Recruiting Database: The Essential Toolbox for Small Businesses

Finding the right person for the right job can be a daunting task. Sometimes, you spend ages on interviewing a potential new hire only to have them underperform in the first week. Or, you have difficulty picking between two candidates and you’re afraid of making the wrong choice. That’s where recruiting databases come in. 

What exactly is a recruitment database?

Have you ever gone to your kitchen to look for a particular spoon, but you couldn’t find it? You know you have that one particular spoon. You literally just saw it yesterday! You’re pretty sure you put it in the drawer, but it’s not there! 

You know what would make things easier? A well-organized cutlery drawer. Every utensil is placed into appropriate categories and is easily accessible, ready for use. 

Guests who come over can find what they need immediately because your cutlery drawer is labeled clearly. They can take things out and put them back easily in each section, making your kitchen experience so much smoother and easier. No more digging through the dishwasher to find your spoon!

A recruiting database is a lot like a cutlery drawer, but for profiles. It provides a space for you to sort and store relevant information, communications, status updates, and notes about a potential hire. It can be as simple as using spreadsheets, a monthly subscription to an end-to-end platform, or a database in a server in your company. 

Regardless of your choice, it’s a great way to consolidate information and streamline communication by simplifying or automating tedious tasks. 

Why a recruiting database is important

Oh it can’t be thaaaaat important, can it?

Sure, you can start a business without one when you have only 2 employees, like how you don't really need a special box just to store a single hammer and screwdriver. 

Let’s fast forward to when your business begins to grow. What happens when you’re a multinational company juggling applications and hiring across six different countries and 200 applicants? Keeping track of and comparing 200 resumes, cover letters, and applicant interviews isn’t going to be easy. 

You want to make sure you hire the right people because as Lawrence Bossidy, former COO of General Electric once said,  “I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.”

Once your organization hits a certain size, it gets harder to coordinate between teams and people. As a result, people make mistakes in storing data or sharing information. Employees forget to update details or send emails. All of this leads to wasted time and effort, which at best will only cost the company some money, and at worst damage its reputation.

Best believe that a recruiting database is going to be a time-saving and effort-saving tool at each stage of the hiring process.

How recruiting databases simplify the hiring process

Hiring is usually divided into three stages: 

1. Pre-recruitment
2. Recruitment
3. Post-recruitment.

In general, recruiting databases are very useful because they serve as a central repository for information, help to promote candidate engagement, and reduce human error in recruiting. I’m going to take you through each stage and explain how the database can help you in each one.

Pre-recruitment: 

Management decides how many people they want to hire, and for which roles. Job descriptions are created and jobs are posted on job boards. Sometimes, companies run ads to solicit applications. HR collects the resumes and cover letters either manually or using applicant tracking systems. 

Job posting

Alright, let’s get down to business. I simplified this into just ‘job posting’ but this is where the alignment must first begin. In the digital era, you cannot just stick an ad on Craigslist and hope a decent person shows up. Job boards are popping up left right and center like mushrooms after a rainy day. 

The company must first decide which role needs hiring, and what is involved in that role. For example, Company A might say that their role of ‘Writer’ will involve keyword research as well as social media posting, but Company B might say that the same job title only involves writing 2 articles a week, without the need for keyword research, whereas Company C equates ‘Writer’ with ‘Social Media Marketing Intern Who Does Everything’. 

Totally *cough* not speaking from experience *cough*.

Here’s where a recruiting database can come in handy when ensuring that all teams are aligned. It serves as a central repository for all sorts of information.

The job description, salary, expectations, and what have you, should be all consolidated in one (1) spot so that everyone from the intern who posts it on Indeed, to the team leader who requested a new hire, to the manager and the CEO, should be able to see what exactly is required of an applicant. 

If you’re creating a mini recruiting database in Excel or Google Sheets, you should dedicate a sheet just to track job postings. 

Everybody on the team should be able to access it in order to see the job information posted. This way, everyone understands what exactly is needed for the role. 

PacOceanData, a (fictional) B2B data and software company wants to hire an in-office engineer for their company. Their HR team puts up a job ad on 10 different job portals. They don’t make a note of where the job has been posted. As a result, when upper management revises the offered salary from 140k a year to 100k a year, they overlook updating the information on one of the job sites. 

Consequently, candidates who come to interview for the position end up turning down the job because it doesn’t meet their expected salary. Not only has PacOceanData wasted time and effort because they did not have a centralized repository of information, their reputation as an employer has taken a hit. 

Centralized information is crucial to properly communicating roles, responsibilities, and remuneration packages. Without it, companies and applicants waste time on a recruitment process that doesn’t align with what they are looking for. 

Sourcing for candidates

In addition to posting on job boards, upper management may also decide to poach people from other companies by searching for people working in the same role on LinkedIn. 

Our CEO Steven, does this all the time cause he says it’s cheaper, faster, and better than asking people to apply. According to him,

“The best people never apply for jobs. They’re always poached”. 

For companies that can afford it, using a recruiting agency like LinkedIn Recruiter can take this process off your hands. 

If using a recruiting agency isn’t on the books right now, you can either sift through LinkedIn profiles manually, or use a recruitment database tool like Sapiengraph’s People Prospector. Yes, that’s us, so I may be biased, but hear me out.

Our People Prospector tool gives you access to 500M+ professional profiles with contact information. You can filter by fields like location, industry, current or previous employment. A filtered search like this can build you a list of potential candidates in seconds and cut your research work in half.

Or, if you’ve already had your eye on someone from before, you can track their employment changes to see when they’re ready for a new position using our Job Change Monitor. 

Receiving applications

Now you can expect to see applications start to roll in. 

If you’re a small company that only receives a couple of applicants, you can easily compare the two candidates with both resumes printed out on your desk. But larger organizations sometimes receive hundreds and thousands of resumes for a single job listing. Coupled with the fact that some applicants try to stand out by going overboard with fancy graphics, scanning each one will take a lot of time. 

This is where recruiting databases come in. Most commercial recruiting databases out there have an inbuilt automatic Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Whenever you receive a job application, take the resume and upload it to the ATS. It then uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR)  technology to read resumes and sort them quickly, saving you a lot of time and energy.

An ATS scans and reads the text on each resume then automatically rejects those that don’t contain the specific keywords that you want. This way, you go through hundreds, or even thousands, of resumes in a quick and efficient manner. 

If you’re working for an MNC that just received 100 job applications to be a professional translator, not only will you have to ensure each applicant has the target languages listed on their resume, you must double check if they are certified translators and are able to use special translation software. 

Imagine having a list of acceptable certifications, languages, and software, then going through 100 resumes and highlighting each one to make sure you get all of them. That’s going to consume so much time and energy!

Getting an automated ATS that allows you to upload 2000 resumes and then spit out a list of the top twenty candidates can be quite a costly investment, though one that many companies are willing to make. Smaller companies can opt for manual tracking systems like our free Applicant Tracking Template on Google Sheets.

While it’s not an entire recruiting database on its own, it’s a handy way to consolidate all candidate information in one sheet. And if you’re missing important candidate data, our template can automatically enrich applicant data as long as you have a LinkedIn profile URL. You can upload your resumes to a folder and link them one by one to ensure that you have the right applicant for the right job. 

Even a simple Google Sheet tracker like ours can help you gauge how many applicants you have and their skills. Sure, you may have to enter some of them manually, but it becomes easier to compare skill to skill, language to language, and location to location, in a Google Sheet instead of in a folder full of resumes. 

Recruitment

This is when teams start looking through resumes, shortlisting candidates, and holding interviews. It’s important to keep track of which candidates are put through to each subsequent round!

Parsing resumes

Having a recruiting database that has automated ATS can save hours and hours of work by not only filtering out the applicants who don’t meet the minimum requirements, but also helping to sort and rank the remaining ones based on how often certain keywords appear in their resume. 

Let’s use PacOceanData as an example. They currently have 100 applicants for the role of data analyst. Their basic requirements is that an applicant should be skilled in programming languages like Python, R, SQL, and also have a minimum of one professional certificate related to data science. After their ATS has filtered out those who don’t fit those requirements, they’re still left with 45 people. 

Even though the number is down by half, PacOceanData’s hiring team still has to look through 45 resumes. Or do they?! 

Some ATS can compare Candidate A (who is familiar with two additional programming languages) with Candidate B (who has three professional certificates) and give PacOceanData a score of who fits PacOceanData’s ideal candidate profile better, or even create a list of the top 10 candidates in terms of skill. 

Well, PacOceanData only uses Python, R, and SQL, so knowing many programming languages isn’t a plus point for an applicant. PacOceanData might be more inclined to hire people who have more professional certificates because it establishes their credibility in the field. 

Inversely, if PacOceanData is conscious of their budget, they may choose to hire Candidate C, who only knows 3 programming languages and has 1 professional certificate because more qualified candidates are more expensive to hire.

What happens if you don’t have an automatic ATS that can do all this for you?

Well, a spreadsheet is still pretty great at helping you keep track of who is up for consideration. You can enter your remarks in a separate column, list out the pros and cons of hiring a particular candidate, or mention anything that stood out to you in their resume, cover letter, or email.

You can compare candidates easily by looking at each column or using the filter function. =FILTER('Applicant Details'!G:G, (SEARCH(LOWER(C2), LOWER('Applicant Details'!S:S))),(SEARCH(LOWER(C3), LOWER('Applicant Details'!V:V))))

Yes, it’s going to take time and effort to enter all the relevant information into a spreadsheet, but it’s good practice to centralize data storage. That way, if resumes go missing by accident, you can still refer back to this sheet the same way you would if you were using recruitment database software. If there are multiple stakeholders in the hiring process, they can all consult the same sheet and stay on the same page when it comes to vetting who to invite for interviews. 

Shortlisting

After looking through resumes, entering information, and comparing candidates, you now have a list of people who you want to interview. Ideally, the time taken to get from application to this stage shouldn’t be too long. Otherwise, some of the potential candidates might think they’ve been rejected and accept other work opportunities. 

Having a recruiting database also means that all contact information is readily available whenever you need it. Some of the recruiting database platforms out there can schedule and automate emails, making it easier for you to keep track of who has been emailed and who has not. It would be a shame to miss out on a great candidate just because someone forgot to send an email!

Our own Applicant Tracking Template currently has the categories “Applied”, “Shortlisted”, “Screening interview”, “In-depth interview”, “Offer made”, “Hired”, and “Dropped”. You can also add other statuses like “Email Sent”, “Called”, and “Rejected” to indicate if you’ve already reached out to your potential employee. 

“It’s just an email! How hard could it be?!”

Not hard, just tedious. Especially when you’re reaching out to 20 to 30 people at once. 

Most of the content should be pretty similar - Congrats, we like you! Come for an interview! Here are the interview details! These are additional things we need from you!

With the rise of AI, it’s not a surprise if there are recruiting databases out there that can both write and send these emails. But if you’re doing this old school by copy-pasting a script, just make sure to change the name. No one likes receiving emails addressed to someone else. Mark Dawson, Senior Partner of Axial Consulting, mentions that candidates have more options than ever before, which in turn means that companies need to make a good impression right from the start in order to attract top talent.

Back in the old days, people would have to come in for physical interviews, and you’d have to pencil them in on a calendar. Tuesday, 2:00 pm, John Peters. Thankfully, now there are a lot of tools you can use to set up the interviews. Some recruiting databases have built-in schedulers that help you find a time that works for both you and your candidate. If yours doesn’t have one, there are always external sites like Calendly that will allow them to pick a time that fits your availability.

Interviews

When a person has been moved from ‘Shortlist’ to ‘Email Sent’ to ‘Interview 1’, you’re probably going to want to ask them for more details about their experience, clarify gaps, or ask about future plans. It’s essential that everyone on the recruiting team knows who’s interviewing and for which role, because getting people mixed up is mortifying for both parties.

A recruiting database consolidates all the notes and concerns you have regarding a particular candidate. 

PacOceanData’s lead programmer says that she’s concerned about a particular candidate’s professed proficiency in Ruby on Rails. However, she will be at a conference when the candidate is scheduled for the interview. She can note her concerns in the candidate’s profile in their recruiting database so that her colleagues can help her follow up on those questions.

Any red, green, or beige flags that are spotted during the interview can be entered directly into the recruiting database, keeping all of the stakeholders in the loop. Information such as the candidate’s earliest start date, their buyout period, or any relocation costs should be included in their notes so that the HR team has the whole picture. 

Once a candidate is deemed suitable or unsuitable, their status should be updated accordingly in the recruiting database so that the appropriate next steps can be taken as soon as possible.

Post-recruitment

You’re in the home stretch of post-recruitment now. It’s time to give people the good (or bad) news, take a look at how long it took to find these candidates, and onboard the lucky few who made it through. After all that’s done, you’re also going to have to take a look at how long the process took from start to finish, and whether it was worth it.

Callbacks & confirmations

You have found the one(s). People who fit the role and responsibilities very well. It’s time to make an offer. Before you send that email, check with your team. Can your company afford this person? Are they still available? Can they join you in time for a certain project?

Most companies will touch base with the candidate to say “Hey, we like you, we’d like to hire you,” and see if your potential hire is still interested. Here’s where having a recruiting database can benefit your team. Keeping track of your hiring timeline is crucial because your candidate is likely interviewing for other positions as well, and they may very well be snapped up by other organizations if you take too long to make an offer.

Recruiting databases are essential for keeping track of conversations at this stage. Candidates may not be satisfied with your initial offer, or they may have a lot of concerns regarding their notice period and/or buyouts. 

Let’s say PacOceanData does find a highly qualified candidate for the role of junior developer. PacOceanData wants her to start in July with a salary of $62,000 a year, just in time to take over for an employee who’s moving to another country. 

Although the candidate initially agrees to this price, she emails back a week later saying that her old company is offering her $72,000 and additional perks for her to stay. PacOceanData’s hiring team must now decide if they’re willing to match her new pay and perks in order to bring her in, or if they want to go with their second-choice candidate. 

Now imagine something similar happening with multiple roles at the same time. It would be a nightmare to have to try and remember who is in the middle of negotiations, for what kind of salary, with which company, for 20 positions at a time!

Onboarding

They said YES!

You’ve gotten the coveted signature on the dotted line. You like the candidate, the candidate likes your company, and you’re both in agreement on the job offer. You’re too far into the process to lose a potential hire now. Right? Wrong. 

Probationary periods are a very common practice nowadays. It’s a time when you and your candidate can see if you’re the right fit for each other. During this time, you both can call it quits without too much issue. That’s why having a smooth onboarding process is essential to retention. 

Alright, PacOceanData has found their candidate. They’ve made an offer and the candidate is due to start in a month. There are a lot of steps in setting up an employee for success.

If you’re providing a work laptop, are you going to mail it to the person? Are there essential programs that the candidate has to complete before becoming an employee? What other documents do they need in order to complete the hiring process? If there is proprietary software that your company uses, does your tech team have to install it for them? Or is it downloadable somewhere?

Recruiting databases can help to remind stakeholders to get everything set up on time, even if it’s just a checklist in a spreadsheet. Foster accountability among team members by streamlining communication and tracking progress. This way, your organization can create a seamless onboarding experience for new hires.

Data analysis

“I’ve already hired someone! Surely that’s all?”

Nope!

Hiring people is an expensive and time-consuming process. Job portals charge fees. Screening and vetting candidates takes time. Your employees may be pulled away from current projects to take part in recruitment. You have to make sure that the time and effort spent on this process is worth it.

Let’s say PacOceanData starts another round of hiring. They post on ten different job boards, hoping to attract a total of two sales executives and three app developers.

In total, they spent about $4850 on job postings alone. By tracking the number of successful applicants (i.e. new employees gained) from each site, they can make a better decision on which job board suits them. 

They can see easily that they get the most quality applicants from Monster for their Sales executive role, and none from Flexjobs. Conversely, the App Developer role got the most valuable applicants from Flexjobs. Based on this, PacOceanData can choose to post only tech-related roles on Flexjobs to reduce costs.

If these people are still employed in their role, it’s highly likely that they have the necessary skills to retain that job, which means the likelihood of employee retention and good performance is higher if you can convince them to jump ship. By convincing these people to switch jobs, PacOceanData can reduce costs associated with posting on job boards and skip the lengthy interview process. 

Let’s say PacOceanData hires three new App Developers to work on a mobile app. But despite having professional certification, their performance isn’t really very good and PacOceanData ends up dismissing two of them after six months. PacOceanData then decides to remove that particular certificate from their list of entry requirements for future hires because it doesn’t help to prove someone’s competency.

Using a recruiting database will make it easier to perform ongoing assessments. They allow you to track data from past hires to make better decisions about future employment requirements. If you notice graduates from a particular school tend to do better, your company can scout the school for future talents. 

What kind of metrics should I track in my recruiting databases?

I’m back at it again with the tables. Here you go. These are the basics of the metrics you should be tracking. 

How do I create a recruitment database?

• Step 1. Pick a database structure - the key components of your database i.e. tables for candidates, job postings, applications, communication
• Step 2. Choose the right tool - an end-to-end recruiting database or a simple ATS? Look for features like job distribution, candidate tagging, data analytics
• Step 3. Collect candidate data - gather applicants from job postings, or using tools like Sapiengraph’s from People Prospectors like Sapiengraph. 
• Step 4. Clean data and ensure compliance - create a system for maintaining data accuracy and integrity. 
• Step 5. Organize and tag - categorize candidates based on industry, skills, experience, and interests to ensure easier search in the future
• Step 6. Nurture and engage - regularly communicate with candidates to keep them engaged throughout the hiring process. Make sure they stay interested and informed. 

In a nutshell, recruiting databases provide…

To recap all of the examples in the previous part, I’m boiling everything down into three main points.

Better consolidation of information

It’s not just candidate information. It’s job information, interview information, email information, any kind of data you have about the hiring process. If everything is in the same place, it reduces the possibility of miscommunication. No more long email forward threads. Everything is in the same database. Your notes, my notes, everyone’s notes are all visible in the same candidate profile. 

Easy application tracking and candidate engagement

Having a recruiting database will show you exactly where which applicant is in the hiring process. If you want the hiring process to be transparent and easy to follow for both you and your candidate, both parties must be aware of where they are in the recruitment pipeline. 

By using a recruiting database, you can keep track of who has reached which stage for which role and whether you’ve been communicating with them. Maintaining engagement is especially important because in competitive industries, top candidates are likely to consider multiple opportunities. It’s not enough to change a candidate’s status to ‘Make an Offer’ because if they don’t know that you’re looking to hire them, they’ll accept another position at another company!

Improved data driven decisions

Somewhat related to having centralized information, keeping and maintaining a good recruiting database will provide you with good hiring data in the long run. Eventually, you can see which job boards provide more bang for your buck, what kind of professional certificates can predict work success, and whether the recruitment process is too long, too short, or just nice. Steve Jobs himself attributed the success of Apple to the fact that he went to exceptional lengths to hire the right people. 

Types of recruitment databases

Now let’s talk about your options when it comes to setting up a recruiting database. In general, there are two kinds of recruiting databases. The first and most common (as of now) is cloud-based recruiting databases. The second is on-site recruiting databases. 

Cloud-based recruiting databases

Cloud-based recruiting databases are the most popular choice at the moment. Everything is done online, which means all stakeholders can access the data from anywhere with an internet connection. Your data is stored on the cloud and a lot of the systems provide integrations with well-known job portals like Indeed or LinkedIn. 

A lot of the available recruiting database software on the market has expanded to provide things like automated resume screenings, interview scheduling, follow-up reminders, and team-wide collaboration. The flexibility of working from anywhere and anytime can help a company stay organized and efficient during the hiring process.

Although these cloud-based recruiting databases are pretty popular, there are a couple of hiccups that might impact your recruitment pipeline.

Security concerns

One of the biggest worries when it comes to cloud-based anything is security. All your candidates and related notes are private and confidential and while recruiting databases do their best to keep that information locked down, anything put on the internet has a risk of being breached or compromised.

Integration issues

If a platform has multiple integrations available, it’s likely they’re going to be expensive. If they have limited integrations, your hiring process might run into issues here and there. If you have too many options, you might spread yourself too thin. If you don’t have enough, then you have to manually transfer data from A to B, which may introduce errors and mistakes. Pick just enough features for what you need.

Dependence on the internet

If your internet service provider dies, so does your ability to collaborate with your team. Most of the time, it’s fine. Unless you’re halfway across the world and sharks are biting the deep sea internet cables or the sun is bombarding us with particles again.

Vendor reliability

Somewhat related to internet reliability, but with your vendor. Companies rise and fall every day. When everything is going great, then there’s no cause for worry, but past performance isn’t always a good indication of future success. A good platform that has worked well for you in the past can suddenly switch CEOs and then introduce some new updates that completely break the site. And then when you want to cancel, they tell you that you’re past the cancellation deadline.

On-site recruiting databases

On-site recruiting databases are exactly what they sound like. They’re hosted and maintained on your site. In your office. On your premises. Usually, that means you have to have some kind of server room available. They’re available on your own company’s servers, but not elsewhere. 

These on-site databases give you full control over how candidate data is stored, managed, and accessed. You can get people to design them for you and maintain it yourself, or you can have an internal team design and create your own database. 

The great thing about on-site recruiting databases is that you have enhanced security. There’s a lower (but still not zero) chance of external breaches because the data is on your server. And since it’s your own software, you can customize it however you want, with whatever functions you want. Like every option out there, it does come with downsides.

Higher upfront costs

It costs way more money to set up an on-site recruiting database because there are so many things involved. You may need an entire team of people and dedicated infrastructure and hardware to support its upkeep. Most startups don’t have the budget for this. 

Limited flexibility

The fact that the database is stored on your premises means that you have to actually be on the premises to access the database. That also means you can’t work remotely. Staff members can’t just log on from home to find the information. They have to come to the office, which can be a hassle for team members who prefer a more hybrid situation. 

Scaling difficulties 

Scaling can be complex and costly, especially if you’re changing infrastructure or expanding to new locations. Costs typically include a lot of additional hardware, server capacity, and hiring people to manage the system. Which is why most people stick to cloud-based solutions instead. 

Common challenges of recruiting databases

Recruiting databases greatly benefits a company when done right, but they do come with some challenges, usually when it comes to keeping things updated.

Data overload and management.

Too much data can be a bad thing. Over time, you will notice your recruiting database starts to accumulate vast amounts of data on candidates. It’s not uncommon for a long-standing company to still keep records of a person’s CV from 2010. Without a clear data management strategy, the information starts taking up precious server space and consuming resources. 

Data privacy and compliance

Recruiting databases often contain sensitive information about candidates such as contact information, salary expectations, employment history, and so on and so forth. Even though a job applicant sends it to a company, the onus is on the company to ensure that the data is kept safe. 

Difficulty in integrations

It’s not uncommon for a company to use multiple SaaS platforms for their human resources, payroll, recruitment, communications, newsletters, etc. Companies have to choose a recruiting database software that can integrate smoothly into their existing workflows to ensure that nothing is disrupted.

Data quality and accuracy

Duplications occur often when it comes to bigger companies or companies that are always recruiting. Sometimes, the candidate is just testing their luck for the role, or perhaps they applied for 2 different roles in the same company. Having duplications usually leads to errors in communication like sending the same interview invite multiple times. 

Learning curves

As with most software, the more features it has, the steeper the learning curve. You might be tempted to get the biggest and best recruiting database software out there but the HR team may struggle to learn how to use every single feature in it. Meaning that you’re spending more than you need to. 

Recruiting databases

In the past, you could have gotten away with paper resumes in paper files but the modern world is way too fast-paced for this now. 

Using a recruiting database will give you a strategic advantage by enabling long-term analysis of hiring trends, your sourcing channels, and candidate success indicators. With all this data, you can refine your company’s hiring process. 

If you’re looking to dip your toes into what using a recruiting database might be like, feel free to test our free Applicant Tracking Template during your hiring process!

FAQ Section - fast and furious style

What is a recruitment database?

A recruitment database is a centralized system that stores and organizes candidate information to streamline the hiring process. It’s a repository for information like resumes, contact details, and interview notes, making it easy for recruiters to track applicant progress, compare candidates, and retrieve records efficiently. Most recruiting databases come with ATS, allowing recruiters to automate tasks and maintain consistency across hiring workflows.

Which recruitment platform is best?

Stay tuned for our in-depth assessment of recruitment platforms. 😎

How can a recruiting database improve the hiring process?

• Consolidates data into one central location - no more searching through emails and physical notes
• Helps you track and engage candidates - know where each candidate is at each stage and ensure communication does not break down.
• Improves decision making via data - find out where you’re experiencing bottlenecks so that you can improve hiring. 

What are the key features of a recruitment database platform?

• Job posting automation: post to multiple job boards easily. 
• Resume parsing: extract important information from resumes automatically.
• Candidate tracking: visualize a candidate’s progress throughout the hiring process
• Interview schedule: coordinate interview times between multiple stakeholders 
• Advanced search and filters: find candidates easily based on specific criteria.

How do recruiting databases differ from Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)?

Many recruiting database platforms have an in-built ATS. ATSs usually don’t have in-built recruiting databases.

Are recruiting databases compliant with privacy laws?

They better be! 

Recruiting databases must comply with various privacy laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States. Compliance is essential for protecting candidate data and maintaining trust throughout the recruitment process.

What’s the difference between a recruiting database and LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an unorganized recruiting database. It’s got everything, everywhere, all at once. People aren’t sorted neatly into categories. Recruiting databases are sorted nicely for your perusal.

Are recruiting databases suitable for small businesses?

Recruiting databases are suitable for everyone but if the cost is prohibitive, it’s better to start small. In Google Sheets. With Sapiengraph. ;)