August 16, 2023
You need to hire for 8 new roles, but the last pool of sourced candidates got rejected entirely. You decide to give it another shot and assign a few more recruitment associates to find qualified candidates. The team gets busy maintaining the sourcing pipeline and screening candidates. When the time comes to schedule interviews, the selected candidates have already joined somewhere else. Weeks pass by, but you’re still left with unfilled positions.
Modern recruitment is not about employers, it’s centred around candidates. As a recruiter, you need to adapt to the fast-paced expectations of both candidates and your organization to acquire quality talent. Additionally, the heavy efforts put on managerial tasks around hiring need to be shifted to talent interaction, engagement and assessment.
But how do you do that?
The answer lies in recruitment automation. Top recruiters and hiring managers around the world are already leveraging this – and reported automation to be saving 90% of their time on administrative tasks (more than expected, right?)
A survey also suggests that HR managers lose 14 hours per week on tasks that can be automated. Saving time is one of the most crucial outcomes automation produces, but is surely not the only one. Improved quality of talent, more efficient recruitment processes, higher productivity, minimized cost and better candidate experience are just a few of the benefits – there’s a lot more recruitment automation offers to organizations no matter how big or small. In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the top 7 ways you can transform your recruitment process using automation.
Recruitment automation is the collective term for automating numerous hiring tasks that were earlier performed manually. Not only does automation save time and effort, but also helps optimize the overall recruitment process and hire better talent. Not to forget – automation significantly cuts down costs related to hiring while eliminating the tedious chores of recruiters, it’s a win-win in every dimension.
Unlike what a majority of professionals think, recruitment automation is not a replacement for recruiters, but a helping hand. While hiring candidates, you always look for areas with scope for improvement and rectify shortcomings. But the allocated resources, especially time – is always scarce. Recruitment automation enables hiring teams to do more with less time, effort and expenses. By streamlining mundane recruiting tasks and allowing talent teams to take data-backed decisions, automation plays a critical role in hiring.
Here are the aspects of recruitment automation that impact your overall hiring process as well as talent acquisition outcomes:
First things first, automation primarily caters to human errors and the corresponding dependencies on manual efforts. Recruitment automation ensures that HR teams get highly accurate data to inform their decisions. That’s the core reliability of technology – irrespective of which part of the business it is being used in. With automated processes, recruiters can eliminate mistakes and the rework and cost associated with them.
There are numerous examples – the same candidate being contacted twice by different members, missing out on engagement with candidates, the inconsistent flow of recruitment events and many more.
The efficiency, convenience and boosted productivity for recruiters should not be underestimated too.
No doubt recruiting teams have a lot on the plate at any given point in time, but communication with candidates should always be prioritized and automation helps in fulfilling this. Along with quick responses, several other recruitment chores can be automated that further enable users to focus more on the human side of hiring and improve their productivity. Team collaboration and process transparency are also achieved using automated recruiting processes, which are further useful in executing end-to-end talent acquisition strategies.
One of the most crucial reasons why recruitment automation should be leveraged in your hiring process is the ability to identify and recruit quality talent easily. With a majority of top-of-the-funnel recruitment tasks automated, hiring managers can allow investing more time and resources into evaluating candidates deeply – hence identifying talent which would not only satisfy the technical requirements but also fit in the company culture effectively.
As organizations are growing, recruiters need to hire at scale and hire top candidates which are mostly passive. Automation helps recruiters with repetitive mundane tasks which are more on the admin side of hiring. From reaching out to a large number of candidates at once, maintaining candidate databases to creating and sharing legal documents, offer letters, identity verification, onboarding formalities, joining letters and more – tedious tasks are taken care of. What’s equally important is the facility of driving personalized engagement with candidates through automation tools.
As a major chunk of repetitive and time-consuming tasks are automated, cutting down costs is a primary outcome. Additionally, the elimination of human errors and hence, the reworking of the same aspects – immensely helps in reducing recruitment costs (more than expected). As compared to a few years ago, HR software and tools are now significantly economical. Not to forget – the human resources cost is saved by boosting the recruitment team’s productivity and efficiency.
We often talk about recruitment automation playing a pivotal role in the hiring process and facilitating recruiters. But today’s landscape is more about keeping the candidate as the priority. What about the huge impact automation creates on the candidate experience? Let’s find out.
Over 55% of job seekers avoid applying to companies with negative reviews about candidate experience online. It is evident that a positive candidate experience can help you attract top talent to your company. From outreach to the interview process and quality of communication – everything matters while interacting and engaging with candidates. While manual processes are error-prone, automation helps in boosting efficiency and serves a prominent candidate experience.
Candidates earlier had to wait for weeks and months to hear from recruiters, and it was a mutual expectation. Fast forward to now, candidates have a number of choices, especially the qualified ones – as they are consistently being chased by recruiters. Recruitment automation enables organizations to set timelines well in advance for each job role. So modern candidates know when they can expect the recruitment cycle to progress and they can prepare accordingly. It is now immensely convenient for job seekers to plan their employment and not depend on any company or recruiter.
Once the candidate is sourced, they are automatically informed about the timelines, but what about the engagement throughout the recruitment cycle? Recruitment automation allows sharing timely hiring updates with candidates without fail. Additionally, nurturing candidates in your talent pool and recruitment pipeline is a productive practice. It helps in adding value, conveying company culture and ensuring candidates can set expectations upfront. 63% of candidates are dissatisfied with the communication involved in their recruitment process. When done at a high scale, recruitment automation enables candidates to be in constant touch with a company and delivers a positive candidate experience.
One of the most common concerns of candidates while getting recruited is the human bias in screening which can be minimized but not eliminated. This sometimes defies even the most skilled professionals from opportunities. However, recruitment automation solves this by eliminating human bias and screening all candidate profiles with the same predefined measures.
Therefore, candidates can be assured of fair screening and having the equal opportunity as anyone else to get hired for their desired role.
Recruitment automation tools like AI chatbots deliver prompt responses to candidates and help them avoid any confusion. At every stage of recruitment, right from application to onboarding – candidates’ queries get resolved easily and effectively which further leaves a positive experience. No matter whether a candidate is ultimately hired or not, they will still have a positive review of the company and recruitment process if the responses are quick and consistent.
A majority of candidates have the same reason for dropping off in the middle of the recruitment process - it takes too long. Recruiters leave candidates for weeks and even months of time while in the middle of the hiring stages, only to end up confusing or annoying them. With recruitment automation setup in place, candidates can be screened faster and engaged better and all thanks to admin chores being covered by tools – recruiters can solely focus on engaging and evaluating candidates. Hence, the recruitment cycle shortens and even becomes more consistent leaving candidates with prolific experience.
Recruitment automation involves a variety of solutions that together make hiring easier. As the recruitment funnel consists of different stages, and even companies have varying priorities depending upon their existing recruitment gaps – they can opt for multiple solutions. Here are the top use-cases of recruitment automation that help streamline talent acquisition:
One of the lengthiest and most heavy tasks for the recruitment teams is to track applicants and manage the application pipeline continuously. Collecting data from each candidate and storing it in the database manually for hundreds of candidates separately for each role, is a tiring task. Recruiters’ productivity is directly affected and they are left with less time to actually interact with candidates.
Application Tracking System (ATS) is a type of recruitment automation tool that solves this problem by tracking each candidate’s application throughout the recruiting process. For each open role – hiring managers and recruitment teams are allowed to access the recruitment status of any candidate at any point in time. An ATS plays a crucial role as it primarily makes the hiring cycle organized and also ensures you don’t miss out on any candidates as you never really know – from where quality talent arrives at your door.
After each round of recruitment is done for a candidate, the ATS software automatically updates the corresponding candidate’s status. Hence, for effective collaboration and tracking of talent – it’s a necessary aspect to automate.
Not only does recruitment automation solve your hiring funnel, but it also helps you draw candidates to the top of it. If you have been in the recruitment space for more than a year now, you would probably know how hectic sourcing the right candidates can become at times.
In case of active candidate sourcing through job boards, programmatic job advertising is the most effective use of automation. It basically helps organizations to run targeted ad campaigns without bothering about audience research or ad budget calculation. Everything is automated and this type of job advertisement allows recruiters to cut down ad budget significantly.
On the other hand, passive candidate sourcing through various social and professional platforms can also be made easy with automation. A sourcing automation tool facilitates recruiters to identify quality candidates and add them to sourcing campaigns within minutes. The candidates’ data extraction and database management are automated, adding up to the efficiency of recruitment.
Manual screening requires a lot of time. More importantly – human error plays a huge role in screening candidates and no matter how well defined the criteria are, some decisions will surely include bias. In order to scale your recruitment efforts and make them more efficient, AI-based profile screening automation helps you pre-screen hundreds of applications. Screening automation tools not only enable recruiters to save time by filtering applicants quickly but also ensure that all deserving candidates get a fair opportunity.
A candidate screening tool can be of different types – CV scanning and screening chatbots are the most popular ones. The process is the same for both of the tools, it involves collecting basic information related to the candidate’s qualifications, skills and experience, and matching the details with predefined criteria. Automating the pre-screening round means recruiters have a couple of huge benefits – they now need to screen with a small filtered set of candidates and they can spend more time evaluating them.
Sourcing and screening candidates are not the only activities you need before beginning your recruitment activities. As modern enterprises are primarily focusing on passive candidates - you need to persuade them with consistent nurture campaigns. And it’s not only limited to passive candidates, but your complete internal talent pool needs to be proactively engaged.
To amplify your recruitment outcomes, you cannot just interact with candidates – you need to form relationships. And it’s vital that you keep this independent from the hiring results. Having a nurturing mindset helps both recruiters and organizations in the long run.
A candidate engagement automation tool enables automated email sequences to keep their interest hooked to the position, and to ensure they are informed of each stage of the recruitment and its context.
Social channels have now become more effective than ever when it comes to finding and engaging with top talent. We all are aware of the prominence of LinkedIn in sourcing quality candidates, channels like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are also being leveraged by a large number of recruiters. No doubt social recruiting is a prolific strategy for acquiring passive talent – but how do you manage a number of different channels manually at scale? How do you identify and reach out to them?
Automation tools help you schedule your recruitment social posts that help you attract candidates to your job openings. On the other hand, various tools also enable data extraction from social platforms and automated outreach so that you can connect with passive candidates at scale and check out if they are available for switching roles.
Once a candidate is sourced and screened, it’s time for assessments. While creating those tests is often done by domain experts in the organization, recruiters face a lot of challenges in conducting those evaluation tests for all candidates who are sourced at different points in time. Pre-interview assessment automation tools solve this problem by conducting secure online tests. These tools handle the assessment from end to end covering the scheduling, evaluation and ranking of candidates based on their scores.
Especially while recruiting tech talent, assessments become all the more important and need a higher level of independent automation to allow organizations to conduct effective remote tests.
These tools allow recruiting teams to have a birds-eye view of their entire recruitment pipeline and as per the outcomes, they can quickly schedule interviews with candidates.
Organizations scheduling interviews manually end up putting a lot of time into communicating about the availability on both ends. Not to forget – the hassle created by rescheduling interviews. There’s just too much back and forth in the process and recruiters even lose out on top candidates in some cases.
The road to redemption? Automated interview scheduling – with simple and free tools like Calendly, hiring interviews can be set by candidates and interviewers themselves as the availability is transparent. As a result, recruiters do not need to waste their precious time communicating about interview slots with talent and interviewers.
Nurturebox offers a one-stop solution for recruiters to source, engage and hire candidates effectively. The end-to-end candidate sourcing and engagement automation tool is an intuitive plugin that integrates with your existing recruitment stack and helps you recruit passive candidates at scale. You can easily get started with sourcing candidates from platforms like Linkedin, outreach via multiple channels, add them to your engagement campaigns and manage your talent pipeline.
Recruitment
