As the new year dawns, the world is slowly preparing itself to gallop and positively, job markets have started opening up. This positive trend has set into motion a more lucrative year for recruiters in terms of not just business, but also the sheer satisfaction of putting people to work when it matters most.

Professionals who had previously been displaced have been able to apply for jobs that are actually relevant to their skillset. This only promises a brighter horizon, both for candidates to find their dream jobs and for recruiters to be able to be a part of their journey. If you’re a recruiter, dreaming of kickstarting your entrepreneurial journey by setting up your own agency, we don’t see how there could be a better time than now.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through two use cases for implementing Zoho Recruit’s industry-leading AI powered Automated Tracking System (ATS) and recruitment CRM as part of your staffing strategy going into 2022.

Meet Sally

Sally became an entrepreneur, in the last quarter of 2021, by opening a staffing agency in Texas. Sally was positive that the Texas businesses were recovering from losses and are desirous to fill their rosters once more with talented individuals. Sally knew the traditional method of recruiting manually would not only be time-consuming, but would be cumbersome and will not meet the client requirements which are time and talent sensitive.

Sally was reassured of the same when she was approached to source and hire/recruit digital marketers, coders, and graphic designers as fast as possible for new clients. Each requisition requires a separate set of skills, and some require special certifications and skillsets to perform the tasks set by the job description. With so many requisitions open at the same time, Sally and her team knew, sourcing, screening, assessing, selecting qualified candidates in the limited timeframe they were given, only automated technology driven hiring process is the panacea.

Sally’s recruitment journey with AI driven Zoho Recruit

1. Configure personal and company settings –  Sally can add her brand info and user roles with customized access permission for individual employees.
2. Migrate your data – Sally is using an ATS for the first time, so she imports data from her spreadsheets to better manage her candidate database and client contact information.
3. Job openings – Sally can add information about the job opportunities her clients have specified, assigning them to recruiters from her team. The team then pushes the job requisitions on multiple job boards and her vendor portals.
4. Vendor portal – Sally is associated with various third-party recruiters, and some clients also have internal team leads who would like to refer candidates. To manage job orders better, she creates a vendor portal where they can all submit their best-matching candidates and stay updated on their status throughout the hiring process.
5. Client portal and Contacts module – Sally’s clients create new job openings, send feedback for the candidates submitted, and make interview decisions. This shortens the feedback loop after candidate interviews and allows Sally to cater to multiple clients and candidates at the same time.
6. Interviews and Assessment module – Once the client shortlists candidates, Sally can schedule interviews depending on the stage they are in the process. This can vary from video interviews, live interviews, behavioral or cognitive assessments, and much more. With automation, she saves time when scheduling interviews by eliminating redundant tasks, coordinating client schedules, and gathering post-interview feedback.
7. Workflows – Sally then sets up a workflow to send customized emails to the candidates hired.

Meet Mark

Mark runs a staffing agency in Belgium. Mark adopted Zoho Recruit as his present ATS does not cater to the language diversity he needs and it also lacks essential customizable features. Not to mention that up until now the team had been doing several daily tasks that feel repetitive, like manually searching for candidates, sorting through stacks of resumes from multiple job boards, and making calls or sending emails to set up screenings with candidates—all for just one open role! Mark is aware that in today’s candidate market, even 24 hours can make the difference between landing or losing a top candidate.

Here is how Mark set up his ecosystem.

1. Configure personal and company settings – Mark adds his brand info and changes his preferred regional language to French on the ATS while customizing user roles and access permissions for individual users.
2. Migrate data – Mark is migrating from another ATS to Zoho Recruit so he imports data from his previous ATS workspace.
3. Job openings – Once Mark imports the data, as per his client requirements he adds information about the job opportunities and assigns them to recruiters from his team.
4. Resume management – All the resumes Mark and his team received from various job board integrations, social media, and their careers site go through a resume parser mapping powered by AI, helps them to standardize and align the parsed resume structure to a customized form, for a more seamless import of candidate profiles.
5. Zia – Mark uses Zia once the candidate’s resume is parsed to generate a Match Score to see how good of a fit they might be for the job. Zia, Zoho Recruit’s AI Assistant, uses the skillset associated with the job to assess its requirements before fetching a list of candidates with matching skills and generating match scores.
6. Candidate portal  – Mark provides candidates with a portal to apply, track their application, and receive prompt updates to improve candidate experience and strengthen his employer brand.
7. Analytics and dashboards – The Advanced Recruit Analytics, powered by Zoho Analytics, helps Mark analyze Recruit data and create insightful business intelligence reports and live dashboards. With this integration, Mark’s recruitment process can be optimized and adjusted based on concrete data instead of hunches. Resume Parser Mapping powered by AI and proprietary algorithms helps you standardize and align the parsed resume structure to the form supported by your organization.

Wrap up

The needs and requirements of every client of a staffing agency cannot be presumed to be exactly alike. Therefore, designing a robust, user-friendly, and centralized ecosystem will optimize the recruiting process, regardless of transitioning from traditional hiring system or migrating from existing ATS. Zoho Recruit shortens your time-to-hire, while still allowing you to find the right candidates for every role. Sally and Mark though had different requirements, yet were able to customize Zoho Recruit to streamline their recruitment marketing and hiring process. By leveraging recruitment automation and AI, Sally’s and Mark’s recruiting team has more time to target potential clients and candidates.

With multiple integrations under one umbrella, Recruit helps to establish a strong online presence. It also helps you better manage your relationships with clients and vendors alike. In fact, the tools and integrations will improve efficiency in sourcing, screening, hiring, and onboarding candidates without sacrificing the quality of your hires.