Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Geniuses!

This week’s episode is all about the the secondary tools I’d recommend adding to your stack if you have the budget.

I left out the obvious calendar apps and really focused on workflow optimization.

But before we get into it I just wanted to say how thankful I am to have you all apart of this journey. It’s been a long ride and as we come up on our 1st year, I’m proud of the connections I’ve made and the work I’ve done with all of you.

Has it been perfect? No. But thats why you are all so special to me. You stuck through it, asked questions, and were active participants.

In doing so you’ve been the ones teaching me in so many ways.

Thank you!

Automation Tools For Your 2024 Recruiting Tech Stack

Alright you’ve been running a full desk recruitment strategy for a few years now. You’ve found success but you’re finding difficulty scaling your operations as you continue to grow.

This is where automation software can be extremely useful.

Please keep in mind, these are the tools you should go after when you have revenue to invest. These aren’t mandatory and are more nice to haves. 

I’m not going to go into the ones I mentioned in the Must Have Tools.

These tools will only work if your process and stack is already dialed. Making these subtle tweaks to your stack will help delegate the repetitive tasks to software and put your prospecting on auto pilot.

If you’re a control freak, this may be hard for you but you need to learn when to delegate to software. But keep in mind this is something to worry about eventually not something built in out of the gates.

To start the automation journey you need to map out your process in detail and use something like Mindmeister or Figma to create a flowchart. Here’s an example of the one we built for Atalent.

Then find the steps that are repeated most frequently.

Then the ones that have the least amount of consequence for quality errors.

Think job descriptions, some nurture campaigns and follow ups, research, scraping, trigger events (status changes, invoicing, new jobs, start dates etc) and chatbots. These things are low risk automations that can be time consuming in your daily and I always start here.

You can then move up the risk ladder depending on your tolerance and function of automation.

General Automations

Zapier is a tool that connects your apps together to automate trigger based tasks. This tool can help save you time from doing mindless tasks and keep you focused on building pipeline.

One of the best things about Zapier is it integrates with almost every tool on the market. Hubspot, Slack, Click up, Asana, Dropbox you name it, they’re connectable.

For example, Zapier can add inbound leads into a spreadsheet without needing to click a single button. The team is even building out AI chatbots to power your website. How great is that?

On the other hand, PhantomBusters is better for micro tasks like sending invites to your company page. The app is a little limited in functionality and there is some overlap with other linkedin automation tools.

They both offer free trials so you can try them out risk free and see which one suits your needs.

If you want to move fast, Zapier and Phantombusters are both magical tools to get every last drop out of your tech stack.

If you’re a Solopreneur, you’re going to need some help so you can spend your time on more important tasks.

Choose the level of automation that fits your style and works for you..

No More Job Board BD

It’s 2023 and there is absolutely no reason you should be spending hours on the job boards to identify new opportunities for your candidates.

There is a better way.

Jobleads.io delivers fresh curated job lists to your inbox. These jobs are recent and posted within 30 minutes. They are then screened by our AI to ensure they fit within the scope of your ICP. And can either be sent as is or enriched with contact data. If you don’t want to think about it, they also have a done for you service that will do the outreach for you.

I’m personally not a fan of the DFY outreach for lifestyle and boutique agencies, as you won’t have the scale needed. However, if you run an agency and want to feed your recruiters with these types of leads, this could be a great option. They can focus on the deeply personalized 1:1 interaction while the org works on the job postings at the high level.

No more VAs getting the job leads wrong and managing their workflow.

No more costly subscriptions to web scraping tools.

No more late nights and early mornings wasted.

Check them out!

LinkedIn

This is how you’re going to rev up LinkedIn as your candidate machine.  Automating your LinkedIn will help you farm leads with little to no upfront work. Don’t confuse this with NO WORK!

These tools are going to depend on where you’re at in your recruitment journey. But here’s the foundational work we do to start:

1. Build your target audience of candidates and clients

2. Segment that list based on specific observations and indicators

3. Tailor your campaigns around how you would actually behave on LI.
   

An important rule of thumb for LinkedIn outreach is to be a human. Ditch the pitch! Connect with genuine curiosity and a place of giving. Not in the sense of I have the perfect job or a candidate. Instead, from a place of Problem Prompting vs Product Pushing.

Problem Prompting is basically taking the observation you made, create a hypothesis of an issue they may have, and inquiring.

Jen Allen-Knuth lays it out really well in this post.

More than anything, don’t make the mistake that will get you banned from LI or kill your reputation. Limit your connections to 100 per week, be intentional about who you are looking to engage, what you observed and why they should connect with you.

Now I’m about to let you in on a little secret… OctopusCRM & Dripify are two of the biggest names in the LinkedIn automation space. And they’re owned by the same company. 

Yet the pricing and available features are wildly different. 

OctopusCRM is a simple but intuitive tool to build campaigns on LinkedIn. If you’re just beginning to explore automation this is a great place to play around and learn.

On the other hand, Dripify is more nuanced for the meticulous sequence builders with IFTTT playbooks. It’s putting your LinkedIn on steroids and requires a bit more strategy.

Just keep in mind OctopusCRM’s most expensive plan at $24 a month is still cheaper than Dripify’s cheapest plan at $39 a month for less features.

An added bonus, OctopusCrm and Dripify are both compatible with sales navigator.

For posting and engagement, I’m still a big fan of Tapilo. Mainly for the scrapping ability and finding relevant content features.

Tapilo is a Lempire product so works best with Lemlist. But it can easily be used with my suggested sales navigator and Apollo stack.

Supercharge your Meetings

What was that note about their stack? What was the biggest pain they said they were trying to solve? Who was that candidate they said they liked?

All of us have been there after a call. Taking notes while trying to be present in a sales call is a terrible combo. You just miss things.

There are plenty of video call AI notetakers so lets explore.

If you have an Apollo plan, they have a tool called Conversations that is a part of their suite. It gives an outline of the meeting, pain points, and next steps.

If you don’t have Apollo and want a low cost option with some pretty good AI, take a look at Fireflies.ai and Otter.ai. Both fantastic tools.

However, if you want one that can be a major value add to your recruiting game specifically, check out Metaview. 

It's sort of like Gong for recruiters. Metaview can streamline the screening process by highlighting parts of the interview and sharing it directly with hiring managers.

Metaview will give you an outline of the call and give you the opportunity to make edits. If you own the license you don’t even need to be in the meeting room either you can task Metaview to appear on the interviewer side.

If you like it, you can bring on more services such as interview coaching. The AI integrates with scorecards, will tell you if you skipped questions and ask you to get clarification if you didn’t dig deep enough. 

You can also send snippets of the conversation you had to get clarity on if that is what the HM is looking for. Imagine if you are able to take whole steps out of the hiring process because every interview is neatly recorded and bookmarked for all stakeholders to reference.

Another added benefit is Metaview integrates with other apps pretty well. The notes after the call can be directly uploaded to your ATS or CRM.

Closing Thoughts

The adventure of optimizing your recruitment journey never truly ends. There will always be a new shiny tool out there.

With every tool now riding the coattails of AI, it can be very tempting to pull away from the human to human tasks… Don’t overdo it. This is your differentiator in a robotic world.

If you are just beginning the automation journey, start small and build up. Get each automation working great and consistently before you start adding something else. You can get automation pros to come in and help build these things out which I’d also recommend, but only after you have a rocking proven process.

While these tools are impressive, remember this: You don’t need them to be successful because at the end of the day tools are useless without a skilled recruiter like yourself.

Before you go, read that last line again and then one more time. Until next time!