Covid-19 forced us to start working from our homes like never before. As remote offices grew, hiring candidates online started becoming the norm.

According to a survey by Timedoctor, 86% of companies said that they hire people over video calls in 2020.

Hiring recruits can be very complicated. 

Without a plan, hiring managers have little to no chance of finding the right candidates. 

However, with a few strategies and tools, the online hiring process becomes easy and effective. 

Top 5 Online Recruiting Tools & Strategies to Hire Employees Online

Finding good candidates is not as simple as posting a job opening and waiting for your inbox to flood with applications. If you do not have a plan, you’ll end up overlooking the best candidates and hiring someone incompetent.

We have divided the article into two sections. The first half talks about recruitment strategies. In the second section, we talk about the best tools to facilitate online recruitment. Go through the strategies first to have a better understanding of how to incorporate the tools into your hiring strategy.   

Top 5 Online recruiting strategies

A solid hiring strategy is a groundwork for recruiting and interviewing talented individuals. Without a plan, you wouldn’t even know what you are looking for. If you don’t know what you want in a potential employee, how can you even start recruiting?

1. Build a social media presence

Approximately 54% of candidates look for jobs online. With the rise in information technology, that percentage will only go up from this point.

While some people rely on online job portals, others are discovering social media to be as effective in job search, if not more. The number of people tilting towards social media is increasing rapidly. 79% of job seekers have admitted to looking for jobs on social media.

A strong social media presence will benefit your company in many ways, finding talented people is just one of them. 

2. Promote employee giving programs

Employee giving programs are charitable initiatives taken up by organizations where their employees contribute to a social cause. The contribution need not be monetary all the time. Employees can also volunteer their time and effort for worthwhile social causes.

You might be wondering how this relates to hiring strategy. The answer lies in the changing landscape of social awareness. People are now aware enough to recognize which companies exploit society and which try to give something back. Among millennials especially, there is a strong tendency to align with socially aware companies.

Research more about employee giving programs to find out how they have a positive effect on the hiring process. 

3. Build a strong employer brand

What others think about your brand matters a lot when it comes to finding the right candidate. If you have a good reputation, more people will be interested to work for you. That also means you will have access to better candidates. A strong brand image is crucial for many aspects of business, including finding the right employees.

Apart from being a socially conscious brand, be known as a company that treats its employees well. Encourage your present employees to leave positive reviews on job portals. Highlight the perks and benefits that you offer to your employees. Once you get your brand image right, talent will automatically find its way to you. 

4. Create a talent pool

A talent pool is a database of all those people who have expressed interest in working for your company. It includes people who have backed out, been rejected, or have the potential to work with you in the future. A talent pool will make it easy for you to directly reach out to suitable candidates when you need to hire for new roles.

A talent pool is very important for cutting down on expenses and hassle when you need to find new candidates. Having a database at hand makes it very easy to browse through skills and interests when you need someone to work for you. 

5. Optimize keywords in your job posts

Search engine optimization is a basic element of content marketing. You can extend the same idea to job postings since the underlying principle is the same.

When people are looking for job openings, they will search with keywords. Optimizing these keywords will result in more people directly finding your post when they search online.

Keyword optimization is very different from stuffing your post with a lot of keywords. If done correctly, keyword optimization will help you reach more people. 

Top 5 Online recruiting tools

After you take care of your hiring strategies, it is time to pay attention to the tools that can make hiring easy. Since we are concerned with online hiring here, all tools in this list take care of some important aspects of the online recruitment process. Let’s find out what these tools are. 

1.Greenhouse Recruiting

If you want a one-stop solution for all your applicant tracking needs, Greenhouse recruiting’s software suite is ideal for you. With a bunch of customization and integration options, it will suit the needs of small businesses and enterprises alike. 

Features and pricing

• Create a seamless interview process with Greenhouse recruiting. You can customize interviews to make them more conversational. Create a complete interview plan with this software.
• Keep track of all applicants. Customize rejection letters stating exact reasons. Keep your interview process transparent to earn the trust of more candidates.
• Get in touch with a Greenhouse recruiting account executive to know more about customized plans and rates for your hiring process.

2. Linkedin

Including Linkedin in a list of top tools for hiring talent is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, many companies do not make the most of Linkedin’s huge subscriber base. 

Linkedin is the best platform to improve your brand image, find new candidates, and expand the reach of your company. 

Features and pricing

• Post job openings to reach millions of potential employees. Linkedin filters jobs according to search queries to match candidates with suitable jobs.
• Be a part of Linkedin communities to find a talented and skilled pool of job seekers.
• There is a free plan available as well as three paid plans — Premium Business, Premium Sales, and Premium Hiring. The paid plans start from $59.99 per month and goes up to $119.95 per month per user.

3. TestGorilla

TestGorilla is the best way to screen your candidates fairly and transparently. You can set up effective assessments to find the best candidate, or use one of their many pre-designed assessments. 

Features and pricing

• Create effective assessments easily and quickly. You can use TestGorilla’s set of online assessments or make your own. The test subjects cover everything from coding to English proficiency. With an assessment like testGorilla’s c# assessment test, you can easily figure out who has the competency levels you are looking for.
• Connect with candidates directly from TestGorilla, or integrate it with your ATS platform. The platform makes it very easy to connect with candidates and keep them in the loop.
• There is a free plan and three paid plans available — Pay as you go, which is priced at $25 per month or $300/year; Scale (available at $300 per month or $3600 per year) and Business, which is available at $2000 per month or $24000 per year. 

4. HireRight

Conducting a background check of a candidate is difficult and time-consuming. You would be better off using that time to do something more important. For all your background check requirements, HireRight is the only platform you need.

 Do not ignore the importance of background checks. They are an essential component of finding candidates that will not become an issue for your company in the future. 

Features and Pricing

• HireRight has over 100 screening services in 200+ countries. With HireRight, your screening needs are taken care of without any hassle.
• A global network of partners makes HireRight one of the best background check services. If you are hiring international candidates, this will prove to be very useful.

• The pricing ranges from $39.95 to $79.95 per month. 

5. SurveyMonkey

Candidate feedback is crucial in understanding how well you are performing as a hiring manager or interviewer. SurveyMonkey is among the best tools to use to conduct surveys. The platform can be used in different scenarios, candidate feedback being one of them. It is undoubtedly one of the best survey platforms out there.

 Features and pricing

• Choose questions from their extensive bank of questions. If you do not know what to ask your candidates, the question bank will give you both inspiration and direction.
• ‘Survey logic’ is a special feature of SurveyMonkey that customizes the experience for every person taking the survey based on their answers. It gives a human touch to otherwise mechanical surveys.

• The Business Plan (premium) is priced at $75 per user per month while the personal plan is priced at $99 per month. 

Conclusion

We understand with thousands of candidates looking for jobs, it can be very difficult to manage the hiring process, especially when doing it all online. 

Fortunately, a solid strategy and effective tools can make the process a lot easier. 

With our list of tools and strategies for online hiring, you can make this daunting task look easy.