Just like with implementing any other new feature or technology, automation is no different when it comes to the importance of measuring its effectiveness and the direct impact it will have on your ROI. Since most recruiters face the reality of having to justify their investments to the management, this article will provide you with sufficient information about why implementing automation will simplify the work of each recruitment and bring a significant increase in revenue.
Despite the difficulty of sometimes measuring the success of the entire recruitment process from start to finish due to many qualitative aspects, we will try to give you the most tangible revenue outcomes when it comes to automating your process.
There are two significant benefits of automating your recruitment process; automated features significantly save time spent hiring new talent and increase candidate experience for applicants involved in the process. As we already know, both of these reflect on a company's ROI, but in the following paragraphs, we will give you some specifics behind how exactly it reflects.
It is no secret that by automating some of your day-to-day tasks, you will save time, reflecting on saving money. But how much time and money are we exactly talking about?
Here are some elements of recruiters day to day jobs where automation could help them save time by:
Automating online communication
Automating tasks
Automating assessments
One of the things that recruiters spend a lot of time on is writing and sending out emails. Even though it is hard to determine a specific number of emails sent by recruiters, some sources found that recruiters, on average, send out about 100 to 200 emails weekly, which translates into between around 7000 and 8000 emails per year. In addition, for every 10 emails, there is probably at least one text message, and for every three emails, there is perhaps one survey sent to candidates. This adds up to around 2400 surveys sent per recruiter each year and about 700 to 800 text messages sent yearly.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM's) HR Knowledge International, national averages across all industries and employer sizes tend to fluctuate between 30 to 40 open requisitions per recruiter at any one time. But, this number jumps to several thousand requisitions per year. And, this is where automation enters the room.
By automating your online communication with the candidates and daily tasks related to recruitment, you can save a lot of valuable time and money. More specifically, if you manage to automate these tasks and eliminate workload by at least 20% (which is a rough estimate, the number is quite likely to be higher in reality). This means that your recruiters could spend one day less per week performing the tasks we mentioned. Ultimately, this leads to significant savings for the company and results in more time that recruiters can focus on the strategic aspect of their job.
In total, you are saving around 35 working days yearly per recruiter to spend on other vital tasks. When it comes to money, it equals around 30 000$ when hourly fees of recruiters and increased productivity are taken into the equation. And this is only for one recruiter! So, it's safe to say that automation really reflects positively on your ROI!
(Source: talscale.com)
If the previous section wasn't enough evidence for you to start screaming for automation, in the following paragraph, we'd provide you with some more qualitative elements of automation that will positively impact your candidate experience and indirectly affect your ROI.
Even though there are always some skeptics out there claiming that new technologies, including automation, decrease human touch, we would argue differently. While automating your emails might indeed sound less human at first glance, it is the ability to craft them and automate their sending that makes it way more efficient but not even slightly less as human.
But let's dig deeper into how automation works towards establishing a better candidate experience. There are multiple ways in which you can increase candidate experience thanks to automation:
You've probably heard quite a lot about the importance of first impressions in your life. From childhood all the way to first dates and job interviews. In pretty much every industry or part of your life, first impressions are what increases your chances for success. Yet, we tend to forget about it when it comes to building relationships with our candidates.
Even more so, employers rank first impressions as the second most important criteria (24%) when assessing candidates. But when it comes to their first impression of candidates, they somehow think it's less critical. More specifically, 63% of candidates report dissatisfaction with communication after applying for a job. However, thanks to automated auto-response messages, you can make sure to always provide positive first impressions by simply thanking your candidates for submitting their application and letting them know about the upcoming steps.
Similar to how important first impressions are, so is well-organized and informative communication in every step of your recruitment process. However, this may sound like a dream to a recruiter who is simultaneously handling a couple hundred candidates while hiring for five to six positions. In this situation, automation can play a significant role.
By setting up different automated messages scheduled for each step in the recruitment process, candidates feel more informed and involved, making you have less work with manually informing each candidate. And most importantly, less space for making a mistake and leaving someone out of the communication. This becomes pretty plausible, especially for a recruiter dealing with hundreds of applications daily.
Performing a structured interview experience is one of the most important things recruiters need to take care of when hiring new employees. Besides the importance of structured interviews to benefit their quality, a well-prepared interview also increases candidate experience. With the help of automated actions, you can automatically set up scorecards in the interview phase and make sure to give your candidates the experience they deserve while collecting all information in a structured way. This can be done for various types of interviews and sets of questions, from behavioral questions to motivational or problem solving or any other group of questions you might think of to properly assess candidates.
Finally, candidate experience doesn't end once you hire the desired candidate. With the job market being as competitive as today, good relationships with the rest of the candidates became more crucial than ever. However, as much as these relationships may be necessary, it is sometimes challenging to work on them with a daily workload. Therefore, the ability to automatically add specific candidates to a pool once they reach a certain step in the recruitment process; and from there, triggering automatic engagement in the form of emails and messages become highly beneficial - both from the candidate experience and from an organizational point of view.
At first glance, candidate experience is hardly measured in objective numbers and direct return on investment. That is why many companies still neglect their value and focus on explicit parameters impacting their revenue. However, for anyone working in the field, it is evident that the abilities as mentioned above can positively impact revenue.
By creating a positive candidate experience, companies can count on having more relevant applicants, building a wider talent pool for future openings, increasing the number of referrals, and ultimately reducing the cost of job advertisements. All this eventually leads to hiring more qualified candidates for the job in less time.
Ultimately, a common goal for everyone involved in hiring, whether they represent the management or the recruiters on the floor, should be to seek the optimal solution for faster yet more efficient hiring. If you want to see how talentLyft can help you make this attempt a reality, sign up for our free trial or request a demo from our team.
