5 Incredibly Useful FREE Recruitment Tools And Resources
At Beamery, we understand the importance of recruiter efficiency. The job of a talent acquisition team encompasses everything from sourcing and recruiting to hiring and onboarding. Having the tools to work ‘smarter not harder’ can really help lighten the load for recruiters and help them avoid burnout.
There are a number of free recruiting tools out there that can really help recruiters manage their workload and be better at their jobs overall — each with its own unique purpose and use case.
Here are five useful (and free) recruiting tools that we recommend, which you can start using right away.
ContactOut
This tool is a secret weapon for finding the personal email address or phone number for the candidates you’re sourcing. In recruiting, sometimes finding the correct contact information is half the battle… and that’s where ContactOut comes in.
It’s a browser extension that searches the web for a candidate’s personal contact information when you land on their LinkedIn profile. ContactOut uses an AI engine to automatically search and find personal email addresses, phone numbers and other social media profiles. It’s not guaranteed to find contact information for every single person on LinkedIn, but when it does find a person’s contact info, it is 99% accurate.
ContactOut is used by 76% of Fortune 500 companies. Try it for yourself here.
LinkedIn Salary
The idea of ‘salary transparency’ has gained a lot of momentum in recent years. Many candidates are no longer shy about sharing their salary information with others, and they are more likely than ever to know what they’re worth (and reject offers that come in below their desired salary).
LinkedIn Salary is a free tool that allows both candidates and recruiters to be well informed about just how much their skills, experience and education are worth in today’s marketplace.
This can come in handy for recruiters, because they can go into a conversation with a candidate with a really good idea of how much a candidate should be making, and what they might be expecting in a job offer.
The ‘salary transparency’ discussion is not going away any time soon. And more and more websites like Glassdoor are allowing candidates to search average salaries by industry and job title.
With more informed candidates, recruiters need to do their due diligence as well and take salary into account when writing up job specs.
You can start using LinkedIn Salary here.
The Gender Decoder
There are a lot of tools in the market that use sophisticated AI models to identify and reduce bias in recruiting and hiring. But if you aren’t ready to make an investment like that yet, there is a free tool called The Gender Decoder that can help get started.
The Gender Decoder allows you to copy and paste the text of a job advertisement into their website, and it runs it against a list of “masculine-coded” and “feminine-coded” coded words, which have been identified through research.
If any of these words exist in your job ad, The Gender Decoder will flag it and you can easily make changes to eliminate those words from your ad copy.
The research shows that women feel that job adverts with masculine-coded language are less appealing, and men also feel that jobs ads with feminine-coded words are slightly less appealing, but it has less of an effect on men in general in the job market.
As a recruiter, it’s important to make sure that you are using inclusive language in your job advertisements, and this tool is a really quick and simple way to identify those “gendered” words that should be avoided.
Try out the Gender Decoder here.
Briskine
Recruiters have unique sets of skills that make them great at their jobs, but copywriting isn’t necessarily a skill they all have.
Briskine (formerly known as Gorgias Templates) is a Chrome extension that allows recruiters to write emails better and faster in Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger.
This free tool has some really useful features to help recruiters be much more efficient with their email writing. Briskine has tons of keyboard shortcuts that help lighten the workload when it comes to emailing or LinkedIn messaging candidates.
For example, instead of typing out “kind regards”, with Briskine, you can simply type “kr + TAB”, and it will insert “kind regards” into your email or message sign off.
Little time savers like this may only save you seconds individually, but over the course of a full workday or work week, the time really adds up and it leads to more efficient recruiters, and better email outreach.
Start using Briskine for Chrome here.
Recruit’em
LinkedIn is an amazing database for recruiters, but there’s so much information to sift through and can be overwhelming (not to mention it often takes a long time to find what you’re looking for).
Recruit’em is a free X-ray search tool that helps narrow down your LinkedIn searches by allowing you to put in your specific criteria ahead of time. And it will show you only the results that match your selected criteria. You can tell the tool to search by country, specific location, keywords (to include or exclude), job title, education and current employer.
This is a huge timesaver for talent teams who source and recruit on LinkedIn. It’s a really quick way to build a shortlist of candidates (for free).
Each of the tools mentioned in this article can help your talent acquisition team by either freeing up time in their day to connect with more candidates, or by helping improve the quality of their job ads or direct messages to candidates.
While these tools are certainly helpful, free tools will only get you so far. If you’re looking for something more robust, you can learn more about Beamery’s AI-driven Talent Lifecycle Management solution.