evaluating the very latest sourcing and recruiting tools and training recruiters and hiring managers on how to find best-fit candidates for their open positions.

“I consider myself a nerd–I love technology,” she said during her closing presentation at Recruiting Trends & Talent Tech LIVE! titled “A Few of My Favorite Things.”

Recruiters and talent-acquisition leaders can be forgiven for feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment, said Hudson.

“Josh Bersin estimates there are about 1,400 different recruiting technology products out there–based on my own experience, I’d put that number even higher,” she said. “I just feel like there are too many out there. And if you’re leading a team, you might feel like you’re falling behind.”

Citing futurist Kevin Kelly, author of the seminal book The New Rules for the New Economy and the more recently published The Inevitable, Hudson said technology is outpacing our ability to keep up and understand it. “We’re in a constant state of learning,” she said.

Hudson, who posts summaries of the latest recruitment technologies on her website, recruiterhunt.com, devoted the bulk of her session to discussing some of the new recruiting-tech tools she’s most impressed with.

“There’s just so much cool stuff out there,” she said, noting that the sheer amount of data combined with enormous advances in processing power have helped enable the widespread availability of tools that utilize algorithms and machine learning–commonly referred to as AI.

What follows is a summary of Hudson’s favorite new recruiting technologies:

SwoopTalent “This platform extracts all talent acquisition data from your systems, centralizes it into a database and then spits out the reports you need. It lets you mine your ATS data for candidates.”

Eightfold “This is a ‘talent intelligence platform’ that pulls in your internal data–for internal mobility–and combines that with external data on candidates to help you identify the best candidates for your open positions. It also does blind screening to reduce bias.”

Engage Talent “This vendor describes its tool as ‘candidate identification and engagement.’ It will do some sourcing for you, but what’s really cool is that it monitors companies and passive candidates who may be ‘recruitable.’ If a certain company is having financial trouble, for example, it analyzes for you the employees within that company who may be recruitable.”

Restless Bandit “It goes out and discovers candidates. What’s really cool is that it can rediscover and re-target candidates within your ATS, re-engaging them about positions at your company they’re well-suited for.”

Hi-Q-Labs “It analyzes ‘flight risks’ within your company, which I admit sounds a little creepy. It also discovers hidden skills within your organization–internal talent who may be ideal for other careers within the company. I think it’s really cool, maybe slightly invasive.”

Reimbi “This offers ‘amazing expense reimbursement’ for candidates who have to travel for interviews. It lets you get candidate expense reports back almost immediately.”

ConveyIQ “It captures candidate feedback information from hiring managers. It offers automated group scheduling.”

GoodTime “It’s a ‘candidate-driven scheduling tool.’ It also collects interviewer data.”

Paradox/Olivia “It’s a ‘personal recruiting assistant’ that helps you schedule interviews. And the natural language function is pretty cool.”

Wade and Wendy “It vets candidates and also serves as a personalized career advisor for jobseekers. It delivers job opportunities to candidates and uses natural language to interface with them really well.”

Jane AI “It offers a ‘pre-hire assessment immersive experience’ using real-life simulations. If you’re allowing bots to make assessments for you, you get to double-down on validating those.”

MapRecruit “This really tries to replace the recruiter. It communicates with candidates using speech recognition, it will do automated phone interviews for you and then summarize those communications, it uses sentiment analysis. It’s a little bit involved and ambitious and I don’t know anyone who’s currently using this, but I can’t wait to find out who is and learn more about how they’re using it.”

Blendoor “They describe their mission as ‘diversity on purpose.’ It anonymizes resumes to remove bias from the recruiting process. If you feel you have to turn to tools like these, then there may be deeper issues within your organization. But if you do, resume anonymizers like this can be really helpful.”

TalVista “It’s a multi-function platform that helps you anonymize your profiles to ensure that you’re focused on job skills while recruiting, to prevent bias from interfering with the process. It helps you create structured interviews that focus on candidates’ skills, not their personal backgrounds.”

Atipica “This is an ‘inclusive recruiting platform’ that will mine your ATS data to find diverse candidates, using things like ZIP Codes, schools attended, to identify them. I’m honestly not so sure about the legality of the process–it seems like a gray area. But it’s very interesting.”

ThriveMap “It ‘objectively measures culture fit.’ I’m a little wary of behavior-based assessments because I think they’re a little biased. But some of these tools are really interesting. This one measures and compares candidates’ work styles, things like whether they’re an early riser and so on.”

Recurrence “They call this ‘gamulation.’ These are long-form work simulations, it’s ‘gaming AI,’ that can be customized to your organization. It puts candidates into virtual reality situations. T-Mobile is using this, collecting tons of data on how people behave within their organization. It’s a little creepy but really fascinating, too.”

GR8 People “Bills itself as ‘recruit like a marketer.’ This is a CRM that will do outreach for you and help you create marketing campaigns.”

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Andrew R. McIlvaine
Andrew R. McIlvaine is former senior editor with Human Resource Executive®.