What is Recruitment automation?
Recruitment automation is enabling automation technology in the recruitment process, especially to cut down the manual repetitive tasks to increase the recruiters’ productivity.
This can result in a shorter hiring cycle, low cost per hire, and above all, the company can get a competitive edge over other companies to scale their team faster with the right talents, before other companies pick up the selected talents.
This automation technology consists of a platform, which is the central spot to set up & trigger predefined events for the manual activities involved in the recruitment practices.
It helps to streamline the end-to-end recruitment process efficiently by avoiding the mundane tasks involved in sourcing, screening, scheduling, assessments, etc.
Eg: Triggering to send the automated personalized text message or WhatsApp message for the first round with pre-screening questions, when the candidate responded to the application form.
Benefits of automated recruiting
Shorter Time to fill
At various stages of recruitment such as sourcing, following up, etc. recruiters are spending a lot of hours, which covers their major time in the week.
In addition to these factors, various other external factors are there like candidate and manager availability, ghosting, assessment time, etc.
All the above things make the Time to fill, a much longer for company.
It costs nearly $500/day on average for an unfilled position in a company and the team also struggles with that vacant role.
Recruitment automation helps a lot to save this valuable time, which can eventually impact minimizing the ‘Time to fill’ for the role.
High-Quality profiles
On average, for a role, a recruiter receives nearly 250 applications.
It is a humanly impossible task to do a deep study on each profile and identify the best fit for the role.
Using AI-driven technologies, Recruitment automation can help a lot through attribute-based sourcing which uses various keywords for the targeting role like ‘team handling’, ‘startup experience’, ‘multiple projects handling’ etc.
With AI-based language processing, top profiles can be easily extracted from the huge pile.
Enhanced Positive Candidate experience
Candidates are also facing negative experiences due to inconsistent follow-ups, abandoned emails, late replies, etc.
With automated recruiting, it will become an easy task for a recruiter to deliver timely updates to the candidates without unnecessary waiting time.
This will potentially result in a delightful candidate experience, which will eventually impact the employers’ reputation among the talents.
Increase in Recruiter’s productivity
By default, a recruiter’s day is filled with various tasks and most of them are manually doing one.
While dealing with a high number of applications and the number of vacancies to fill, their focus and productivity are too vulnerable to get affected.
Recruitment automation can help them to keep more focus on important tasks rather than manual repetitive ones. With this, a recruiter can easily achieve high productivity in their day-to-day tasks.
Minimize the profiling bias
Even though practices have been going on around recruiters to hire without any bias, subconsciously there are chances for a recruiter to keep an eye on factors like ethnicity, gender, age, and other personal identifiers.
Instead of taking account into these factors, Recruitment automation solely focuses on a candidate’s potential using attribute-based analysis.
This shift can help a recruiter explore a wide range of candidates and get access to the talent pool without any bias.
Improves Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
In the current trend, even though remote culture is a well-established one among companies, recruiters are still struggling to create diversity in their team scaling.
Diversity hiring can create a lot of benefits for the company in terms of cultural, creative, productive, and worldwide teams.
According to Mckinsey and company, companies with gender-diverse teams are having 25% above-average profitability.
With AI-based sourcing and scheduling, recruiters can create an equitable hiring process and holistic approach towards diversity hiring, which will propel the company forward with a positive team experience.
Empower data-driven decisions using Analytics
As the whole recruitment process is a time taking one, it is very easy to get diverted in the wrong direction without proper data.
Recruitment Analytics can help recruitment teams to have clear visibility on what they are doing, and what’s working and not.
Based on this clear data, they can easily take the right decisions and tweaks to keep their momentum forward in the hiring strategies they are working on.
Recruitment automation ideas you can implement in your existing process
Efficient outbound engagement
Gone are the days, where talent hunt only relied on inbound applications.
Recruiters are leveraging outbound recruiting by reaching out the potential candidates directly on social platforms.
But engaging multiple candidates on multiple platforms is a frustrating one, and it kills precious time. Following up on and tracking their responses is also a very difficult task to manage.
Using automated recruitment software, you can easily automate your engagement with candidates using automated replies, follow-up scheduling, tracking the responses in the dashboard, etc.
Effective sourcing and job adverts
With the help of pre-made templates of job descriptions, skillsets, mandatory skills required, etc recruiters and managers can easily post a job advert in minutes rather than waiting for the description to arrive.
While surfing around different platforms and portals, a recruiter can easily source the candidates if they found them to be best-fit, just with a click.
All the selected profiles were collected in the CRM candidate database which is ready to go for nurturing and further engagement, not only through emails but via desired channels like mobile SMS, Whatsapp, etc.
Attribute-based Resume screening
Easily screen resumes based on specific attributes or skills that a company or hiring manager is looking for in a candidate.
This process involves the use of applicant tracking systems (ATS) to filter resumes based on certain keywords or phrases that are relevant to the job requirements.
The ATS scans resumes and ranks them based on their relevance to the job description. By identifying and matching specific attributes such as education, work experience, skills, and certifications required for the job.
Now the profiles with the top relevancy score can be easily overviewed by the recruiter.
In this way, it streamlines the recruitment process by saving time and resources in filtering through large numbers of resumes.
Initial screening using automated questions
Using a set of pre-determined questions that are aligned with the respective roles, applicants can be easily filtered out by assessing their capability in the initial stages.
This type of automated screening helps a lot to streamline and save a lot of time for recruiters.
For example, if a candidate does not have the necessary experience or qualifications for a particular position, they can be automatically eliminated from consideration, freeing up recruiters' time to focus on more promising candidates.
This process also helps to ensure that all candidates are evaluated fairly and objectively without considering any bias.
It is very important to carefully frame the questions for the role, rather than selecting any templates. Because this impacts lot to source relevant talents to the pool.
Automated messaging
Text recruitment is a new way, where recruiters are reaching potential candidates using text messages as a medium to get their attention.
Automated messaging is used to streamline the recruitment process by automating repetitive tasks such as inviting for the interview, application updates, and answering any other frequent questions.
This frees up recruiters' time and allows them to focus on more high-value tasks, such as building relationships with candidates and conducting in-depth interviews.
It also improves the candidate experience by providing timely and personalized communication throughout the recruitment process.
By receiving updates and notifications in real-time, candidates also will feel positive by cutting their efforts on follow-up with the recruiter.
This thing potentially helps to reduce candidate ghosting, which often happens due to poor communication updates by a recruiter.
Still, it is important to consider the direct interaction option, if the candidates’ questions were not addressed through automated messaging.
Easy Tracking & Scheduling
Automated recruiting enables recruiters to store and manage candidate data, track the status of candidates throughout the recruitment process, and automate the scheduling of interviews.
This can help recruiters to manage and track all candidates in a timely and organized manner.
With the help of workflows and sequencing, for each action performed by the candidate and interview stage updates, the respective scheduling will be easily made.
Collaborative hiring
Hiring is not a single-player game. It needs the whole team's effort to work together at various stages to evaluate the right talent for the role.
This approach allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates, as it involves input from multiple perspectives and stakeholders within an organization.
Automated recruitment software helps team members to easily collaborate at one spot, where the respective person can add their comments, inputs, and evaluation results at the right time so that the overall time to hire can be reduced a lot with the right collaboration at right time.
Speed up the evaluation process
By executing the previous steps like automated pre-screening questions, attribute-based profiling, collaboration, etc. the overall evaluation process time for a candidate can be minimized a lot.
With fast evaluation, you can provide offers to talented candidates, before other companies hunt them.
Talent pool database
Rather than waiting a long for the right candidates from incoming applicants, recruiters can move fast in their process by leveraging the existing talent pool database.
As they are already screened and evaluated, with little nurturing, there are high chances for you to get potential candidates for the new roles opened up.
Automated offers and rejections
In the hiring process, many steps are manually repetitive and time-consuming.
Initial greetings, Offer letters, and Rejection messages are most common among them.
With automation, based on the candidate stages and their responses, these offer and rejection messages can be easily automated following the channel used.
While automated offers and rejections can save time and resources for recruiters, it is important to ensure that they are used appropriately and do not negatively impact the candidate experience.
Importance of Talent engagement using Automation
In today’s trend, Talent engagement is a very significant aspect of the hiring process as the right interactions at the right times help to build a strong relationship between the companies and the talents in the market.
It helps to deliver the factors like clear communication, more personalized touch with candidates, showcasing inside company culture, etc.
These factors impact a lot in attracting talents and retaining them in the consecutive stages of the recruitment process.
With a low volume of recruitment, it is possible to do these engagement activities manually up to a certain extent.
But with a high volume of candidates, it is manually impossible for a recruiter to keep a relationship with all candidates by properly engaging.
Here, Recruitment automation helps a lot in minimizing the efforts to reach a high number of candidates, and that too with a more personalized touch.
It all needs a one-time workflow and sequence set up, then keep on updating them based on the requirements throughout the process.
With this automation setup, candidates will get a positive experience which will eventually impact the company’s reputation among the talent crowd.
In a nutshell, talent engagement in hiring is critical to creating a positive candidate experience and attracting and retaining top talent.
By fostering strong relationships with candidates and creating an environment that supports their growth and development, organizations can set themselves apart in a competitive job market.
How Automation can help to leverage Passive recruiting?
Passive recruiting is attracting and engaging with potential candidates who are not actively searching for job opportunities.
Chances are low for these candidates to post their resumes on job boards, and profiles and actively apply for the roles.
But still, there are high chances to find your potential candidate in passive recruiting.
Once you have identified potential candidates, automation can help to nurture those relationships over time.
You can set up automated text message campaigns using SMS & Whatsapp, that provide valuable information about your organization, industry, and job opportunities.
This will easily attract the attention of the candidates engaged and make them interested in working for your organization.
Social media can be a powerful tool for passive recruitment. You can use automation to identify and connect with potential candidates on social media platforms.
This will allow you to build relationships with those candidates and keep them engaged with your organization which positively impacts your passive recruiting strategy.
By leveraging automation, you can save time and resources while building relationships with top talent in your industry.
Conclusion
Recruitment is a time-consuming process with team dependencies and challenges for every company.
But what matters is, how the companies are overcoming the challenges by adapting to the right technologies and processes by executing to their teams.
In that way, with this AI trend, recruitment automation is a much-needed essential thing for growing companies to scale their team faster with a competitive edge.
In the end, without a team at the right time to work, ideas were just ideas for the companies and won’t become real outcomes for the world without an efficient team.
FAQ
What is automated hiring software?
Automated hiring software helps companies to automate the manual repetitive processes involved in recruitment practices, which eventually results in hiring the right talents faster in a more efficient way. This software eases the process for recruiters, hiring managers, and even founders to recruit talents for their demands.
Can recruiters be automated?
Even though automation software cuts down many steps in the recruitment process, it can’t be fully automated without human interaction. As it’s a people-dependent process, automation software remains a supporting tool, where recruiters are the main people in the process.
Why automate recruitment process?
The recruitment process involves a lot of manual steps which is time-consuming and repetitive for the recruiters. Automating this process can result in saving a lot of time, recruiting faster, improve the quality of candidates by picking the right fit talents.
How do you automate a hiring process?
With Recruitment automation software you can easily automate the hiring steps - Pre-screening, interview scheduling, responding, follow-ups, outreach engagement, and evaluation process.
How do you automate sourcing in recruitment?
Recruitment automation software offers easy-to-use features, to easily source candidates from various platforms and job boards and compile them in one spot.
