Productivity Tools for HR Managers
Tools for HR Managers to Increase Productivity
Everyone is talking about productivity now a days. Be it the Task Master Manager or the target driven Sales Executive or even the friendly Accountant, sitting next to you. For decades, Productivity was a word more associated with Operations People, working on shop floor. But gradually the concept of efficiency and yield has percolated to other functions including Human Resource. We will discuss here, five Productivity Tools, that will be very useful to any recruiter, for enhancing his or her ‘productivity’ ie., doing more in less time.
Personalization Tools
First weapon in the kit of your arsenal should be a good personalization tool. One of the most time demanding exercise for any recruiter is to search for relevant candidates. Personalization tools will help you, as a recruiter, to fine tune your search efforts. They let them so the working for you by crawling across social media profiles, e-mail addresses, locations and build up a sensible story regarding a candidate. Some of the popular tools are Crystal, Clearbit and Gender Decoder. Clearbit gives you a full profile data of against any email address. It will let you identify who visited your portal, thus, enabling you to send more targeted job roles to them. Clearbit also has a “connect” feature that allows you, to search for the right candidate, by job title or role. Crystal is another powerful tool for recruiters, which increases recruiter’s response rate. It enables the recruiter to uncover hitherto unknown aspects of candidates’ personality.
Recruitment Software
Softwares have become ubiquitous even in the so perceived human intensive filed such as recruitment. When used diligently, it will help you save time & manage the recruitment funnel more effectively. A good recruitment software allows you to source relevant candidates, track conversation with them and have candidate relationship management features that, takes off the load of mundane tasks, from your time pressed shoulders. First in the list comes TalentLyft. It has a clutter free and appealing interface that is user friendly, even for the first time users. Plus the company regularly updates its tools, to bring you the latest feature rich and useful functionality. Even if you go by the customer reviews, you find that it has great sales & customer support team, so that, help is just round the corner, in case you ever need it.
Project Management Tools
HR Recruiters have to manage myriad of activities and it requires diligently planned time sequenced activities to achieve your specific talent acquisition objectives. Not any run of the mill software, will be able to do justice. You have to get yourself a good ‘Project Management’ software available in the market. Although Project Management has been traditionally associated with construction, infrastructure, defense and IT industry, you will be surprised to know that, now-a-days, project management has become quintessential for Recruitment too. Some of the good PM tools available are Basecamp, Trello and Asana. Latter is very useful for collaboration with other recruitment team members. It is a work-management platform that, allows you to collaborate with your team and stay focused on your daily tasks, by using functionalities, such as deadline tracker and priority setting.
Time Management Tools
If time is not managed properly, it can adversely affect productivity. Same holds true for recruitment activities too. Time is always a constraint, with so many things to deal with, on a daily basis. If not used judiciously, time can become an impeding factor at work, leaving you overwhelmed. But don’t worry there are lot many time management tools available today such as Pomodoro, RescueTime, Toggl and Tracking Time. One of the good tools is Toggl that allows you to track how you are spending your time, which are the tasks you are doing and how much time you have spent on doing them, are these value added tasks or no value adding activities. Plus you get a detailed analytical report, which gives insights on how your day was spent and where you should be focusing at. Toggl’s license is available as starter pack that allows time tracking & reporting and as premium pack, that provides profitability charts and tracking reminders. RescueTime is another great piece of software that gives you valuable insights.
Social Media Management Tools
Social media is a great force to reckon with. No recruitment job is complete in true sense without harnessing the power of social media. Social media management tools help you manage all your social media presence at one place. You will also be able to track performance of your social media posts. Few of the good tools available are Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social. Most reputed amongst these tools is Hootsuite that lets you manage an array of social media platforms from Facebook, Instagram to LinkedIn. It provides an intuitive dashboard that is customizable according to your needs. Similarly Buffer provides strong functionality in scheduling posts and sharing content. It gives access to a useful graphic designing tool Pablo which you can use for creating your social posts. Sprout is yet another tool with intuitive “messages” tab.
Other Productivity Tools
We are in an emailing world. We receive tens’s of emails every few minutes, to swiftly go-through them and make sense, needs time. Sortd is a useful mail management tool specifically made for recruiters. It lets you to rearrange your inbox into various lists such as Resume, Interview and Hired. You can add notes to track status of candidates, expected salary etc. Forest is another tool that needs mention. It helps you focus on task at hand. In the age of Facebook and other online portals, we are continuously fed with notifications, pop up messages and other distraction. Forest uses gamification technique, you start with a seedling, goal is to grow a forest and not kill your trees. Every time you leave work for other sites, your trees die.
Competitive business landscape has grown. Recruiters are no exception. In order to differentiate oneself and be more productive at work, it makes sense to take help of IT tools available in the market.