According to a talent trend report by ZipRecruiter, the top challenges of talent acquisition include finding the best fit, connecting with candidates, and racing against time. That's why there are numerous talent acquisition tools available, aiming to solve these problems and help talent acquisition teams identify, evaluate, and keep track of candidates in the shortest time.
To help your hiring process easier and faster, we’ve gone through tons of talent acquisition tools and made a list. In this list, our focus is the tools optimizing sourcing, assessing, and tracking, as these are the most challenging parts that often lead to inefficiency in hiring.
We also prioritize talent acquisition tools with more affordable pricing, rather than those mainly designed for scaling hiring. Let’s face it, during this challenging economic time, not many businesses are not in the game of hiring large groups of people. Sure, smaller businesses might be working with even tighter budgets when it comes to hiring. But our list is also a great fit for bigger companies hunting for more cost-effective recruitment tools during this turbulent economic climate.
1. Sourcing
Hold on, don’t close the page just yet—I know what you're thinking. Yes, everyone is familiar with LinkedIn. But here's the thing: while we could easily list various talent-sourcing talent acquisition tools and encourage you to try them out, let's remember the focus of this article—"Top 8 Talent Acquisition Tools to Streamline Recruitment for Small Businesses in 2024." We aim to highlight only the top contenders.
With over 1 billion members spanning 200 countries and regions worldwide, LinkedIn stands as the largest professional platform. It’s the talent acquisition tool that every recruiter should turn to when sourcing candidates.
Pricing
LinkedIn is notorious for its lack of transparency in recruiter plan pricing. The most clear and accessible option is Recruiter Lite, the entry-level tier of their recruiter plan. It starts at $170 per month for a single license. The biggest allure lies in 30 InMail Messages per month.
Nonetheless, Recruiter Lite cannot integrate with ATS. For small businesses with restricted budgets, it’s more sensible to use LinkedIn solely as a sourcing recruitment tool and look for better alternatives to applicant tracking and managing.
2. Tracking and Managing
Sapiengraph
Now you have sourced a bunch of candidates on LinkedIn, the most hectic part comes in - how do you easily filter and tell if they have the backgrounds you are looking for?
Sapiengraph is the right talent acquisition tool to empower your hiring process (yes, it’s us!) It is a Google Sheets add-on that allows you to pull fresh LinkedIn data straight into Google Spreadsheets. Sapeingraph also offers a free Google Sheets template for applicant tracking.
To start with, you need to sign up for an account for free, and you will get 100 free trial credits. Then you need to install the browser extension and Google Sheets add-on.
After installing the extension and add-on, in this applicant tracking template, all you have to do is put the applicant’s LinkedIn URL in the "Add New Applicant” sheet, as shown below:
Then click the button “Enrich” in the “Applicant Tracking” sheet. The data of the applicant you need, such as email, current role, and company, will automatically show up. This feature frees you from examining the qualifications one by one.
With Sapiengraph’s Google Sheets template, you can check candidates' backgrounds at one glance, and manage the hiring status of the applicants such as “shortlisted” and “offer made”. Simple, right? You can also refer to the full step-by-step guide on how to use this applicant tracking template.
Pricing
The Google Sheets template from Sapiengraph is completely free. The data enrichment feature will require you a credit or more for each piece of data, depending on what data you are looking for.
When you first sign up for the account, you will get 100 free trial credits. For more formulas and credits, you will need to subscribe to an annual plan. The pricing starts at $49 a month, which is fairly affordable for a recruiting tool and particularly suitable for small businesses with limited budgets.
3. Assessing:
With the help of LinkedIn and Sapiengraph, now you have filtered some potential candidates. Other than interviews, it’s time to assess if the applicants have the skills the positions need. For this stage, there are some assessment tools you can use to test the skills of the candidates.
TestGorilla
A Freemium recruitment tool designed to assess candidates. TestGorilla prides itself on offering reliable, science-backed tests across a wide array of skills and roles. From programming and foreign languages to personality traits and cognitive abilities, its extensive test library caters to diverse needs for different positions. Furthermore, it provides clear statistical reports for test results, streamlining the assessment process for hiring managers and recruiters.
Pricing
The thing we love the most about TestGorila is that it can start with a completely free account, with 5 free tests, 5 custom questions, and unlimited candidates. This is very feasible for a small business not actively recruiting.
The next tier is Lite, which starts at $499 per month. It sounds a lot, but it’s a monthly plan so it’s relatively flexible. Overall, TestGorilla is highly recommended if budget is the primary concern.
AdaFace:
AdaFace is a hiring assessment solution crafted to streamline the candidate evaluation process with efficiency and precision. It keeps the tests simple as "40-minute tests and no tricky questions," focusing solely on real on-the-job skills crucial for organizational success.
AdaFace covers comprehensive assessment options, with over 500 tests available for different skills or roles, ranging from growth marketing and financial analysis to coding. It also offers aptitude tests, psychometric tests, and personality tests to provide a holistic evaluation experience.
Pricing
AdaFace starts at $180 for 12 credits per year, which sounds very affordable. However, we want to note that each candidate evaluation consumes one credit, while a ready-to-use test requires five credits. Therefore, for a more practical approach, opting for at least the Starter plan at $500 per year for 50 credits is advisable.
Codility:
As the name suggests, Codility is an assessment tool tailored specifically for engineering talent acquisition. Though Codliity starts as an enterprising solution for scaling hiring, it has various solutions customized to meet the specific needs of companies and their scales, such as remote hiring, senior engineering recruiting, and more.
Codility offers three distinct platforms for the different needs of its clients:
CodeCheck, CodeLive, and CodeEvent. CodeCheck is designed to evaluate candidates' coding skills. Its built-in plagiarism detection features help keep assessments trustworthy by identifying copied content, ensuring fairness and equal opportunity for all participants.
CodeLive is a collaborative coding environment that facilitates real-time technical interviews. Through CodeLive, employers can engage with candidates in live coding sessions, assessing their problem-solving skills, coding proficiency, and teamwork capabilities. This interactive platform provides a seamless interviewing experience for both parties and helps companies make better hiring decisions.
Codility's CodeEvent platform, on the other hand, serves as a hub for hosting coding challenges, hackathons, and technical events. Companies can leverage CodeEvent to engage with the developer community and identify potential talents from thousands of participants through programming competitions. Of course, this platform is ideal for enterprises with enough budget.
Pricing
While Codility is primarily designed for enterprise use, it also provides a starter plan priced at $100 per month, billed annually. With this plan, users can send out 120 invites per year, suitable for small businesses that do not require extensive hiring.
4. Reference checking
After leveraging LinkedIn, Sapiengraph, and the assessment tools we’ve introduced above, you've narrowed down a few ideal candidates. The final step in this decision-making process involves conducting reference checks.
Unfortunately, some companies tend to skip this step due to time constraints. This is understandable. Traditionally, recruiters need to make phones call to the contacts candidates provide. It could be time-consuming and a a lot of invalid data could make things even worse.
However, reference checking is an important assessment step. It provides more insight into a talent, as the former employer can disclose valuable information about a candidate’s working style and qualifications, which might not be able to discover during the interview. Skipping reference checks is not conducive and effective to enhance recruitment efficiency.
This is when smart recruitment tools come in. By utilizing reference-checking tools, recruiters can save time while not sacrificing this important assessing step.
HiPeople
HiPeople offers recruiting tools for both assessment and reference-checking, with the added convenience of separate plans. Companies can opt for the reference-checking plan only, if they want to use other assessment tools.
HiPeople’s reference-checking tool is powered by AI and automates the procedure of reference-checking, helping the talent acquisition teams speed up the process. Recruiters begin by building and customizing a survey from its templates gallery. After the survey form is completed, simply share the link with the candidate and referees, and the referees can submit their feedback. It offers a clear data dashboard and analysis from the feedback, helping the recruiters make decisions based on data in a breeze.
Pricing
HiPeople offers a free trial that allows one invite to a candidate and experience the tool. Following this, the different plans are based on company size respectively, which makes it particularly attractive to small businesses.
For company sizes between one to fifteen people, the Grow plan is at $70 per month, billed annually. This plan offers unlimited candidates and references.
Checkmate
Checkmate is an online recruitment tool designed to streamline the reference-checking process for both recruiters and referees, saving valuable time for all parties involved. Similar to HiPeople, it also offers built-in survey forms that can be sent to referees.
The difference is that with Checkmate, recruiters can create dynamic questionnaires that follow natural conversations, facilitating the collection of comprehensive information. This feature enables recruiters to analyze the results efficiently, with clear reports summarizing key insights.
Pricing
The pricing information is not shown on the website. But there’s an option that allows users to sign up for an account for free to get a taste of it.
Harver
As a provider of talent acquisition tools, Harver offers assessments to screen candidates' job skills and personalities. However, what particularly grabs our attention is their reference-checking tool.
With Harver’s reference-checking tools, recruiters can just put a candidate's contact information. Subsequently, the candidate will automatically start the checking process by submitting their references, who then receive a brief survey that can be completed in just 2 minutes on a mobile device. Unlike traditional phone calls, a text-based reference check typically yields more comprehensive information about the candidate.
Pricing
Unfortunately, pricing information is not available on Harver's website. It's also unclear if the reference-checking tool can be selected as a plan itself. Nonetheless, considering the potential productivity enhancement it offers to the hiring process, we find it necessary to include it here.
Building Your Dream Team with Ease
Building a team with the right talents is the key to success for a company. Finding, tracking, and assessing the right talent, however, takes up a lot of time. Leveraging the right recruitment tools can reduce the time and increase the success rate of hiring the best fit. Do try out the recruitment tools we've suggested to make your hiring process smoother. Happy recruiting!
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