What is a Recruitment Management System (RMS)?
It’s no secret that hiring the right people can be challenging. Particularly for small businesses and startups, hiring the wrong person in a role can have devastating effects. Recruitment management systems are used to increase the chances of finding the best match for your open role.
A lot of financial investment and time goes into hiring, and there is opportunity costs that comes with every new position. Remote work tools can make hiring more straightforward and easier to manage by reducing admin tasks, grouping information, and creating workflows.
However, recruitment management systems aren’t always designed with startups, small businesses or smaller sized teams in mind. Businesses don’t always need to invest their resources into a large recruitment management system.
Sometimes, making use of available resources can be the best organizational strategy when hiring.
What is a recruitment management system?
Let’s explain briefly what a recruitment management system is. A recruiting management system helps automate and manage the process of finding new employees.
With a hiring management system, a company has an overview of the people who apply, are interviewing, have been offered a job with documented candidate information, and internal feedback.
Basically, it brings together all the different pieces of information that businesses need when hiring. Recruitment management systems help organize the data while also staying organized at work.
Step by step, the number of candidates pass through different stages in the recruitment process until one or multiple people fill the job opening. After that, you can onboard them with a 90-day plan or other frameworks.
Why use a recruitment management system?
It is part of the natural lifecycle of a company to hire new employees. Sometimes people get promoted, someone leaves, retires or is fired. Achieving company goals and objectives or overall company growth can also be a reason for new positions opening up.
To keep up with the hiring needs, every company must create a process to find and employ new team members in an effective and productive way. Without a good process, companies risk creating a toxic work culture, loss in productivity and a waste of resources and time.
Particularly on a smaller scale, this recruiting process is relatively straightforward. However, as more people are hired or openings receive a lot of applicants, needs become more complex. The hiring process must then adapt to ensure you find the right fit for your open role.
Depending on the system, there is a range of ways a management system makes the hiring process more efficient. With technology advancing so quickly there are now even tons of recruiting tools that use artificial intelligence to automate recruiter tasks.
Here are two main reasons businesses use a recruitment management system as a small business or startup.
- Reduce administration costs by documenting all information in one place.
- Pick out the most qualified candidate and hire them faster
Let’s dive a bit deeper into each reason.
Decrease administration costs
The admin side of hiring can become overwhelming. Contracts must get prepared, jobs posted, candidates reviewed, interviewed, and assessed. Alongside this, schedules must align for interviews and meetings. It takes a lot of time to bring relevant information together and organize it.
Organizing and scheduling becomes even more difficult if your business operates on an asynchronous work schedule. A recruitment management system reduces endless back and forth while keeping everyone informed on the current hiring funnel.
Filtering for qualified candidates and faster hiring
An established hiring process will allow teams to more easily pick out the most suitable candidate. A recruitment management system helps businesses screen candidates and assess their capabilities in more efficient ways. This means less time wasted on people that aren’t suitable or the best match.
Writing for Forbes, Deborah Lovich, makes an interesting point about how important streamlining the hiring process is. She writes, ‘In today’s hyper-competitive job market, as the saying goes, those who hesitate are lost.’ If you want to move quickly and not lose talent to competitors, hiring them quickly is extremely important.
With a better-organized hiring process, you can cut down on the back and forth and move qualified applicants to the ‘hired’ stage faster. This means you can improve the chances of the best profile match joining your team.
For smaller teams there are better alternatives to manage hiring
For a lot of startups and small businesses, finding a suitable recruitment management tool can be a challenging task. Advanced tools have a lot of functionality that a small business or startup might not need.
This is because a lot of recruitment management systems were created with scaleups, larger businesses and big multinationals in mind. These large companies are continually hiring, or have a lot of applications to process.
Typically, they also have hiring managers or human resources departments that spend most of their day using the system.Comparatively, a smaller business or startup might have just one person or team member who goes through applications. It might even be a shared responsibility among team members across business functions.
Enterprise recruitment management tools have a lot of functionality that a startup will probably not need to make use of when hiring.
Think of advanced dashboards and complex automation systems.There are a few reasons why enterprise software is not the best match for startups and small businesses. But the main one is that they simply don’t get as many applications on a day-to-day basis.
Also, they might not go as deep into the recruitment process, with their hiring funnel consisting of 1 or 2 stages instead of 5+. Let's dive a bit deeper into why an enterprise tool is often not effective.
Consider the price
Dedicated recruiting tools are expensive. This is especially an issue if a business is not continually hiring and works with a small team.
If a startup wants to hire a new person for a role, buying access to a recruitment management system for one hire is not effective. The subscription could run for months, which is a waste of resources.
For smaller teams, money is often tight, and there are probably better investments the team can make instead of purchasing a recruitment management solution.
Training employees
Specialized tools require getting used to. Users must learn how different parts of the platform work. This can be an ineffective use of time, particularly if there are only a few roles to fill.
A small business might just need a fraction of the functionality that the tool provides. However, because there is so much functionality, an inexperienced user can become overwhelmed.
A new user can get lost among all the options. The more training your team needs to navigate a tool, the harder it gets to involve a wider team as not everyone will be able to navigate the platform.
What startups and small businesses need for a recruitment management system
Despite the benefits of using a hire management system, sometimes startups and small businesses need a more tailored solution. Below are some of the key features a startup should look for in a recruitment management system.
1. Simple functionality
Complex or hard-to-manage functionality makes hiring harder. Usually, it takes a lot longer to get started with the recruitment process.
If you want to hire someone, you want to start right away. You don’t need to go through a whole setup and learning process before processing applications. Or have the hassle of signing up to get a free trial with a bigger tool.
Your recruitment management system must be accessible enough so anyone can jump in without too much of a learning curve. The focus should be on getting new team members rather than learning new software. Simple functionality promotes cross-functional communication as everyone can chip in.
2. Integrated work environment
Don’t overcomplicate work with hundreds of different processes and tools. Incorporate the management recruiting system into current work streams. This allows people to easily access new information and updates.
For example, some companies have candidate information stored in an email, the job role in a shared folder, notes on the candidate’s interview on paper, and internal discussions on a communication tool. Browsing each of these tools to find and add information to your workflow is inefficient.
Spreading your recruitment information across multiple platforms is a waste of time. In this circumstance, you’re continually searching different information stores. Instead, securing information in one place will save a lot of time, everything is together, and organized for access.
Collaboration tools like Rock bring all of those knowledge bits into one place. Everyone is involved without switching platforms. You can do everything from one place, with centralized documentation.
3. Lower the cost
An RMS (recruitment management system) only makes sense for smaller startups or businesses if it’s free or low in cost. Startups must be mindful with how they spend their money. They should spend resources on other critical areas of the business if an effective, low-cost alternative is available.
With Rock, you can create unlimited spaces and manage the whole recruitment system at no cost for your team. You can access all main functionality you might need, such as messaging, tasks and notes just like large recruitment management systems.
It can also be neatly combined with other day-to-day work, as you can create unlimited spaces and adapt the functionality for marketing workflows, general team communications and even engineering, sales or customer support tasks.
How To Set Up a Hiring Funnel With Rock
Setting up a hiring funnel in Rock is simple and quick. To do this, follow the steps below:
1. Create a dedicated space and add colleagues involved in the recruiting process.
You can create unlimited group spaces for managing work. A group space allows you to invite anyone in or outsite of your team. This means that you can encourage cross-departmental communication or even invite external recruiters or people you are interviewing to a Rock space.
Group spaces offer loads of functionality, here’s a brief overview:
- Full-fledged messaging: reactions, gifs, polls, threads, and everything else you need to message team members.
- Task management: Switch between list, board, and calendar view with feature-rich tasks for any kind of workflow.
- Note-taking functionality: set up meeting agendas, interview guidelines or other important information in dedicated notes.
- Meetings: start a Zoom, Google Meet, or Jitsi meeting for free, you can also share asynchronous video with Loom.
2. Connect relevant storage providers, add relevant files about the open positions and keep everyone updated within that space
If you’re storing important hiring information on Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive you can directly add the folder to your space.
This allows you to quickie access CV’s, cover letters, interview questions and other important information in your space. You can even attach your cloud files to tasks, notes or topics so you don’t have to search around for information.
3. Leverage the tasks Mini-app as a Recruitment Management Tool
It is also possible to create a hiring flow by leveraging task management on Rock. The Tasks mini-app allows you to add new applicants and manage their progress from start to finish in one place. Essentially, every applicant becomes a ‘Task’, which is then moved between the different stages of the funnel.
To use the Tasks mini-app as a recruitment management tool, format the lists in your recruitment space in a way that mirrors a recruitment pipeline.
For example, you can structure your process like this:
- CV review - the applicant has registered interest in the role
- First interview - candidates to interview
- Case - Complete a case assessment before moving to the last interview stage.
- Accepted for the final interview - a shortlist of applicants to interview again
- Job offer - the candidates that offers were sent to
- Hired - the candidates that accepted the job offer
- Rejected - candidates that turned down the offer or did not pass an application.
In this recruitment pipeline, you can assign and process applicants by creating tasks. For example, a job applicant for a key account manager job applies and a task is created with their relevant information. A colleague involved with their application can be assigned to manage the task.
Any thoughts, remarks or complementing information gets added to the task description. For example, their cover letter. The team can then discuss the applicant in a dedicated comment section under the task.
With a task created, you can move the applicant across each section of the funnel. Following this method, you replicate the functions of a dedicated recruitment system, without paying for the tool.
Use Zapier to Automate the Recruitment Management Process
You can even automate the recruitment process with a Zapier integration in the PRO plan. With this setup, you can automate emails from applicants to go straight to a recruitment space as dedicated tasks with titles, assignees, descriptions, and more.
Instead of copying the data from emails into the relevant tasks, Zapier automatically moves the information into a task and formats it. This is useful because it removes a layer of administration and speeds up processes.
Centralize Your Activities
For startups and smaller businesses, it is important to work efficiently and not waste resources. The more you centralize activities, the better. With Rock you can centralize messaging and task management in one place.
Collaborate and communicate the whole hiring process while also managing other workflows in the same place. Conveniently, you can also manage any other project related to, for instance, marketing campaigns, product development, sales, or customer success.
Find the Right Recruitment Management System For Your Business
A recruitment management system can dramatically improve the hiring process. But it is important to consider the size of your business and whether a dedicated tool is actually necessary.
Use Rock to manage the hiring process and seamlessly incorporate recruiting into your everyday team communication, collaboration, and project management. Set up your first recruitment space and start with a hiring funnel within minutes of signing up.
