How to Automate Your Recruitment Process
Key Reasons to Automate Recruitment
When recruitment is an ongoing process, recruitment difficulties tend to pile up and block the company’s progress. At some point, the team has no time to develop the reputation of the company, attract better candidates, and instead, they have to deal with urgent issues, using outdated practices. Automation allows focusing on critical recruitment aspects that will pay off in the long run. Not only does it help to speed up and simplify the recruiting process, but also recruiters can track candidate engagement and build up-to-date talent pools for open and future positions. Let’s find out key reasons why you should automate recruiting:
Reduced time to hire
The hiring process involves many repetitive steps, such as messaging potential candidates, going over emails and CVs, saving and re-saving attachments, and managing files. The HR team can reduce the workload by automating these redundant processes. Improved quality of hire Automation improves the quality of the end hire by selecting relevant candidates and analyzing their CVs. Such a platform can even provide smart insights, determining a particular candidate’s strong suit or weaknesses. This is valuable for interview preparation – an HR specialist will have a better idea of a candidate and come up with a list of smart questions. Also, recruitment automation systems keep track of received CVs and build a database that helps to better organize recruitment data and makes it easier for HR and recruitment specialists to reuse collected information. Increasing hiring diversity According to Deloitte’s report on workplace diversity, more than 78% of job candidates consider diversity to be a competitive advantage when it comes to choosing a company. Employers should take these numbers into account and focus on keeping the workplace open to all races, ethnicities, and hiring both male and female workers. You can build an applicant tracking system for analyzing the rate of diversity in your workplace, determining how inclusive the company is. If certain groups of people are underrepresented, the automation software will remind you to pay attention to certain aspects of your next hiring process. You can put filters that would mark the candidates that fall into a particular diversity group. Of course, the hiring process would still be held mostly based on the candidate’s merits, but the diversity factors would be the additional ones for consideration.
Additional benefits to candidates
Job candidates want the recruitment process to be fast and straightforward. Companies make efforts to cut off micromanagement activities (such as filling out additional documentation, conducting several calls to confirm details, etc), but they still have to document the process and get more details on future employees.
Automation helps to find a balance between being thorough and coming across as old-fashioned. Not only does it help to analyze the candidate’s CV to ascertain as many things as possible without additional documentation, but also the system will automatically schedule calls and quickly update the applicant on any changes.
7 Ways to Automate Your Recruiting Process
Recruitment automation covers multiple hiring aspects, helping to deal both with day-to-day mundane tasks and high-priority objectives. Let’s take a look at the most common ways of using automation for recruitment facilitation.
Pre-screen candidates
AI-based automation can be used to reduce the candidate screening time. A job offer can attract hundreds of replies, the majority of which would be completely unrelated to the offer. AI can look for particular keywords in a CV and determine if the applicant has relevant experience and skills to take on the position. At the end of the day, an HR manager ends up with a pre-selected collection of the most relevant profiles.
On top of that, AI can send personalized replies to the candidate, declining their CV or scheduling a meeting. It can also rate the candidates based on their professionalism and CV relevance.
Pre-employment assessments
If a company offers job candidates a test task, AI can assess the results and grade applicants. It’s easier to do with coding assignments than with creative work – even so, AI can draw objective criteria to provide the work’s pre-evaluation – before a team member takes a look at it.
Also, automation systems provide comprehensive statistics on pre-hiring assessment, storing the ratings and details in a personal profile of each candidate. Whenever an HR needs an update on a particular candidate, it’s available in one click.
Interview scheduling
Automation systems have access to HR’s work schedules and can find a time window for calls, and schedule them automatically. The HR manager will only have to confirm the scheduled date – and the platform will automatically send a personalized message or a template to a candidate. If a candidate offers another date, the platform will record this data and notify the HR manager immediately.
Implement evaluation process
The platform can come up with objective criteria for candidates’ assessment and rate candidates during pre-screening. This way, HRs already have an idea on the level of candidates’ professionalism and don’t have to invest time into contacting unqualified
Automate the offer process
The automation system can assist in creating new job offers based on offers, posted by competitors and those that were posted by the company previously. Then, the platform will send the offer for an HR team to be approved – so managers can perform final tweaks. Some platforms can be integrated with job posting platforms and LinkedIn accounts – the offer will be automatically published.
Structuring recruitment
Automated platforms create recruitment funnels that demonstrate the typical steps of recruitment based on the company’s real-time practices. A system creates and collects documentation that displays the results of the hiring process as well as time investments.
This documentation can be encrypted and transferred to cloud storage – so HR managers can access the data anytime and from any device. Some platforms might not support cloud storage – it depends on the particular system.
Automated talent pipeline
Recruitment software collects data on all pre-screened candidates, saving their profiles and contacts in an automated database. Whenever you have a new opening, you can contact these candidates instead of restarting an open search.
The platform creates this pipeline by analyzing the recent hires and identifying the roles that the company is hiring for. Then, it collects basic requirements and skills – usually based on pre-screening keywords – and analyzes talents who were accepted by the company.
Lastly, it saves their contents and sends follow-up messages and posts about new job offerings. This way, the candidates are in the loop of what’s happening in the company, and the business increases its visibility.
Bottom line
Recruitment automation is a long-term investment that also brings tangible quick results. HRs and recruiters can easily track the decrease of time, spent on mundane hiring tasks, and measure the number of closed job offers. From a long-term perspective, using automated platforms allows teams to refocus on more scalable tasks, such as growing the company’s online presence, attracting a following on social media, especially LinkedIn, and optimizing the hiring process.
