Recruitment Management System: Small Business Guide
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Charlette has over 10 years of experience in accounting and finance and 2 years of partnering with HR leaders on freelance projects. She uses this extensive experience to answer your questions about payroll.
Jennifer Soper is an HR Specialist and staff writer for Fit Small Business, with over 15 years of experience in accounting, payroll, and human resources.
This article is part of a larger series on Hiring.
A recruitment management system (RMS) is a human resources tool or set of tools used to manage the process of recruiting, interviewing, and hiring new employees. Managing your recruitment process sounds simple enough but it requires constant monitoring and adjustments and compliance with employment laws to ensure it is fair and non-discriminatory. The right RMS can automate your process, from finding and engaging candidates to interviewing and making offers, reducing the load on you or your team and resulting in higher-quality hires.
ZipRecruiter provides small businesses with an end-to-end recruitment management system. It can post jobs on numerous job boards and set up and manage your entire recruitment and selection process online in one portal, creating a seamless and efficient experience for both you and your applicants.
How an RMS Fits Into Your Recruitment & Selection Process
The type of recruitment management system you should use depends on how much hiring you plan to do and how often you plan to do it. A free job board and applicant tracking spreadsheet may be more appropriate for small businesses that are only hiring a couple of employees per year, whereas complete recruitment software works better for companies that are scaling rapidly.
ATS vs RMS: An applicant tracking system (ATS) is similar to an RMS. The goal of an ATS is to help you track where your candidates are in the hiring process. An RMS covers that in addition to recruitment analytics, reporting, interview scheduling, onboarding, and more.
Let’s take a look at how an RMS works in the different steps of your recruitment process.
Posting Jobs
Posting jobs is tedious. To reach the maximum number of potential candidates, you need to post your open job on at least several of the major job boards. Doing this one by one will take valuable time and probably result in not posting on every job board, which could reduce the number of candidates who see your open job. Unless you work in an industry that utilizes an industry-specific job board, you’re more likely to attract the best candidates if you make your job posting visible in multiple places.
A recruitment management system like ZipRecruiter will automatically post your open job to numerous job boards at once. Additionally, it will allow you to create a company page where you can direct potential candidates to learn more about your company and see all of your open positions.
A good RMS will also allow you to send recruiting emails to candidates who match the qualifications found in your job description and compile all of your candidates so you don’t have to bounce between multiple sites.
Employment Application
Even if you do not have a company job application form, there is still certain information you need to collect during the application process. Through your RMS, you can collect relevant information about every job candidate, including:
- Full name
- Complete address
- Phone and email
- Previous employment history
During this stage of the candidate’s application, you can also ask specific questions. Be careful with some questions as asking certain questions about a candidate’s background or criminal history can be illegal, depending on the state in which your company operates or where the candidate lives. Not only can an RMS help you build the application process, but it can also alert you if a question you want to ask could be illegal.
Applicant Screening
When recruiting manually, you would need to review each candidate’s resume individually. You’ll need to match it to the job description and ensure they tick off the boxes you need for the role. This is a time-consuming process.
An RMS does this matching automatically. Your system will screen candidates for you, only notifying you of those that match your open job best. This reduces the time you have to spend screening candidates and ensures that the candidates you review are of higher quality.
Interview Scheduling
Once your RMS narrows down your candidate pool for you, you need to review the highest-quality candidates. As you look through their resumes and applications, you may want to schedule interviews with some of them.
Some recruitment software is capable of scheduling interviews for you. When you want to interview a candidate, you can select several dates and times that work for you and the system will offer those slots to the candidate. When the candidate selects one of those options, your RMS automatically books that time on your calendar, eliminating the back-and-forth required to set up an interview manually. If you’re interviewing multiple candidates, this is a massive time saver.
Bottom Line
A strong recruitment and selection process is key to successful hiring for any small business, particularly in this competitive environment. Having the right recruitment management system such as ZipRecruiter, speeds up your hiring process and reduces the manual labor you have put in for each new open position. An RMS will also help your company remain legally compliant with confusing and complex employment laws.
