Recruitment Automation 101: How to Make The Best Out Of it?

August 16, 2023

As modern enterprises chase rapid growth and competition for acquiring top talent rises, the burden on recruiters and business stakeholders gets heavier with each passing day. Add up multiple job openings arriving consistently, quality requirements of talent intensifying and recruitment processes becoming more dynamic – managing recruitment alone can be too hectic at times. Gone are the days when posting jobs on certain popular websites was enough for attracting well-qualified candidates. Passive candidate sourcing is the need of the hour and recruiters need to streamline their talent acquisition funnel. Recruitment automation plays a vital role here – helping employers save time and maximize their hiring efficiency.

A large number of hiring managers and company stakeholders are still sceptical about leveraging recruitment automation as they don’t find it reliable enough. Although the biggest advantage of automation is putting the repeated admin tasks in auto-pilot mode and focusing on the human-oriented ones – talent interaction and evaluation. Finding relevant candidates for your open roles, engaging them consistently, assessing their skillsets and adding them to the recruitment cycle are the core tasks that take up most of a recruitment team’s time. And when the requirements are at scale, the pipeline management for hiring becomes heaving.

Your recruitment team loses around 73% of the time in monotonous admin tasks. In this blog, we will discuss how recruitment automation can help you solve the time and efficiency problem of hiring. If you’re on the fence about whether or not you should leverage automation to improve your hiring process, you have landed in the right place. Stick around as we answer the what, why and how of recruitment automation. Let’s get started

What is Recruitment Automation?

Recruiting technology that enables automation of otherwise repeated manual tasks is being used to streamline workflows and other recruitment activities. From candidate sourcing, screening, engagement, assessment, scheduling and communication – recruitment automation tools are helping with all the tasks which often take a great deal of recruiters’ time.

If you’re wondering how this helps – by automating these mundane tasks, the talent team can focus on interacting with candidates more consistently and fill up the open positions faster. Given the fast-paced growth every other company is chasing, scaling up hiring requirements is bound to happen and automation is the most optimal way to solve it. Let’s not forget the companies with limited resources either – small recruiting teams need to do more with less effort and automation allows them to tackle it.

The recruitment space has evolved completely in the last five years, and especially in the post-pandemic period – with The Great Attrition followed by The Great Resignation made things only trickier on the employer side. Some factors that recruitment teams and stakeholders are currently focusing on right now are:

Quality of hire - automation helps you make sure the end-to-end management tasks are being done efficiently - hence serving a streamlined hiring process, and better candidate experience.

Time to hire - Time is the most precious resource now, even for small companies. Employers have realized that in order to trigger growth – acquiring talent and doing it fast is the key.

Let’s now dive in a level deeper and find out the various recruitment processes that can be automated.

How Automation Helps Improve Recruitment Processes?

Every area of hiring is now aided by technology and automation. Take a look at the most critical recruitment processes automation is helping streamline:

Sourcing Candidates

For both inbound and outbound sourcing of candidates, automation helps to recruit teams to quickly source and add them to the recruitment pipeline. To advertise the open roles on numerous platforms easily, various automation tools help recruiters create job descriptions and ads through ready-to-go templates. This helps organizations to get enough applications in a short span of time.

On the other hand, outbound sourcing via social media platforms can also be accelerated and scaled up using sourcing automation tools. Additionally, when combined with ATS and candidate engagement automation, a candidate sourcing tool can help streamline the entire talent-hunting process.

Building and Engaging Internal Talent Pool

Active recruitment strategies are not as effective as they used to be. Passively sourcing candidates and building an internal talent pool is the need of the hour. However, having a talent pool isn’t much of an advantage if you don’t nurture them consistently. Engaging with candidates currently in your talent pool adds up to the candidate experience and boosts your chances of recruiting them. 55% of recruiters say having access to automation is helpful for nurturing candidates. However, candidate engagement is undoubtedly a time-consuming and long-term activity. Automating nurture communication flows significantly adds up to the efficiency of your recruitment process and helps you hire fast.

Resume Screening

If you have been in the talent-hunting space for some time now, you would probably relate to the struggle of screening and analyzing resumes manually. Recruitment automation tools solve this great time-consuming chore by AI-powered resume screening and giving each profile a score. So that recruiting teams can easily identify top talent and move them to further stages rapidly.

Applicant Tracking

Managing the applicant pipeline is a huge task in terms of time consumed and effort, and a majority of recruiters end up stressing too much over it. Automated applicant tracking systems (ATS) enable recruiters to integrate their recruitment funnel and automate mundane admin tasks of maintaining the pipeline every day. As a recruiter you don’t need to manually update which candidate has crossed a certain stage of hiring and which candidate didn’t, an ATS is vital for your productivity.

Interview Scheduling

One of the most frequent tasks of recruiters is scheduling interviews as per candidates’ and interviewer’s availability. While it happens every day, manual scheduling is too much of a to-and-fro and recruiters’ time is very precious to be taken from analytical tasks for scheduling of interviews. Scheduling automation tools do not require any manual intervention in the process. For example – If an interviewer offers five time slots in a day, the candidate can choose among those directly as per their availability.

Onboarding

From documentation requirements to offer creation, and payroll software – all onboarding activities can be streamlined with recruitment automation tools. It is now possible to automatically generate offer letters, contracts and onboarding emails for successful hires too, hence eliminating all the chances of delaying the acquisition. As the onboarding is accelerated, recruiters involved can focus on finishing up the pending pipeline tasks.

Driving Factors of Recruitment Automation

Finding quality talent is only getting trickier with time. Amplifying competition among growing organizations, and a huge gap in supply and demand of skills have added up to the intensity of competition for talent.
Talent retention is now tougher than ever. You never really know who would leave the organization at any point in time, and recruitment needs to be immensely fast and effective for dealing with such scenarios.

Wrong hires can cost companies a lot more than calculations, in the long run, hence recruiters need to give more time to analyzing talent before onboarding them.

Resources are limited for early-stage startups which form a large chunk of the entire corporate world, recruitment automation is the saviour for such organizations.

What are the Benefits of Recruitment Automation?

One of the core advantages of recruitment automation is helping recruiters hire easily and effectively. However, when we dig in deeper – it means much more than just convenience for organizations. Here are the most important benefits of recruitment automation:

Improved Productivity

Improving the hiring process has a direct effect on the productivity of recruiters. Recruitment automation tools help them work effectively and make better decisions. Automated candidate sourcing, engagement, resume screening and talent pipeline management allow talent teams to focus on the highly important - human side of recruiting. 80% of recruiters say that automation helps boost their productivity. Teams can get much more work done with the same efforts.

Increased Diversity

Recruitment automation helps diversity in two ways - through removing the bias while screening and by aiding the diversity ratio through effective passive talent sourcing. Sourcing and engaging candidates from around the world helps reduce the bias - 61% of candidates claim so. Additionally, automating your repetitive hiring processes gives you enough bandwidth to focus on diversity and inclusion in your organization.

Reduced Time to Hire

One of the most crucial metrics while hiring candidates is the time to hire, and automation primarily caters to this optimization requirement. Recruiters can save hours of work every week by sourcing hundreds of qualified candidates in a jiffy, auto screening, automated engagement campaigns, and other top-of-the-funnel recruitment chores to hire the right people quicker, fill the open positions faster and trigger growth for their organizations.

Easily Identify Quality Candidates

Going through hundreds of applications and LinkedIn profiles is not required anymore, as with recruitment automation – it is a matter of minutes. Additionally, as talent managers dedicate more time to interacting with candidates and evaluating them – organizations are highly likely to end up hiring top-quality talent. Having a pre-qualified talent pool based on the skills and experience is the primary strategy of numerous talent teams now, and it further helps in improving the quality of hires.

Scale Up Your Hiring Seamlessly

Suppose you are hiring for 15 different roles at a time. The number of openings would definitely be so huge that no matter how big your talent acquisition team is – it will take considerably long to fulfilling those requirements. As your company grows the number of openings keeps increasing and you don’t necessarily know when the requirements arise. Leveraging recruitment automation by automating outbound campaigns, nurturing leads, screening profiles and planning their assessments enables recruiters to wind up their hiring campaigns within a few days instead of weeks or months.

Optimized Cost & Efficiency

Talk about hiring metrics and the cost of hiring tops the list. Hiring budgets of organizations vary as per market conditions, business status and the stage they are in. Contrary to popular opinion, recruitment automation is not an added cost to your company, but rather an investment which will soon return results reflecting outstanding progress in the quality of hire and efficiency of your talent teams.

Outsourcing your hiring because of limited recruiters is not a smart move now, as they neither know much about your business deeply nor do they understand your company culture, but the internal teams do. Empower them with recruitment automation tools and the results would be much better at reduced costs.

Focus on Talent, Not on Hiring

No matter how much hiring has changed, the best approach to acquiring top talent remains the same – focus on the talent and analyze what they bring to the table in terms of skills, experience and personality. Modern recruitment is largely driven by analyzing applications, screening profiles, scheduling meetings, publishing job advertisements and engagement across social media. While these activities are important, interacting with candidates personally and automating the rest can transform your recruiting and significantly enhance the talent that you hire.

Amplify Your Visibility with Analytics

Recruitment automation enables you to integrate the entire recruitment stack and pull relevant data together. What this helps with is a transparent overview of the end-to-end recruitment funnel. As a result, talent teams can collaborate better and stakeholders can have up-to-date information about the status of recruitment campaigns. Not to forget - identifying and fixing the shortcomings become much easier by studying analytics consistently.

Enhanced Candidate Experience

The efficiency and seamless experience recruitment automation bring in, is not limited to recruiters. Candidates also benefit from it as they are continuously updated on the recruitment status, face no bias with AI-based screening, get quick responses to their applications and the queries are almost promptly resolved too. The ease and convenience of getting recruited should not be underestimated – candidates can now get hired from social media platforms even without any Resumes sometimes - based on their portfolio and skills.

Top Signs Your Organization Needs Recruitment Automation

Every enterprise – no matter how big or small needs recruitment automation. However, some signs convey that you and your recruitment teams deeply need the help of technology:

Prolonged recruiting cycle and unfilled roles: If your organization has unfilled roles for a long time and you’re not a newly opened business, the recruitment surely needs restructuring. Additionally, prolonged recruiting cycles are a double loss - as in most cases, candidates are lost midway.

Overburdened recruiters: From sending outreach emails to posting job ads on tens of sites and updating candidate pipeline databases – your recruiters are doing everything on their own. They feel the need to dedicate more time towards people interactions but are unable to do so, and you’re probably losing out on quality talent because of that.

Not able to convert sourced candidates: If your recruitment teams are spending plenty of time sourcing candidates and filling the pipeline, but still are not able to pull them into the recruitment funnel – chances are high that they are not able to engage candidates consistently. Automating the process will just need them to add candidates to the pipeline with a single click and personalized engagement happens through automated campaigns.

Limited recruiting resources: Especially in the case of early-stage companies, where both time and capital are limited – recruiting candidates is a big challenge. If you have a small recruiting team, investing in automation would definitely help you stay ahead with the quality and volume of talent requirements. Outsourcing is really expensive, but it’s slow and doesn’t guarantee results. So, empowering your current recruiting team is the way through.

Level Up Your Recruitment with Sourcing Automation

For a majority of enterprises, hiring candidates after assessing them isn’t a challenge, but driving quality talent towards their recruitment funnel is something they constantly struggle with. The competition for acquiring skilled and experienced talent is becoming deeper and hiring passive candidates seems like the only optimal solution.

However, sourcing and hiring passive talent is not a piece of cake – when done manually. It adds up too much to the recruiter’s plate (which is already filled) in most cases. Leveraging technology is a preliminary need – everyone understands that, but finding a recruitment automation solution that fits perfectly to your needs and existing talent pool, can be overwhelming. But it’s not the case for you as you’re already here.

Nurturebox enables talent sourcing teams to source, engage and acquire top talent at scale. And don’t worry, there’s no tech knowledge required for integrating the tool into your recruitment stack. Unlike other automation tools, Nurturebox’s Chrome extension is a comprehensively easy-to-use platform which makes your life as a recruiter convenient. Here’s how the automation tool helps recruitment teams ace quality talent sourcing:

Identify your target candidates on LinkedIn and add them to sourcing campaigns with a single click.
Integrating your existing ATS is a matter of a few seconds, so you don’t need to bother about maintaining the pipeline database manually.
Candidate outreach at scale is now easier than ever. Engage your candidates via WhatsApp, LinkedIn or emails to appeal to their requirements.
Track your sourcing success metrics and know what works well for passive talent engagement.
A complete updated overview of your sourcing pipeline is accessible anytime, anywhere to anyone among your recruitment team.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly. ‍
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.‍
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

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Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.

Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.

Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.

About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Why should candidates apply for the position?
Highlight the growth opportunities
State the company vision and mission
Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

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Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.