There is a fight for talent in all industries. Automation can help recruiters streamline their workflow and source more candidates and opportunities with less manual work involved.
In this guide, we’ll look at some of the top recruitment automation tools for client acquisition and candidate acquisition.
We’ll highlight the key features that will help you improve your sourcing, and save you hours every month.
How Do You Automate The Recruitment Process?
All the different recruitment steps, from cold outreach and talent search to shortlisting candidates and onboarding, can be automated.
Today, you no longer need to rely on increasing the hours you work every week if you want to scale up the number of candidates you’re reaching out to or companies you’re pitching your services to.
You can begin this process by automating one step at a time. For instance, you can use an automation tool to assess applications to narrow down the pool of candidates in half the time that it would take to do manually. Or you could integrate the software in your company system to automate repetitive tasks such as sending an interview invite.
Why Use Recruitment Automation Tools?
Recruitment automation software offers many benefits, which include:
Speed up the recruitment process.
Reduce the amount of repetitive work involved.
Improve the efficiency and accuracy of the process.
Identify qualified candidates to reach out to.
Enable a more holistic and transparent hiring process.
Streamline the application sharing between departments and coordination between multiple recruiters.
Depending on the tool, the benefits will differ. To help you find the best for your needs, we’ve broken the list up into different categories.
Best Recruitment Outreach Tools
All recruiters know how crucial cold outreach is to keep the talent pipeline full. You can gather a qualified prospect list from platforms like LinkedIn, then, send them a personalized cold email or LinkedIn message to pique their interest in the role and company you’re hiring for.
Here are some of the best tools to reach out to candidates or hiring managers:
1. QuickMail
Send personalized cold emails and follow-ups at scale.
1. Send Personalized Cold Emails at Scale
Personalization is vital when you’re reaching out to candidates or anyone inside a company that you’re pitching your recruitment services to. Candidates want to know you’ve done your research and aren’t going to waste their time.
QuickMail lets you personalize every email using attributes, like:
First and last names
Company names
Job titles
Custom sentences for every recipient
Your candidates won’t feel like they’ve been added to a bulk email list, and instead, will feel like they’re being personally reached out to for a one-to-one conversation.
2. Automatically Send Reminders and Follow-Ups
The candidates you’re pitching to know they’re in demand, and that means you won’t always get a reply to your first outreach email.
With QuickMail, you can automatically follow up with top candidates until they reply.
Considering over half of the replies to cold emails come from a follow-up, it’s a simple but powerful way to boost your reply rate.
3. Always Land in Your Recipient’s Primary Inbox
Deliverability is a key part of cold outreach success. If you get caught by the spam filter or promotions folder, you’re going to see significantly fewer replies.
QuickMail's native integration with MailFlow, (a free tool that improves your email deliverability) will help show Gmail and Outlook (and other ESPs) that your email account is a trustworthy sender by generating real engagement and removing emails from the spam folder if they land there.
If you ever have problems, you can identify them in MailFlow's deliverability report, and make changes to your strategy accordingly.
If you’re working as part of a larger team, you can leverage QuickMail’s inbox rotation and send emails to prospects from different accounts without logging in and out all the time. You’ll keep the sending volume low from each account and be able to track your whole team’s email campaign performance from one dashboard.
Pricing: Plans from $49/month.
Best Features:
Automate your candidate outreach and follow-ups.
Upload contacts directly from a CSV.
Team collaboration features by default.
Native integration with MailFlow to make sure your emails land in the primary inbox
Check out the recruiter's playbook to learn more leveraging the power of QuickMail to automate recruiting.
2. Salesloop
Automate connection requests and candidate outreach messages on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is where you probably spend most of your candidate prospecting time.
Salesloop lets you build prospect lists using keyword searches and filters for location, previous work experience, and skills. You can then send personalized LinkedIn messages to the entire candidate list you’ve built, right in LinkedIn.
To avoid your account being restricted, Salesloop can add a delay between messages, and you can set daily message limits to avoid getting a penalty from LinkedIn.
When you’re using a tool like this, make sure to have a paid Sales Navigator account to reduce the chances of your account being restricted.
Pricing: Plans start from $49/month.
Best features:
Quickly creates and narrows a list of candidates for outreach.
Automatically remove candidates from sequences when they reply.
Keep sending messages even if you close your computer or browser.
3. Salesflow
Offers easy scheduling of LinkedIn outreach messages and generates reports so you can analyze performance.
Similar to Salesloop, Salesflow is a LinkedIn automation tool designed to automate your LinkedIn outreach. You can automatically personalize the messages and set up a sequence of follow-up messages to people that don’t reply.
It also integrates with your CRM so you can efficiently organize the leads in groups according to priority. It also shows you data on which message templates are getting the most responses, so it’s ideal if you have ideas you want to A/B test.
Pricing: Starts from $89/month
Best Features:
Unlimited follow-up messages.
Customizable LinkedIn inbox for better organization.
Manage multiple LinkedIn accounts under the same user.
Recruiterflow
Recruiterflow is a comprehensive recruitment software designed to streamline the hiring process.
Recruiterflow combines the power of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to manage both candidates and clients efficiently.
With its intuitive interface, Recruiterflow allows you to post job openings to multiple job boards with a single click. It also provides advanced candidate sourcing tools, enabling you to find the best talent using a variety of filters like location, skills, and experience.
One of the standout features is its automated communication system. You can set up personalized email sequences and schedule follow-up emails, ensuring consistent engagement with both candidates and clients. Recruiterflow's reporting and analytics tools give you insights into your hiring process, helping you identify areas for improvement. It also integrates seamlessly with various third-party applications like LinkedIn, providing a smooth workflow.
Pricing: Recruiterflow offers a free trial, and its plans start from $99/month/user.
Best features:
Easy job posting to multiple platforms.
Advanced candidate sourcing and filtering.
Comprehensive reporting and analytics.
Bulk personalized email capabilities.
Robust CRM for client management.
Best Candidate Email Finder and Verification Tools
Just like automating cold outreach can save your time and resources, using tools to find and verify emails automatically saves time. These tools will usually scrape emails available on the web and list them in one place. The accuracy is generally quite good, but always make sure to verify them before using them in any outreach.
1. Hiretual
A Chrome extension that finds email addresses along with data on work experience and seniority level.
Hiretual is an AI sourcing assistant that searches all major platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, GitHub, and more to find email addresses for candidates you want to reach out to. You can apply filters to create your ideal candidate persona, and Hiretual will then scan profiles for people matching your candidate criteria.
This recruitment automation tool will arrange your prospect list based on how good of a match they are for your role, so you can prioritize your outreach and send messages to the best candidates first.
Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start from $49/month.
Best Features:
The more specific you are with filters, the better candidates you can find for your talent pipeline.
The search insights feature offers valuable data on the candidates in addition to their emails.
2. ContactOut
Chrome extension that lets you find and verify candidate emails.
Contact Out can help you find professional and personal emails based on your desired candidate criterion. It also has a built-in email verification system that boasts up to 99% accuracy. ContactOut sources email addresses first-hand from LinkedIn and GitHub along with some other platforms, and they rely on their own email database rather than third parties.
It has one of the largest email databases out there, with over one billion email addresses, so you’ll have more than enough candidates to fill your talent pipeline.
You can save candidate emails and export them to a spreadsheet, which is ideal if you’re running your outreach campaigns from a cold email platform like QuickMail.
Always verify your email addresses with a third-party tool before using them.
Pricing: Starts from $39/month.
Best Features:
Provides validated emails quickly.
Offers a Chrome extension for easy sourcing from LinkedIn and GitHub.
Uses a proprietary email database rather than relying on third parties.
3. UpLead
A tool for finding and downloading emails in bulk.
UpLead offers highly accurate and updated emails based on your criteria of candidates. You can filter for companies, URLs, and titles at the workplace, amongst other key details.
For example, if you’re hiring for a role at a company working in a niche market and it requires candidates to be familiar with one specific technology, you can filter for candidates based on other companies using that technology. You then have an instant pool of people who are likely to have the skills you need, so you can reach out, and see if they’d be interested in progressing with the process.
You can instantly export the email lists to your CRM and create a database in your system. That way, you’ll have a targeted email list that you can use to fill your talent pipeline. With the chrome extension, you can access UpLead from most devices, and it doesn’t require a lengthy download process.
Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start from $74/month.
Best Features:
50+ filters to find relevant candidate emails.
Real-time email verification to ensure that you have real emails.
Export emails to a spreadsheet to use in your outreach tools.
Best General Candidate Sourcing and Screening Tools
Sifting through the applications to screen candidates is one of the most time-consuming parts of the entire recruitment process. Here are some recruitment automation tools you can use to speed up your candidate screening:
1. Fetcher
AI-powered sourcing tool to keep your talent pipeline full with interested candidates.
Fetcher is an all-in-one recruitment automation software that finds qualified candidates based on your company’s preferences. The software lets you add prospective candidates, then, will use those profiles to find similar good-fit candidates who you can then reach out to.
There’s also a screening tool that automatically reviews candidates based on parameters you set around experience and skills, which will save you hours every time you have a long list of applicants you need to sort through and review.
Pricing: Unavailable; custom on request.
Best Features:
Requires minimal effort from recruiters to fill the talent pipeline since it's AI-powered.
Matches your specific needs with the appropriately qualified candidates that are just right for your team.
2. Paradox
A recruitment automation software that utilizes conversational AI to screen candidates.
Paradox offers a unique feature where candidates can have their questions answered by an AI called Olivia. It saves recruiters time while prospecting and screening resumes, and has features This tool is aimed at automating administrative recruiting tasks.
You can input all the important details about your role, requirements, and anything else worth mentioning, and the tool will help you automate the early communication process, even scheduling interviews with prospects.
The main goal of it is to significantly decrease the time between application submission and screening of candidates, so you can spend more time talking with candidates and on high-leverage, important tasks.
Pricing: Custom based on your needs.
Best Features:
Screens candidates in real-time, thus decreasing the time to hire.
Eases high volume hiring by automating most repetitive tasks through Olivia.
3. Gem
Candidate pipeline CRM and tracking platform to organize your recruitment processes.
Gem is a platform with multiple features, but one of the most useful is the candidate CRM. You can easily keep track of where each candidate you’re in touch with is in your pipeline, and make sure you’re always staying in touch with the best candidates.
You can create talent pools, which is useful if you’re building a pipeline several months in advance, as it lets you group candidates by skills, experience, or other criteria of your choosing.
Gem also has analytics that you can use to measure the ROI on your candidate sourcing efforts, and it’ll also help you understand if your recruitment automation systems are delivering the results you expected.
Pricing: Custom depending on your needs.
Best Features:
Track your candidate engagement levels throughout your pipeline.
Use analytics to measure how successful your recruitment efforts are.
Group candidates based on skills and experience.
Integrations with the main applicant tracking systems.
4. Textio
Improve your job descriptions with text and language recommendations.
Textio is a platform that helps you write job descriptions — and other recruitment collateral — that are free from bias, creative, and match the employer brand you want to show off.
Once you paste in your job description, Textio will make smart recommendations to optimize your language. For example, are there words used that don’t resonate with a particular type of candidate, or if there are overused or potentially harmful language being used.
Your job descriptions won’t need to go through multiple rounds of team reviews as you’ll have the best recommendations made to you instantly.
There’s also a free LinkedIn extension that you can use to vet any company announcements or posts from leadership, allowing you to make suggestions on how to ensure your company values are always considered.
The end result? You’ll be attracting a diverse and qualified candidate pool to your jobs and be able to then filter down to find the best ones for your job.
Pricing: Free LinkedIn extension, custom plans available on request.
Features:
Insights into your job description wording and phrasing
Find improvements that will attract qualified, diverse candidates
Free extension to audit your LinkedIn posts and comments
Wrapping Up
All the recruitment automation software we’ve mentioned above can help optimize your hiring process by improving your sourcing process, having access to verified emails, as well as giving you the tools to engage with the best candidates with ease.
Remember, not every tool here will necessarily be a good fit for your processes, so make sure to start out with free trials, and always compare them to alternatives.
When you’re ready to start sending personalized cold emails to your prospective candidate list, you can start your free trial of QuickMail.
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