As estimated by McKinsey Global Institute, automation in recruitment could boost global productivity by 1.4%. Even, online recruitment platforms can alone improve worldwide GDP by $2.7 trillion by 2025. All these statistics clearly reveal the power of talent technology and recruitment automation process.
Operations can break or make a strategy, and the same applies to recruit. For example, an average recruiting team keeps running a series of recruiting events and at the same time monitor data compliance issues, keeps alum engaged, and ensures nurturing programs receive adequate engagement.
For such reasons, it is vital to manage recruitment operations behind a successful function, which cannot be on an ad-hoc basis. Hence, automation of recruitment process is essential.
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In this article, we will be discussing the below-enlisted topics,
- What is Recruitment Automation?
- Reasons Your Company Needs Recruitment Automation
- How to Automate Your Recruitment Process?
- Ways to Automate Recruiting Processes
- Benefits of Automated Recruiting
- Recruitment Automation Infographic
What is Recruitment Automation?
Recruitment automation is using automated software to support and enhance modern techniques of recruiting like lead processing, campaign management, lead life-cycle management, social marketing potentials, CRM integration, recruiting analytics, and lead scoring.
Using automated recruiting software helps the recruiting team to focus on the work that needs special expertise and judgment. A few automated processes that one can avail are:
- Including a candidate to the talent pool if they have certain specialized skills.
- Assigning a candidate to the colleague when they are first linked to a talent pool.
- Altering the status of a candidate when they hit any milestone such as multiple email interactions or attending an event.
- Triggering notification when a candidate visits a job posting.
- Monitoring the replies to email and prompt answers.
Reasons Your Company Needs Recruitment Automation
Automation is altering the workplace. Once, every organization needed intensive human involvement. However, presently, the recruitment team is streamlined. All this is because of automated tasks, which free up time and create a way for personal attention where it is required the most.
Nowadays, hiring managers can easily manage to recruit and onboard much more strategically than before.
Here are a few essential reasons to implement an automated recruitment process to meet the increasing competitive challenges.
1. Streamlines Processes:
Recruiting automation uses predictive analytics and enables recruiters to utilize more actionable information about the premium candidates and to efficaciously predict the prospects, which are an ideal fit for an open role in the company.
This way, the traditional approach of weeding through innumerable applicants is eliminated and hiring experts are able to follow a more streamlined hiring process. It’s true that recruiting will always involve a human touch. However, AI can be combined with advanced algorithms to help recruiters make the best choices.
2. Saves a Lot of Time:
Secondly, recruiting automation enables recruiters to get back usable hours as well as streamline workflow to avail enhanced efficiency. It is known that recruiters bear an administratively loaded and time-intensive workload.
All time-intensive activities like engaging with passive talent, sourcing, scheduling interview appointment, managing follow-ups, and defining job descriptions are detail-oriented and need meticulous handling. All these and more other functions can be managed well with the help of recruiting automation.
3. Better Retention Knowledge:
It is possible to accumulate a huge volume of information through a candidate management system without utilizing much bandwidth or using too much human memory. It stores knowledge within, and hence, it is never lost.
Since one employer recruits many candidates, so it is quite difficult for them to keep track of every applicant without using any software. With the help of recruitment automation tools, hiring experts can keep track of multiple candidates at one point in time. This way, it is possible to achieve more personalized and better solutions as well as streamline the overall recruitment process.
4. Augmented Candidate Experience:
Another major reason to use automation for recruitment is automated communication with elite candidates. Answering all the questions, sending outreach at ideal times and scheduling interviews in a timely way can drastically enhance the overall experience of a candidate with the company.
This offers a sought after a candidate with more professionally inclined and smooth recruiting experience, without the need for huge expenditure and effort.
5. Enhanced Sourcing Efficiency:
The modern applicant tracking systems or ATS allow recruiting team to define job descriptions and extensively promote them on job websites, social platforms, and other productive and innovative recruitment channels in a few seconds. Also, it makes it easier for recruiters to identify, engage, and qualify candidates automatically.
Though it is possible to reduce time spent on administrative tasks by handling them with the use of modern technology, soon you will notice that has cut cost as well. Therefore, automation in recruitment allows cutting recruiting cost and helps to increase the profit margin of your company.
6. Better Diversity:
Even the best recruiters can result in unconsciously biased decisions. This biased process presents not just an obvious ethical issue but also is detrimental to achieve the optimal performance of the team.
Teams working in the interpersonal dynamics can lead to more diverse experience and tend to be more innovative and productive. Using an automated process objectively identifies prospects for a specific position. Hence, it eliminates human biases and helps to recruit the best-fit candidates in the preliminary process of assessment.
Challenges of Remote Working Recruiters Usually Face:
Automated recruiting is a double-edged sword. It can offer benefits such as the shorter cycle of recruitment as well as enhanced candidate experience.
Hence, it is best to automate only those parts or processes in the recruitment that can generate more value for the company without causing any issue to the candidate experience.
Gone are the days where recruiters used age old methodologies for their recruitment and selection process. Nowadays, several recruitment automation software and modern hiring techniques are being used by recruiters to achieve their goals and targets.
Not only it helps in ease your recruitment process but also aids in finding the right candidate for the job vacancy. It also makes you survive and stay ahead among your competitors.
Lack of recruitment software and systems can surely act as a hindrance in your working process. Saying this does not mean you choose any software, you need to pick the one which matches your requirement perfectly.
The other hindrance which most recruiters face during their recruitment process are the challenges is when they work remotely or while they have to manage remote recruiters. Though there are many, some of them can have negative impact which needed to be avoided at all costs.
Based on such issues, Wisestep has performed a linkedIn survey in the form of a poll specifically on recruiters by asking them “ If You manage a Recruitment Team or Business, What’s your biggest challenge in Remote working?”
The four options which they have provided for it are as follows,
- Share CV database logins
- Productivity of the team
- Analytics on performance
- Data privacy
Though there are many other concerns for recruiters, we have picked the top ones which are seen very common. And here is a media form showing what most recruiters had said through this poll.
Now as per the Wisestep Poll result, around 43% of recruiters have given their votes for “productivity of the team” option as the biggest challenge for recruiters when working remotely.
But the best part is that utilizing recruitment automation software can even solve this problems and challenges in a efficient manner.
How to Automate Your Recruitment Process?
For sure, human intervention is always going to be there in the recruiting process. Still, humans have to plan job descriptions, source candidates, communicate their final outcome, and conduct interviews. However, automating the recruitment process will make things simpler for hiring managers and at the same time boost efficiency.
Here are few points that help in automating your recruiting and hiring process.
1. Automating Pre-Screen Process:
Reduce the time associated with physically screening every candidate. This can be done by administering pre-recorded video interview sessions. Recruiters can select questions, which they want to ask the candidates, distribute the same to candidates and set aside certain time duration to review these videos.
This will not only save time but also help recruiters to precisely compare candidates. Also, pre-recorded interview videos are helpful when you have to interview a large number of candidates.
2. Automating First Level Interview Process:
Offering a toll-free number to applicants to let them record their personal details like preferences, employment history, education, and more is another way of bringing automated technology to use. The DTMF responses can be exported to a particular sheet where candidates can be screened on the basis of their eligibility criteria.
Also, you can send automated SMS or call for acceptance or rejection of the application. This saves a lot of time as well as reduces cost.
3. Simplified Scheduling:
Recruiters can remove them from scheduling matrix and allow candidates to schedule or reschedule their interview sessions without interrupting the entire team.
This can be done easily by implementing an interview scheduling software that offers candidates available time slots and let them schedule the date and time based on their availability and preferences.
4. IVR Call in the Further Interview Process:
A series of pre-recorded questions can be made available to the candidate through an IVR call. Once a question is read out, let candidates record their answers. It will not only help almost a one-to-one interview session experience but will also remove human biases.
The answers received can be integrated with the online recruitment software to make sure every aspect of the process is recorded and tracked.
5. Recruiting On-the-Go:
Let hiring experts can recruit from anywhere utilizing mobile recruitment apps. Conveniently capture details about a candidate like its resume and access real-time candidate details.
Moreover, one can monitor the progress much faster than the competitors, knowing that you have gathered all pertinent candidate details away from the boundaries of your office or desk.
6. Build Talent Pipelines:
An easy way to speed up the process of interview is by developing talent communities. This way, hiring experts can have a consistent pipeline of highly engaged candidates.
You can source candidates from this community to reduce up-front vetting and reduce candidate discovery. Most importantly, it can help the members of the talent community to know your company better through videos showcasing the culture, updates, and specific content of the company.
7. Implementing Evaluation Process:
Moreover, you can establish talent workflows including mobile and online evaluations. This will cut down the time needed to gather interview feedback.
It also makes possible to evaluate the interviewers and automate the overall process through follow-up reminders.
8. Run Recruitment Operations Using CRM:
Using candidate relationship management software helps to reduce hefty responsibilities within the process of recruiting. It is because CRM automates the overall process of recruiting and provides you all details related to the candidate at one place.
CRM also helps to schedule interviews and establish and manage multiple interviews at a time. It is also useful for campus recruiting tools to accumulate correct information and efficiently recruit a specific college campus.
Ways to Automate Recruiting Processes:
Automating the recruitment process can help recruiters take a relaxing breath as it streamlines many steps along the recruiting process.
Here are many ways you can automate the recruiting process.
1. New Recruit Requests:
Job duties and candidates can misalign if vital details are not mentioned in the job posting. A standardized template in the new hire request app makes sure no detail is removed in the job description.
Mobile and laptop notifications offer prompt feedback and approvals to get job advertisements as soon as possible.
2. Candidates Sourcing:
It is of utmost importance to offer candidates with a professional and attractive hiring experience right from the day one
With the use of social media HR tools, it is easier to connect to a vast pool of skilled workers. An ATS can track app and post a job description on numerous sites from one particular point of time.
3. Applicant Screening:
It is painstaking to manually keep up with all applicants in spreadsheets. However, an ATS can instantly process applications and sort things through the copious volume of data.
Using automated recruiting apps also helps to shortlist candidates and weed out applications that do not meet the hiring criteria.
4. Interviews:
It is possible to create interview appoint slots with multiple email exchanges between department heads and HR. A scheduling module can automatically place candidates within the open slots for interview duration.
The process can be prolonged by writing and sending the same emails for every interview invitation.
5. Offer Letters:
An automated recruitment workflow process can generate and save digitally signed contracts, offer letters, and other documents securely.
Moreover, all letters can be automatically generated and sent to the remaining candidates in just a few minutes.
Benefits of Automated Recruiting:
In the present scenario, recruitment has become highly competitive. A lot of recruitment agencies compete with each other to search the most talented employee. Automation in recruitment is an excellent solution to the modern recruiters.
So, here check some of the prominent benefits of automation in recruitment.
1. Boosts Productivity of Recruiter:
Recruiters using conventional recruitment techniques are often confined within the office space. The only access they have is their paperwork and computer.
Automation in recruitment offer recruiter an easy access to vast sources. Such sources are useful to shortlist candidates and hence are useful to improve the overall productivity of a recruiter.
Technology like cloud is helpful to users and enables them to connect with candidates using laptops or mobile devices. This offer recruiters the ease to work from anywhere.
2. Saves a Lot of Time:
One obvious advantage of recruitment automation software is that it helps recruiters to save time by automating the various parts of their process. On an average recruiter spends almost 60% of its daily time searching for novel candidates.
Automating the initial process of screening as well as sourcing helps recruiters to perform the same task in reduced times. The saved time can be spent to interview applicants, engage with the candidates, and perform other activities that involve human intervention.
The only thing is that recruiters must automate the correct tasks as only then it will save them time and let them perform things better.
3. Better Candidate Hiring:
Automated recruiting is all about finding and recruiting the best technology. It weeds out weak candidates and present recruiters with only the best solutions. The best thing is that you can equip automated recruiting software with predictive analytics to better comprehend candidates and assess those who will be perfect fit to the job and successful in a role.
4. Removes Human Bias:
A study reveals that algorithm not only helps to hire fast, but also ensures that the quality of hire is excellent. The main reason for this is that algorithm makes decisions on the basis of the test results and pre-defined algorithms.
In many cases, recruiters use their discretion to guide the overall decision making. Sometimes biased decisions are made and an unsuitable or a candidate with less potential is hired. But this can never be the case with the automated recruitment process.
Human biased is removed and quality candidates are hired that also improves the retention rate and results in better prosperity and growth of the company. Most importantly, it also reduces the hiring cost as well as cost related to training and productivity loss.
5. Retention of Knowledge:
There are always star performers in a company. They understand all needs of a company and are aware of the best tactics required to attract great candidates. So, what happens when they leave your organization?
If you are using automated recruiting solutions, you need not worry about it. The advanced automated recruiting software uses machine learning to identify the best practices of recruiters. Moreover, they retain information and replicate actions. With their feature of knowledge retention, it allows the recruiters to work in the best mode. In addition to this, it reduces the amount of training needed by new recruiters.
It is because automated processes let recruiters retain their valuable data and use it when there is immediate or urgent need.
6. Improved Candidate Experience:
The present job market is candidate-driven and recruiter give huge priority to offer a stellar candidate experience. Recruiters can easily offer their candidates a rich experience by utilizing the power of automated recruiting.
Such solutions generate one-click and easy to use applications to encourage more candidates to apply. Also, such software come with the capability to have constant contact with applicants, thereby offering them timely updates on their status in the recruiting process.
They eliminate most of the challenges and offer results like reduced hiring time, reduced cost of hiring, and an overall enhanced experience for the candidate.
7. Greater Diversity:
With the help of automation in recruitment, it is possible to achieve greater diversity in the workplace. It is because automated recruiting depends heavily on data. At the same time it eliminates conscious and subconscious human biases from the process of recruiting.
Every company follows a standard process of recruitment. But there can be variations. Moreover, the process of recruiting can be predictive, but the thing is that it can be biased. It dismisses tons of qualified people.
If you hire people based on their preferences and likeliness will not only generate a homogenous workforce, but it will also reduce the productivity of the company. And in order to diffuse this problem, it can result in better group issues solving.
Recruiters aim to achieve diversity within the organization but it also enhances the overall efforts of a company. Hence, it is best to diversify the workplace using automated recruiting channels.
8. Optimizes Pre-Screen Engagement:
Further, automating the pre-screening process brings tons of benefits to the overall recruitment process. Your recruitment process can lead to high gains only if you make the right move from the very first step. Hence, it is best to optimize the pre-screening process.
This can be done by sending configurable email communications as well as automated notifications to the applicant. The applicants will not only be able to communicate with the recruiter but will also like the advanced recruiting mechanism followed by the company.
9. Extends Recruiters Reach:
Around 76% of jobseekers look for opportunities on social platforms and mobile apps. Automating the recruitment process provide instant access to the talented pool of experts who are proactively searching for a change.
Also, it allows recruiters to monitor and track the overall performance of each and every source. This is useful to materialize the various sourcing strategies and leads to maximum conversions.
10. Makes Easier to Generate Real-Time Reports:
An automated process of recruitment collates the mission-critical details to create real-time customized reports, which allow hiring managers to monitor the performance of recruitment.
Recruiters can track the efficacy of a job posting as well as monitor the overall efficiency of different social platforms. This ensures process compliance and offers actionable data, which helps to optimize existing procedures and processes. Moreover, companies are able to gain maximum ROI without spending massive money and time.
11. Social Sourcing:
With increasing competition among companies to recruit the top talent, it is vital for employers to look beyond the active job seekers and extend their efforts for including passive candidates.
Using right technology can help businesses to leverage the social networks of their current employees. This is known as social sourcing. It offers the main benefit of letting recruiters socialize with like-minded people. Hence, if a particular social network has helped recruiters to hire rich employees in the present, it is most probable that it would help finding successful employees even next time and later.
