5 Sales Tools For Simplified Recruitment

Building a recruitment plan, doing university outreach, searching tirelessly through LinkedIn for prospects ripe for job transition… the life of a recruiter can get tiresome. And as face-to-face chats become a thing of the past—giving way to email, LinkedIn messages, and Google Hangouts, I, for one, start to feel a bit like a salesperson.

And that’s not a bad thing; salespeople have a lot of really useful tools that become more applicable to our profession each day. From networking to prospecting to maintaining relationships with potentials as we court them along the pipeline to being hired, there’s a definitive overlap in goals and, for sales (which is, really, the bread and butter of any business), a lot of people go to a lot of trouble to make sure they have tools to do their jobs efficiently.

As a result, I’ve taken it upon myself to test out sales tools that I think might simplify recruiting, and here are five of my favorites.

5 Sales Tools for Simplified Recruitment

1. Rapportive: With Rapportive, you can find anyone’s email address. This sales tool, a Gmail plugin, is designed to display social information (think Facebook & Twitter handles) along with professional information (Title, Company, etc.) of anyone you’re emailing; the idea here is that you can use this info to personalize correspondence, set up meetings, etc. But about a year ago, Salesengine reported an ingenious hack: you can guess at email information (typically first name.lastname@business they work at.com) while using Rapportive, and, if they’re correct, the social data will display. Mind blown.

2. Yesware: Yesware lets you know when/if your email has been opened. For those of us who prefer reaching out to prospects via email, Yesware is a godsend. Knowing who’s opened your email (and when they did) offers insight on when and whether to follow up, and when to move along to the next recruit.

3. CircleBack: CircleBack uses artificial intelligence to keep your contact list automatically up-to-date. Ever experience the frustration of finding a perfect match for a prospect, and then they disappear, changing their email/phone number out of the blue? Of course you have. By adding them to CircleBack, you’ll get alerts as soon as the information changes and have access to their new contact info.

4. Streak: Streak makes it easy to keep track of recruits with its CRM style tool in your Gmail inbox. Because so much of our time spent working with recruits is about scheduling, Streak makes it super easy to keep track of everything, schedule follow-ups, etc. all without ever leaving Gmail. After installing Streak, you’ll simply create “boxes” for each prospect, and drop all of the surrounding communication in there. Then, you can add notes, details, a timeline and more, and can even share the boxes with colleagues.

5. SalesLoft Prospector: SalesLoft Prospector allows you to perform automated prospect searches across the internet. With SalesLoft Prospector, it’s simple to search across all of social and the web for potential recruits fitting very specific criteria. Simply enter your search terms, and Prospector goes to work looking for prospects who match. Then, you get a list, you can check them out on LinkedIn, and, if you like them, use Rapportive to find their email address and reach out!

While, ultimately, nothing’s better than a little elbow-grease and some face time, using tools to find potentials, keep in touch with them, and easily manage the lifecycle of your relationship can make some elements of your recruitment efforts much easier. After all, what’s better than enjoying the efficiency-driven fruits of the technology?

Did I miss anything? Any other favorite tools?