Recruitment is without a doubt one of your HR department’s most business-critical functions. It is critical to get it right.
But when your recruitment team is bogged down with piles of resumes and tedious tasks, they might make the wrong hiring decisions. They may also be unable to respond to applicants in a timely manner, and ultimately, your reputation starts to suffer.
This means you need to streamline your end-to-end recruitment process by cutting down on repetitive manual tasks. This is where automation in recruitment comes into the picture.
Recruitment automation assists organizations in automating their recruitment tasks to minimize recruitment costs, improve their talent profiles, increase productivity, and reduce the time to hire.
Let us discuss what recruitment automation is and how it can help your organization.
What Is Recruitment Automation?
Recruitment automation is the process of using technology to automate recruitment tasks. It involves automating candidate sourcing, screening, resume parsing, and interview scheduling, among other things.
It is a common misconception that recruiting automation solutions are too expensive for every organization to use. But that is not the case. The resources that the firm spends on manual recruitment for each vacant post, as well as the time it takes to fill those positions, are far greater than the one-time cost of having recruiting software. Not to forget the fact that the cost of hiring the wrong candidate is even higher.
There are numerous recruitment automation software and platforms in the market today that can be tailored to your specific requirements. But first, let us focus on areas of recruitment that can be successfully automated.
How to Use Automation in the Recruitment Process?
Here is the list of places where automation in the recruitment process can be used:
1. Job Advertising
It is important to get your job ads right. With a good recruiting automation platform, you can create more targeted job postings and display ads while you connect with candidates, build relationships, and network.
You can have job ads sent automatically to specific demographic segments that you think would be the best fit for your position. According to reports from LinkedIn, 70% of the global workforce is made up of passive candidates who aren’t actively looking for jobs. The other 30% are active job seekers. So, it is always a good idea to post targeted job ads.
With ad automation, you can use insights and analytics to find out which social media platforms brought you the most qualified candidates. This way, you can spend more time and money in the future to specifically target those platforms.
2. Screening
With the help of recruitment automation tools like ATS (Applicant Tracking System), you can take care of resume screening and parsing. The ATS will keep track of all applications and decide if a candidate’s resume is right for the role they applied for.
It does so with the help of keywords given by recruiters or hiring managers. For example, it will use keywords like “SEO,” “Google Analytics,” “WordPress”, etc. to determine if a resume is suitable for the digital marketing role.
Not only that, but some ATS software record candidate profiles for future roles and suggest other roles where their profile would be more appropriate.
3. Pre-employment Assessments
Pre-hire evaluation tools are beneficial. They allow for the assessment of appropriate abilities and attributes for the job opening. This helps minimize time to hire by eliminating prejudices and biases that may affect candidate selection.
There are numerous pre-employment assignments, each of which is a test meant to determine whether or not a candidate is qualified to fill a particular position.
Pre-employment assessment systems usually offer recruiters and hiring managers a comprehensive picture of candidates. Tests can be merged, and various areas can be evaluated through a single online experience. It gives recruiters and hiring managers an edge over their competitors.
Most talent evaluation platforms may also easily integrate with your company’s applicant tracking system (ATS). It guarantees that you have up-to-date information on prospects as they take exams and move through the hiring process.
4. Interview Scheduling
Manually scheduling and arranging interviews can take weeks or even months, especially when working with a big pool of prospects.
It is also more prone to error since the hiring team can get quickly overwhelmed with so many resumes, cover letters, and candidates to consider. This tedious work consumes valuable time that your recruiting team could use for more pressing matters.
Creating an automated interview scheduling system reduces your hectic work and streamlines the interview process. It results in a better experience for both the recruiter and the candidate.
5. Candidate Nurturing
When an applicant drops from the candidate pool, it is a real loss for the employer.
You don’t want to lose quality candidates before interviewing them, but you also don’t have much time to nurture every applicant. In this situation, automation tools can help immensely.
Applicant tracking systems are automated tools that can handle all of this for you. They can keep an eye on how your applicants act online to figure out where they are in the application process and give each candidate a score.
Based on these rankings, the automated system sends out specific email sequences to try to get the person interested and keep them interested throughout the employment process.
Candidate nurturing emails can make candidates feel mor e involved in the process than passive applicants just waiting to hear back. It keeps the lines of communication open and helps your new hire do well in their new job.
Importance of Recruitment Automation
Let’s discuss some of the benefits that recruitment automation offers to your company:
1. Accuracy
HR automation tools deliver more precise data to HR departments, allowing them to make better hiring decisions.
Without suitable cutting-edge technology, no matter how well-managed your organization is, you cannot escape human errors. It is impossible to predict or eliminate errors.
Manual efforts and the complicated structure of your workflow are important contributors to HR process mistakes. HR automation tools will streamline your overall workflow by breaking down the intricacies of your routine. It reduces human errors and reliance on manual processes.
2. Saves Time and Cost
Recruiters and HR professionals can become more efficient and devote more time to high-priority tasks by using recruitment automation solutions.
These tools save time by getting rid of the need for manual work, filling in gaps in the hiring process, and automating boring tasks.
Furthermore, when human errors are avoided and mundane jobs are automated, the huge cost factor associated with recruiting automation technologies is reduced. With these automation solutions, you will be able to carefully automate your recruiting process while avoiding huge investments in software with unnecessary functionality. Unlike other recruitment software, automation tools don’t require lots of investment and maintenance fees.
3. Efficiency
Communication is made easier with recruitment automation tools, and you can automate simple tasks like responding to emails. With these tools, your channels of communication will be improved, and candidates will be kept in the loop.
Recruiters can give more attention to tasks that add more value with fewer mistakes. By getting rid of process bottlenecks, recruitment automation tools make the whole hiring process seamless. With their simple interface, they also make it easy for groups to work together. With their “actionable insights” feature, recruitment automation tools help HR teams make informed decisions.
4. Streamline Data Collection
Recruitment automation tools can be used to collect applications from a variety of sources, including job boards and your website’s career page. You can improve your recruitment process by using these tools to collect and evaluate data about applicants. In the same way, you can also collect other useful statistics, such as the number of people who looked at your job ads, the number of people who applied for a certain job, etc.
Conclusion
Recruiting automation can completely transform your recruitment process, making it more efficient and pleasant for all parties involved.
It is not intended to replace recruiters, but rather to liberate them from manual activities and allow them to refocus on getting to know applicants. And in a job market that requires recruiters to find creative ways to compete for top talent, automated recruitment is an extra advantage that you should start using.
