Recruitment software is also known as RMS or a recruitment management system - it’s a software tool that speeds up and automates the processes of hiring staff by using find, assess and hire systems. Depending on the complexity of the software, and the need in each case, it may also help with attracting (advertising) and interviewing processes.

Why do you need recruitment software?

If you’re an agency that manages personnel, or an organisation with complex hiring needs, or just in an industry that has a high throughput of staff, like the hospitality trades, you may benefit from the speed and accuracy of recruitment software.

What are the benefits of recruitment software?

There are two key areas of benefit when using recruitment software:

Less administration

Lower costs.

The first set of benefits relate to how complex it can be to hire new staff, whether temporary or permanent. Both legally and in terms of administrative time, it can feel as if there’s an endless amount of form filling and fact checking associated with finding new personnel and ensuring they are properly employed.

Large companies use recruitment software to select the best from large pools of candidates, many of whom may not be adequately qualified for a post but apply anyway.

Smaller, more specialised organisations use it to reduce the time from seeking a new employee to getting them into the workplace.

Agencies, of course, use recruitment software to keep track of large numbers of candidates and to ensure they are fully qualified for a position before recommending them to a client company.

The second set of benefits relate to costs - cutting the time it takes to find a new staff member can drastically reduce the losses that organisations incur when key personnel leave. Cutting recruitment costs is also beneficial, as the longer it takes for a new employee to ‘earn back’ their recruitment cost, the greater the overhead that the company experiences before it starts to benefit from its new hire. Reducing administrative load is also a cost benefit and recruitment software allows organisations to recruit more swiftly, more simply and with less time spent on form filling, processing, CV scrutiny, reference requests and interviews.

Finally, by using sophisticated recruitment systems, companies can increase their ‘quality per hire’ by ensuring that the candidates they interview are well equipped to do the job, and then have confidence that the software will help them conduct interviews that ensure the best qualified and experienced candidate will get the job. This drastically reduces the risk of miss-hires, where highly persuasive or personable candidates score highly at interview but are actually ill-fitted to the job they end up doing. Miss-hire is difficult to assess as there are no records kept to record its impact, but the effect on an organisation that has selected the wrong candidate are often both dramatic and negative.

A final, unquantifiable but very real benefit of using recruitment software is peace of mind. For many people, recruitment is stressful, whether they are the applicant or represent the organisation seeking personnel. Recruitment software supports those involved in recruitment processes and gives them confidence about their decision making in this complex and often urgent area of business life.