Being a sourcer or recruiter can be highly stressful. One of the key skill sets you’ll need to be successful in a recruitment role, is organization.
Organization is important to any role – but for recruitment it is absolutely essential. Without organization and respect for other people’s schedules – you’ll lose the respect of your candidate’s and clients and you’ll lose the opportunity to see them, meet them, and eventually hire them.
These tips will help you organize your day to day routine and also help you organize your day to day communication and work load.
1. Use Trello to organize your to-do list
Trello is a fantastic tool to make and manage your own to-do lists. You can download the app on the go and have access to all your information out of the office. Trello allows you to always jot down notes, and move items between lists, depending on the stage a task is at. For recruiting and sourcing professionals, you can make different tasks for each candidate you have, and you can move then around the list according to which stage their application is in. You can also add other colleagues to your lists so they can keep up to date with your projects and edit things if you’re out of the office.
2. Schedule and automate tweets and job posts via social media
At the beginning of the week, make sure you’ve written and scheduled tweets and job posts on your social media account. We all know social media is important and a hugely valuable recruitment tool – but it can be easy to forget about it during a work week when other tasks seem to take priority (even if by accident). By scheduling anything important ahead of time, you take the pressure off, and you make yourself more efficient.
3. Use Google Docs instead of Excel
Excel is great for organizing our documents and keeping things up to date – but by changing to Google Docs, you can access documents no matter where you are. You’ll be able to get them at home, at work, on your commute – etc. You can also share Google Docs, meaning candidates can upload their CVs in specially created folders, and can update them at the same time as you. This is hugely beneficial as it stops you needing to download a new document every time a tiny edit needs to be made.
4. Use Boomerang or Canned Responses for Gmail
Boomerang is an app for Gmail that allows you to schedule emails, that then get sent out at a specified time. This is great for replying to candidates you know have busy schedules – as you can schedule your correspondence with them to be sent out when you know their schedule might be a little less jam packed. Canned Responses is another, separate application that allows you to save email templates and insert them into emails quickly and efficiently.
5. Color-code your calendar
If you use an online calendar system to organize your appointments and interviews, a good way to get yourself super-organized is to color-code your appointments. Decide which are your high priority appointments, which are interviews, which are research appointments, etc and give each a different color. This will give you a quick visual introduction to your day, and will leave you with a quick and easy organizational routine to follow.
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