Stay in Touch: Top 10 Communication Tools for Recruiters

Welcome to Top 10, Recruiter.com's weekly rundown of the best of the best in recruiting! Every Friday, we release a list of some of our favorite people, things, and ideas dominating the industry. From awesome tech tools and cool companies to great books and powerful trends, no stone in the recruiting space will be left unturned.

This Week: Top 10 Communication Tools for Recruiters

When it comes to recruiting, staying in touch with candidates is half the battle. This week, we've compiled a list of ten great communication tools for recruiters with a little help from the pros. Check it out below:

1. Slack

You're likely familiar with Slack already, but if your recruiting team isn't using it to stay connected, you should change that immediately. There's a reason it's so popular – in fact, many reasons, including ease of use, customizability, mobility, and, of course, the ability to spam a channel with gifs when it all gets to be too much.

Learn more.

2. Rapportive

While many bemoaned the changes Rapportive underwent after LinkedIn acquired it – and for good reason, to be honest – the tool is still immensely useful when it comes to remembering who's who in your inbox. This Gmail plugin displays your contacts' LinkedIn profiles right in your inbox, which means you won't confuse Nic the developer with Nick the content marketer anymore.

Aside from the administrative use, the addition of LinkedIn profiles to Gmail allows for richer, more informed conversations with candidates, which go a long way in establishing trust and winning top talent over to your side.

Learn more.

3. Followup.cc

Recommended to us by Nick Chubb, a former recruiter and current business developer with Marine Society, Followup.cc is what Chubb describes as a "beautifully simple way of following up on email."

Recruiters are often talking to what feels like a million people at once – candidates, hiring managers, teammates, etc. – and that makes it easy for important conversations to slip through the cracks. With Followup.cc, you can set reminders, program automatic followups, schedule sends in advance, and more.

Learn more.

4. Calendly

Take the back-and-forth out of scheduling with Calendly. You set up a calendar, you send people a link, and they can select times to meet with you according to the availability in your schedule. No mess, no fuss – and it sure beats the will-we-won't-we of conventional scheduling.

Learn more.

5. Yello

Recommended by Rita VanderWaal, senior manager in the talent attraction team at Talent Collective, Yello is a talent relationship management tool "that segments talent pools and engages with them with automated email campaigns containing personalized, customized messaging," VanderWaal says.

She continues: "We can track candidates and communicate with them all through the recruitment process, from the first touchpoint through the final offer letter. That helps us stay engaged with candidates, and it shows us how and where we've converted them along the journey."

Learn more.

6. Crystal

"As recruiters, we always try to communicate with candidates and clients in their preferred form of communication," says Taylor Dumouchel of Peak Sales Recruiting. "However, it's more about how you communicate that helps you get the most of your conversation."

That's why Peak Sales and plenty of other recruiters use Crystal, which offers advice on the most effective ways to communicate with people. Crystal uses information about your social media contacts to compile "personality reports" on them, outlining the ways in which they like to be communicated with. It also offers real-time suggestions as you compose messages to people. If one contact prefers short, direct messages, Crystal will guide you in that direction. If another contact likes casual, chatty conversation, Crystal has your back there, too.

Learn more.

7. FlashRecruit

FlashRecruit is a live-chat recruiting platform that allows recruiters to add chat links to all of their job posts, making it that much easier for candidates to reach out when they have questions or want to learn more about an open role. Top talent is always just a click away from connecting with you. Talk about putting the human touch back in recruiting!

Learn more.

8. Mya

Mya is an AI chatbot that can handle the brunt of candidate communication for you. It answers questions, gathers information about candidates, screens them against set criteria, and grows smarter and smarter with each candidate to whom it speaks. Though Mya is still in private beta, we're really excited about what we've seen – and we think chatbots are going to become recruiting necessities in the near future. Get ahead of the trend now.

Learn more.

9. Gorgias

When communicating with candidates, you don't want to rely too much on email templates. That will make you seem distant and impersonal. However, you don't have to abandon templates altogether. They can be incredibly convenient and helpful, if deployed properly.

Gorgias is a Chrome extension that allows you to create, save, and use custom email templates right inside your email client, whatever it may be. You can also program keyboard shortcuts so that simply typing a word or two will automatically trigger a full template.

Just make sure to personalize your message a bit before you hit send, okay?

Learn more.

10. Gender Decoder

Gender Decoder is a simple but much-needed tool built by developer Kat Matfield. You input a job description, and Gender Decoder tells you whether or not your post is subtly coded "masculine." We don't often realize it, but much of the language we use is targeted toward men. This can have the unfortunate effect of turning talented women candidates off of your job openings, needlessly limiting your company's reach. Thanks to Gender Decoder, you can catch these linguistic mistakes before they go live.

Learn more.