There’s a lot of competition in the recruitment sector. For that reason, anything that can give companies the edge is worthy of serious consideration. It’s the nature of the modern world that businesses rely on software, and recruitment is no exception.

A database is essential to store and organise candidate and client details, but good recruitment database software in the UK is able to do much more to drive the effectiveness and profitability of your business.

What do you need?

The first step towards choosing a recruitment database is to identify what you want to achieve. This might be attracting more candidates, finding a better fit for roles, improving workflows, reducing the time taken to fill vacancies or any number of other targets.

recruitment database software

Once you have got your goals sorted, you can concentrate on what is needed to help you achieve them. This might mean increasing awareness among potential candidates, finding existing people on your books who are a good fit for a new role, spending less time sifting CVs and so on.

Once you have considered all of these things, you can start to think about what database features you will need to support them. This might be faster data entry, easier querying of the database, real-time updating of information or simply spending less time on administration of the software.

Essential Features

There are some features that are going to be essential in any recruitment scenario. Prime among these is to have a single candidate database. Having all of your candidate data in one place makes it easier to perform filtering and searching. It also means you are more likely to spot candidates who might have the skills needed for a particular job, even if they are not in a similar role. Being able to search across the entire database for certain keywords or phrases is a must have too.

Another essential that can save you time is automated responses. Sending out a standard email when a new CV is received, for example, can free up your staff to perform more important tasks. Similar automation can help in setting up interviews – notifying locations and times, for example.

If your database is available online for people to add their own details, then it needs to be easy to use. Even if it’s not, it needs to be able to integrate smoothly with online job boards so that you can easily post new vacancies quickly to a number of locations.

Finally, but certainly not least, your database needs to be secure. You are dealing with people’s personal data and you have a legal obligation to keep it safe under GDPR. But compliance is not the only issue – failure to secure candidate records properly can harm your business by losing the trust of your clients and your candidates.