After a few weeks of a break with the topic of recruitment automation, it's time for us to wrap up the subject! So, in the following paragraphs, we'll cover everything from what recruitment automation entails to its application, benefits, and, ultimately, how it will reflect on your business. Therefore, anyone reading the article will be well equipped to decide whether or not they will start leveraging automation technology for their HR efforts.
So, let's begin by explaining what recruitment automation is and what isn't. Unfortunately, a general opinion started to make that automation technology is equal to AI technology, which caused some confusion for recruiters worldwide. Automatically, many candidates started fearing this new technology, blaming it for making recruitment processes less human. However, even though both AI and automation work towards simplifying the recruitment process for the person executing it, they differ in several essential elements.
First of all, let's begin by saying that while AI is used for non-repetitive tasks, automation technology is solely used to eliminate repetitive work, and its job is based on commands and rules. However, AI has interactions with humans to learn from their previous experience, compare situations, and work accordingly. Therefore, knowing the difference between the two is vital for understanding the roles of each technology in the recruitment process. Ultimately, automation is here to do a lot when it comes to automating repetitive tasks and performing redundant work for you without taking on any decision-making process on itself. AI, on the other hand, is here to learn from behavioral patterns and make decisions accordingly.
Now that we know how automation works in general, it is easier to understand which recruitment-related tasks will be the most useful. Just like we've mentioned above, automation tools are most useful for repetitive tasks. And, such recruitment tasks revolve around keeping your candidates informed about the next steps in the process while maintaining your database organized.
More specifically, you will benefit from using automation tools for:
Automatically disqualifying candidates without creating enemies
Building long-lasting relationships with silver medalists
Engaging with candidates from open applications
Successfully collaborate with your colleagues
Even though we often speak about the importance of giving feedback to all candidates regardless of their stage in the recruitment process, we still witness disturbing statistics in the area. While 70% of candidates report never receiving any feedback for their application after the screening process, another 53% don't receive feedback after the interview phase. This is quite destructive for a company's reputation if we consider that more than 80% of applicants with a bad candidate experience will change their minds about the role or company they once liked.
And, because the technology has evolved so much, missing out on a chance to automate some repetitive tasks (in this case, automating your communication) would almost be silly. By leveraging automation features, you can keep in touch with your current candidates and use one of the preset automated reasons for disqualification and offer all your candidates a good experience with your company. All it takes is setting up all rejection reasons with matching email content and triggering them when appropriate. The more templates that you create, the more personalized experience you will provide to all your applicants.
When asked about it, most recruiters say it would be great to perform proactive hiring and keep in touch with their silver medalists. Yet, when asked about why they are not doing it, the answer is always the same: "We just don't have enough time at the moment..". And even though we're aware of the workload of HR departments worldwide nowadays, with the help of automation tools, it only takes a couple of hours and goodwill to turn things around and be more proactive with hiring.
Recruitment automation software enables you to automatically add your candidates to talent pools and move them through different stages of the pool pipeline. This allows you to always keep track of your candidate's progress in the pipeline and make sure they all receive messages suitable to them. Everything from the purpose of each pool or the automation action you would like to trigger in each stage of the pipeline is preset up once and can be used numerous times- any time the candidate possesses specific skills or attributes and would benefit from receiving your messages. This way, "we don't have time yet" is no longer a valid excuse for not being more proactive with hiring since it saves more of your time than it costs!
Another thing automation technology can be helpful for is the assistance it can provide for engaging with open applications. Open applications are undoubtedly a great source of quality candidates, and their whole purpose is to create relationships with potential candidates. However, many companies implemented the policy of accepting open applications, yet they don't seem to be leveraging them in any way. Unfortunately, this is such a waste of opportunity, and instead of improving your employer branding, it can negatively reflect on it! Therefore, automating your messages once a candidate submits their application for a specific department and adding different candidates to pools of candidates with similar interests can be highly beneficial for creating those meaningful and lasting relationships. So, similarly to the previous paragraph, you can leverage automation for providing your candidates with a more genuine and improved candidate experience!
Finally, to be successful at hiring new talent that would fit well within the team, recruiters need to smoothly collaborate with their colleagues. This means that leaving notes, tasks, or tags for themself and their colleagues to better understand all candidates is essential. With the crowded labor market that we are all working in, each job post attracts 250 applicants on average. Let's imagine that a recruiter has approximately 5 open positions at any given time - this soon brings us to the number of 1000 applicants at any given moment.
Without good planning and structuring, everyone can mix up some information and potentially lose valuable candidates. That is why setting up automated actions such as tasks or tags to your candidate profile once they reach a particular stage can make everyone involved with the hiring process more organized! Leave tags or open tasks for your colleagues, and always make sure to be on top of everything.
As you could have figured in the previous paragraph, automation technology can be used to simplify your day-to-day recruitment-related tasks. In addition, doing so automatically introduces some great benefits to the overall hiring process that you are offering to your candidates.
So here are some great benefits your candidates will experience if you decide to automate your recruitment efforts:
Boost productivity
Improve your scheduling
Improve the quality of hire
Improve candidate experience
From everything that has been listed in the paragraphs above, it is pretty evident that recruiters' productivity levels can increase significantly when implementing the right automation features. Whether it is due to automating your email communication with each candidate who submits a form or because you manage to collaborate with your colleagues more efficiently, it affects your productivity, leaving more time to focus on the strategic aspects of the job. Ultimately, the more productive recruiter, the more high-quality hires you can expect to have!
Scheduling is one of the most essential yet most time-consuming and repetitive tasks for any recruiter. Even though it seems pretty simple and straightforward at first glance, if we think about juggling several hundreds of candidates at once, this can become a tricky task. So, it is helpful to have a tool assisting your scheduling efforts, ensuring that you always show up prepared for all your interviews.
There are two ways to improve your scheduling thanks to automation:
These two features will ensure you schedule interviews with everyone you attempted to and never miss out on the link for online scheduling or other essential details.
Quality of hire depends on many factors like sourcing, attracting, and ultimately selecting top talent through a well-thought-out and structured hiring process. And during this complex process that takes many steps and can force recruiters to make many mistakes along the way, causing to slight decrease in the quality of hire, it is beneficial to have a tool that would minimize human error and improve it. The ability to automate many repetitive actions that are often a source of human error ( such as making sure that everyone received their rejection email) represents a huge advantage and drastically improves the quality of hire!
Ultimately, if you have a tool that minimizes your mistakes, improves your interactions with your candidates, and potentially wholly eliminates the "no feedback" rates for all applications, this can improve your candidate experience! Not only you can improve your feedback, but you can also be more proactive at engaging with your candidates and expanding your talent network for the future!
Even though mentioning all the benefits and applications of automating your recruitment efforts might sound attractive, when it comes to deciding whether to actually implement the solution or not, the ROI becomes essential. So, in the following paragraph, we'll be talking about how automating your recruitment process directly impacts your ROI.
As it may be relatively obvious from the word "automation," the feature, first and foremost, helps you and your recruiters save valuable time. Ultimately, by implementing automation, you can save time in multiple ways and save up to 35 working days per recruiter to perform other relevant tasks!
If you want to know the full calculation behind this number, check out What Is The ROI of Automating Your Recruitment?
Another element impacting your ROI is the improved candidate experience that we discussed in the paragraphs above. Candidate experience is a powerful predictor of your hiring success and even the ability to transform your future employees into a long-lasting workforce. Since everything starts with the hiring process, providing your candidates with a hiring process that will accurately depict what it will be like to work on the position they are applying for helps you select the best candidates for the job.
And the candidate that possesses the right culture fit, skill set, and relevant background is probably a future employee who is not so likely to switch jobs. Finally, how you approach candidates and your timely communication can help you improve candidate experience and find a better fit since you are more likely to attract those drowned to your communication style. Therefore, improving the quality of hire directly reflects on your ROI!
Finally, new technologies can sound scary and unknown territory for many HR professionals already used to perform their job in a certain way. However, the application of automation technology in recruitment is so broad, simple, and not intrusive for the candidates. Despite a common belief that automation technology can somehow make recruitment less human, this technological advancement only helps recruiters do the job they are already doing without introducing any new and unfamiliar decision-making.
