Top Talent Management Tools for 2020

Recruiting tools are necessary for today’s complex hiring environment.

It is almost impossible to recruit and manage talent in 2020 without using technology tools to streamline, assist, and manage the process. Tools allow your hiring staff to handle increasingly complex aspects of recruiting without bringing on more staff to help with the workload.

It is possible to automate your entire recruiting process if you wish to do so, but for most hiring teams, technology tools are the best way to take care of the mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming parts of the process. Tech tools can help you dedicate your time and effort to personalized communication and human touches that will connect with candidates and attract them to your organization.

While quality tools typically come with a cost, it may actually cost less to use technology than to pay another salary in order to get the work done. The most helpful talent management tools share most or all of the following characteristics:

• Integration capability: When you choose technology tools that integrate well with tools you already have in place, you can multiply the effectiveness of all the tools and streamline your processes. Social media, email, job boards, and third-party staffing platforms are just some of the secondary tools with which your main tool should be able to work to streamline the recruiting process and give you a clear picture of your talent pool.
• Marketing capability: A tool that contains email automation, job ads publishing, video communication, candidate relationship management (CRM), and in-app messaging will give you the capability you need to run your recruiting like a sales or marketing opportunity, which can be effective. These processes highlight the commonality between attracting candidates and attracting customers.
• Shortlisting capability: Today’s recruiting involves an ever-increasing number of different leads and sources, which makes it a huge task to create a shortlist. Luckily, there are now tools that can complete this task for you, making it a breeze to select the right people to interview and pursue.
• Robust analytics: If you don’t evaluate each aspect of your recruiting process, you won’t know what’s working and where you could improve. Analytics-based tools can give you actionable insights that will help you optimize your talent management processes to stay competitive.

Here are a dozen of the top talent management tools for 2020, along with a quick look at how they measure up to the above-described criteria.

1. Jobvite: Jobvite is used by many large companies and offers integration with other HR systems and tools, recruitment branding, resume screening and tracking, social media recruiting, and analytics with insight into hiring performance. Furthermore, Jobvite focuses on candidate experience for a lower rate of drop-offs during the hiring process.
2. Ascendify: Ascendify uses predictive analytics to learn from your existing recruiting process and make improvements over time. The tool can even be used to create a career path for internal recruiting and succession planning. It also has a built-in diversity compliance tool to make it easy to meet diversity goals almost automatically.
3. Workday Recruiting:  Besides containing an end-to-end recruiting platform with all of the capabilities to automate recruiting, Workday Recruiting has an exceptionally strong referral management element for larger companies that want to beef up their referral program or already have one that is managed manually. Pan-organization endorsement, referral leaderboards, and recommendation gathering can help companies make the most of internal recruitment and referrals. This tool will work best for larger companies rather than small businesses.
4. ADP Workforce Now® Recruitment: This tool can automate candidate screening, post jobs just about everywhere, and provide analytics for time-to-hire and other recruiting metrics. Companies that use ADP for HR and payroll functions will have the best integration with this tool, but it can integrate with other systems as well. While ADP is capable of handling talent management for even the largest companies, it also works with many small businesses and can be a full-service tool for any size company.
5. SmartRecruiters: This tool has SmartAssistant, an AI engine that guides hiring teams through the recruiting process, from applicant screening to selection and engagement. AI scores candidates and matches them with a given job, even sharing other roles for talented applicants that aren’t a match for the original job. The tool is also mobile-enabled, which gives it portability and accessibility anywhere and at any time.
6. iCIMS Recruit: This tool is actually a well-rounded suite of options from which you can choose depending on your needs. Together, they make a complete recruiting solution and integrate with Google and social media for better searches in a variety of industries. About 20 percent of the Fortune 100 use iCIMS for their recruiting, so it has a very good reputation in recruiting software and tools. 
7. Zoho Recruit: If you are a fast-growing business that needs to inject scalability into your recruiting process, Zoho Recruit may be the best tool for you. In addition to prescreening assessments, resume management, and e-signature verification, this tool also integrates with other Zoho solutions that can help with all your HR and hiring needs. There’s something in this tool for every step of the recruiting process, and it can be customized to your exact needs whether you’re a tiny startup or a burgeoning mid-size business looking to grow even more.
8. LinkedIn Talent: The main advantage of LinkedIn Talent is access to a huge social platform for job seekers. Other tools may also integrate with LinkedIn, but this tool is part of the platform and therefore has a unique ease-of-use that others don’t. The search feature lets you find others like an ideal candidate you identify, and you can contact potentials through LinkedIn’s own messaging system. You can also build a custom talent pipeline for future needs. You won’t need to learn a new system if you already use LinkedIn professionally–and who doesn’t?
9. IBM Kenexa BrassRing: This tool uses behavior marketing to attract talent and is proactive in its engagement. It has everything you need to automate your recruiting, including talent pool access, assessments, and some of the best IBM analytics in the world. As it is cloud-based, it can be easily and securely accessed on any device. This tool also helps you connect with new hires and provides easy onboarding to get them up and running quickly and easily.
10. JazzHR: JazzHR is known for its integrations with other tools, which make it easy to use and a good fit when you already have existing systems in place that you don’t want to change. Other key features include offer management and third party software for background checks, making it easy to recruit and hire from beginning to end. Custom reporting enables recruitment to be data-driven in ways that are helpful to your organization and easy to understand.
11. happierHire by happierWork: This tool is specifically for small businesses and offers the simplicity that is often needed when a few people wear many hats. Despite the simplicity, it has many helpful features like an auto-extraction algorithm to help sort and screen resumes and a happierBot that will keep track of it all for you. Optional add-ons let you control the price and get just what you need, nothing more and nothing less.
12. BambooHR: Another tool that works well for small businesses is BambooHR, which includes a mobile app and boasts exceptional ease of use. This tool aims to make the candidate experience smooth and easy, and it doesn’t really get any harder on the user end. Being able to schedule communications with candidates and new hires makes something that can be a time-consuming chore much easier.

Finding the Perfect Fit for Your Organization

Many of these tools share key features like talent sourcing, candidate screening, and analytics. While there are many tools from which to choose, careful consideration can reveal the tool or set of tools that will work best for your organization’s unique needs.

Talent management has become complex and multi-faceted, but it’s important to be intentional about your talent management process if you want to bring the best possible talent to your organization. While technology tools can help to automate one or more parts of the process, it’s also important to have partners as you navigate the complexities of recruiting and hiring.

Narish International works with organizations on a daily basis to help them analyze their hiring and recruiting needs and then meet them with a deeper level of understanding, both of their organization and of themselves.

Let us help you use our expertise to build higher-performing teams.