If you’ve managed to get through a busy day’s workload of recruitment without the assistance of Chrome extensions, then you could be making life significantly harder for yourself. Recruitment is a difficult job that requires us to keep tabs on a lot of different problems at once if we’re to be successful. Extensions can help us keep focused and streamline our workflows to ensure that we’re avoiding mistakes and keeping up a strong work rate. So, whether you’re looking to generate leads, manage contact details, or schedule workloads, there’s a recruitment extension for every situation. Let’s take a look at some of the most useful options currently available.
1. Accompany for Gmail
Accompany for Gmail is a free Google extension that we rate highly for ease of use. It’s a clever piece of software that aggregates data from contacts in your Gmail inbox and then generates useful candidate profiles from that information. Just hover your cursor over the name of a candidate, and you’ll see their work history, current position, and relevant links to their social media profiles. Accompany for Gmail also offers reminders for any meetings you have coming up with a candidate, organizes all your previous correspondence with the prospect, and provides a notepad where you can enter any relevant details that might be important in the future.
2. SignalHire
Lead generation tools have revolutionized the way recruiters identify the best talent, and SignalHire is among the best currently available. The SignalHire extension sits on your browser and can instantly source a candidate’s contact details when you hover the cursor over their profile when you’re on sites like LinkedIn. You can search for promising candidates with a range of criteria, including job title, location, and skills. SignalHire then analyzes over 400 million profiles on major social sites like Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn to return results. You’ll be able to see candidates’ skills and previous employers, and SignalHire’s software conducts a deep analysis of a candidate’s account to find matches with valuable keywords that might not be featured in a basic profile.
When you’ve found a promising prospect, SignalHire can return contact details such as phone numbers, business and personal email addresses. This allows you to reach out to prospects without having to go through an intermediary like LinkedIn, so you have a better chance of attracting their attention. All contact information is verified by third-party services, so you don’t have to worry about your messages being overlooked in unused or incorrect inboxes. There’s also good integration with other recruitment software platforms and an option to send batches of up to 1,000 messages. Overall, SignalHire represents terrific value and could be the key to unlocking the potential of your lead generation processes.
3. MightySourcer
Getting the attention of passive candidates is a challenge any recruiter will be intimately familiar with. The MightySourcer extension, designed by the creators of MightyRecruiter, helps streamline the ways you can make contact with prospects. You can customize email templates to then instantly send to candidates inviting them to apply to a position, which can save serious time when you’re dealing with a high volume of prospects. The service also does okay at generating candidate profiles with contact details, qualifications, and work history, although other extensions can be more effective in collecting this information.
4. Hiretual
Hiretual is a very specific tool for tracking down prospects that’s powered by some clever analytics software. The service uses smart Boolean search strings to trawl various professional platforms to return the most promising candidates. Perhaps Hiretual’s biggest feature is the way it displays a prospect’s profile by useful metrics like availability, estimated pay bracket, and seniority.
This technology also assigns candidates a ranking calculated against their peer group. Of course, while this feature sounds excellent in theory, perhaps recruiters will be taking their hands off the wheel a little too much if they expect it to chase down leads without any input. The basic version is free, but if you want to access the majority of AI-powered features, then you’ll have to pay monthly for the premium edition.
5. Streak
Streak is a handy service that lets you manage a lot of CRM processes through a single interface. You can manage and track interactions with candidates, archive resumes, and monitor applicants through different stages of the recruitment process. Happily, you can do all this without having to tab out of your Gmail account. The “Email Power Tools” feature lets you manage your inbox and track your outgoing correspondence, letting you see when messages have been opened, personalize mass email dispatches, and schedule mail delivery for a later time. A paywall blocks the most powerful features, but the free version can still be of use.
6. Ultidash
Ultidash isn’t an extension designed purely for recruiters, but its productivity-boosting features are likely to be appreciated by busy PR professionals. Features include customizable to-do lists, a site blocker to keep you away from time-wasting websites, and a tracker function that can measure your behaviors online. As we say, this extension doesn’t offer any specific features for recruitment purposes, but you may well find it useful if you’re struggling to stay focused on your responsibilities at work.
7. LastPass
Here’s another program that’s not made with recruiters in mind but will prove essential for most of us anyway. LastPass is a free Chrome extension that securely houses all your passwords and logins for every account and website you need to regularly access. Encryption makes sure this password vault stays secure, so safety concerns aren’t an issue. While it might seem trivial, if you consider how much time you spend logging into different emails, online accounts, portals, and more every day, you soon see that the time spent arbitrarily logging in seriously adds up. LastPass is also great for saving face if you’re worried about remembering all your different passwords, and overall, it’s a very useful, time-saving free extension.
Final Thoughts
No matter your recruitment specialization, extensions exist that can boost your work rate, save you time, and reduce your stress on the job by helping you stay organized. They can also improve your success rate for lead generation and help you communicate and track candidates throughout the application and onboarding process. Many of these extensions either cost nothing or offer a basic version that you can try for free, so shop around to find the services that suit you best.
