How Slack helps you recruit smarter

Candidates in today’s market expect a slick, seamless recruiting experience. This sets the tone for employee experience as well as building your employer brand. After all, 64% of job seekers say a poor candidate experience would make them less likely to purchase goods and services from that employer.

With the right recruiting process, you can secure top talent ahead of competitors, even in a tight job market. In fact, 74% of recruiters believe hiring will become more competitive this year.

Top-notch recruiting can be time-consuming and expensive. But if it’s managed well, you can save precious resources and free up time to focus on other strategic projects instead of tactical firefighting.

How Slack can help boost your recruiting efforts

Using Slack for recruiting fixes many of these problems before they happen, so you can:

• Gather stakeholders, share information, align around decisions and manage feedback
• Reduce the need for internal meetings, so everything happens faster
• Coordinate interview logistics far better than you can with phone calls or email
• Keep candidates in the loop, offer them a great recruiting experience and build your employer brand
• Reach the job-offer stage sooner, so you snap up that ideal candidate before your rivals do

Here are five ways you can recruit smarter with the help of Slack.

1. Create a channel dedicated to your role

Working in Slack gives you the ability to organize different projects or tasks into channels, so you can keep track of what’s relevant—and exclude what isn’t. Ultimately, it’ll help you shorten the hiring process.

Create a private channel in Slack dedicated to each position you want to fill, and give it a name like #hiring-[job title]. Creating a private channel will allow you to have discreet conversations about the applicant-tracking process while allowing hiring managers and talent management to converse freely.

Pin the job listing to your channel and add the lead recruiter and deadlines to the channel purpose. Invite everyone who needs to be involved to the channel. That can include external recruiters, if you want—but keep it secure and apply restrictions for guest access.

Your position channel will allow you to:

• Align on and finalize job requirements
• Assign tasks and set reminders
• Share information about the position and the recruiting strategy, including interview notes and feedback
• Share candidate sourcing lists and promising candidates
• Easily manage internal referrals
• Collate external referrals from channels like LinkedIn
• Easily pull in the right people, with context, for sensitive discussions about individual candidates
• Create an audit trail for the hire with no extra effort

 

 

2. Find important info faster and keep candidates in the loop

Recruitment can generate many documents, in many different formats and locations—job specs, ads, résumés, application letters, evaluation sheets and more. So it can be hard to pinpoint the document you need at the moment you need it.

Slack gives you the ability to collect vital documents together in one place. You can pin important documents or posts to your channel, and you’ll never lose them again.

Additionally, candidates hate being left hanging with little to no communication about where they stand in the interview process. With quick access to information, you can make sure you keep them in the loop.

Slack also makes it easy to utilize integrations with job posting and applicant-tracking apps, such as Greenhouse, to help you manage and monitor the whole process.

 

 

3. Coordinate interviews and feedback

Scheduling a group interview shouldn’t be harder than agreeing on an international peace treaty. But it sometimes feels that way. Instead of playing endless “calendar Tetris” with multiple interviewers, use your channel to get quick agreement on dates and times.

Once the schedule is set, use Slack’s /remind feature to remind everyone of upcoming events—interviews, feedback or other action items. When the time comes, Slackbot will give them a nudge.

You can also use specialized recruiting apps that integrate with Slack, such as Lever. Lever can push interview reminders to Slack, complete with venue, time, candidate details and more.

Later on, Lever can prompt interviewers to submit their feedback—both a quick score for the candidate, and more in-depth written feedback.

 

 

4. Get recruitment updates and review job offers in Slack

App integrations let you bring together multiple apps in Slack, so you spend less time switching between native desktop applications or open tabs on a browser and more time being productive.

With Greenhouse’s Slack integration, you can configure recruiting notifications to be sent directly to users or a specific Slack channel. Those notifications include approvals, new candidates, new referrals, agency submissions and scorecards due. This reduces clutter in your inbox, because Greenhouse uses email for notifications otherwise.

You can also use Greenhouse to approve or reject job offers right in Slack.

 

 

5. Track candidates right through to hiring

A single candidate journey can take many twists and turns, so it pays to keep track at every stage. One way to do this is with a candidate-specific channel during the interview stage, you can call it interview-[candidate name]. Create one for each person you’re interviewing, and make sure it’s private to protect the candidate’s privacy.

Pin the candidate’s résumé to the top of the channel. Then use your candidate channel to schedule his or her onsite interview and debrief afterward.

You can also use candidate-facing channels to manage aptitude tests, share the results with the candidate or provide feedback on his or her performance.  

And don’t forget the final stages of the recruitment process, where the handover between recruiting and onboarding processes take place. Little touches such as introducing the successful candidate to an all-company or team-specific channel can make a big difference and have them feeling at home in no time.

 

Level up your recruiting process with Slack

A better recruiting process leads to better outcomes. It helps you manage end-to-end recruitment processes from a central hub, bring stakeholders together and make information easily available for better decision making. Ultimately, it helps you grow your workforce the right way.  

Check out all the apps for recruiting in the Slack App Directory, or get in touch to learn more about how Slack can help you sharpen up your recruiting and win the race for top talent.