Recruiting automation has emerged as a key technological trend in the industry to streamline recruitment processes and improve efficiency in this increasingly competitive job market.
As such, this ultimate guide will explore the ins and outs of recruiting automation, from its benefits to how you can implement it for your recruitment process.
What is Recruiting Automation?
Recruiting automation is the process of using technology to streamline the recruiting process at any stage. It aims at eliminating manual and repetitive tasks which can be time consuming for recruiters such as:
- Sourcing candidates
- Screening resumes
- Communication
- Scheduling interviews
- Running assessments
- Sending feedback
- And much more
By delegating these tasks to automation, recruiters can then focus on engaging and closing candidates.
Why should you automate your recruitment process?
The driving factors of recruitment automation
- Increasing Competition for High-Level Profiles
Finding first-rate talent has become an increasingly daunting task. With the widening skills gap and various industries hunting for similar roles, recruiters are struggling to find the right candidates.
- Talent shortage within HR departments
The highly competitive situation along with other factors has left recruiters feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied, contributing to a high turnover rate in the HR industry. This lack of recruiting talent only compounds the problem, making it even more difficult for organizations to attract and retain top talent.
- Lack of data-driven decision making
Recruiters face a daunting challenge in managing the overwhelming amount of candidate data available. The influx of information from various sources surpasses their ability to process it, leaving them with insufficient time to source, assess, and screen candidates.
- Time-consuming administrative tasks
Recruiters may spend a significant amount of time on administrative tasks such as scheduling interviews, sending follow-up emails, and collecting candidate information. Recruiting automation can help automate these tasks, freeing up time for recruiters to focus on more strategic tasks.
- Inefficient candidate communication:
Keeping candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process can be challenging, especially when recruiters have a high volume of candidates to manage. Recruiting automation can help maintain candidate engagement by providing real-time feedback and updates.
- Limited candidate reach
Traditional recruitment methods may not always reach a wide range of candidates. Recruiting automation can help expand the reach of recruitment efforts through social media and other digital channels.
The benefits of recruiting automation
- Increased productivity
Recruiting automation can help you save time by automating tasks such as resume screening and scheduling interviews. This can free up time for recruiters to focus on more strategic tasks, such as sourcing and building relationships with candidates.
- Reduced Time-to-Hire
As you save hours of work and gain efficiency in sourcing, reaching out and screening candidates. You will inevitably speed-up the moment you hire the right talent for your job openings.
- Improved Candidates and Hire Quality
Leveraging recruiting automation in your sourcing phase ensures you to identify and engage with the most qualified profiles for the position. As a result, you get a better quality of hire and enhance the organization's global performances.
- More Diversity
We all have cognitive bias that leads to unconscious discrimination during a manual hiring process.
"50% of recruiters think their companies could be doing more to ensure their hiring process is fair and unbiased" according to a 2019 Entelo study on Recruiting Automation.
Machines are less likely to be impacted by such phenomena since they focus on relevant data such as experiences, education and skills without taking into consideration ethnicity, gender, age or any other irrelevant data.
This enables many recruiters to source, engage and hire candidates with more fairness and build teams with more and more diversified backgrounds.
- Improved candidate experience
Using recruiting automation can create a more positive candidate experience by providing real-time feedback and updates, as well as streamlining the application process. In addition, saving time on repetitive tasks allows recruiters to spend more time on building connections with potential candidates.
- Cost-effective
Instead of outsourcing with costly recruiting agencies or spending long days on manual and repetitive tasks, recruitment automation will save tremendous time per week and improve your hiring performances. As a result, it can save money and reduce the overall cost per hire.
- Improved data collection and analysis
Automating recruitment stages helps recruiters collect and analyze information throughout the hiring process and make data-driven decision making. This can provide insights into the effectiveness of different sourcing channels, recruitment strategies, and candidate engagement.
- Scalability
Recruiting automation can help recruiters manage a high volume of candidates more effectively. This can help recruiters scale their recruitment efforts and handle larger candidate pools, without sacrificing the quality of the hiring process.
The misconceptions of automating recruitment
While recruiting automation can provide many benefits, there are also some misconceptions that can lead to misunderstandings about the technology. Here are some common ones about automating recruitment:
- It replaces human recruiters
As for marketing and sales automation, recruiting automation is designed to assist recruiters, not replace them. While it can help streamline certain tasks, recruiters still play a crucial role in building relationships with candidates and making hiring decisions.
- It eliminates bias
While automation helps to reduce bias by standardizing the screening process, it is not a complete solution. Bias can still be introduced at other stages of the recruitment process, such as during the interview stage.
- It is a one-size-fits-all solution
In reality, different organizations have different recruitment needs and may require customized solutions that are tailored to their specific requirements.
- It is expensive
While there may be upfront costs associated with implementing automation, such as purchasing software and training employees, the long-term benefits can outweigh the costs.
- It reduces the quality of hire
While it is important to maintain a balance between automation and human involvement, recruiting automation can actually help improve the quality of hire by standardizing the screening process and providing data-driven insights.
9 ways to automate your recruitment process
1/ For Job postings
Many Applicant tracking systems (ATS) offer automated job posting features. It allows you to write your job advertisement once to post it across multiple job boards with a single click instead of manually copy-pasting it yourself.
Among the most popular ATS, you can find GreenHouse, Workable, or Lever.
2/ For Candidate Sourcing
Candidate sourcing automation tools helps you proactively identify potential candidates who match your candidate persona. These tools allow you to filter candidates based on criteria like job title, location, industry, skills and so on.
LinkedIn Recruiter combined with Leonar make a great duo to find and select the most promising talents thanks to their filtering complementarity and AI features.
3/ For Pre-screening
When job seekers apply to your job postings, you can give them a survey to fill with qualifying questions. The purpose of pre-screening qualifying questions is to assess whether a candidate meets the basic qualifications for the job, such as relevant experience, education, and skills. By asking these questions upfront, you can save time and resources by focusing on the most promising candidates and avoiding those who don't meet the minimum requirements.
For example, you can ask “Have you worked in a similar industry or with similar clients before?”, “Do you have a driver license?” or “Do you speak Spanish fluently?”.
You can automatically set these questions directly on the job boards or from your ATS that will automatically incorporate them into your job postings.
4/ For Resume Screening
With an Applicant Tracking System, you can also scan and parse resumes and job applications you receive. It looks for keywords, skills, and experience that match the requirements of the job. ATS can also be programmed to filter out unqualified candidates based on specific criteria, such as education level or years of experience.
You can also use Machine Learning technology to analyze past hiring data to identify patterns and predict which candidates are most likely to succeed in a specific role. This can help automate the screening process by providing a ranked list of qualified candidates based on their qualifications and past performance.
5/ For Multi-channel Communication
Whether you are contacting candidates for the first time, sending follow-ups or rejecting candidates from the process, copy-pasting the same message to hundreds of talents is time consuming. So you better use a multi-channel communication automation tool like Leonar.
With a multi-channel communication automation tool like Leonar CRM, write your messages and follow-ups templates once, launch the outreach campaign, and work on something else while the software is running.
6/ For Interview Scheduling
You can use scheduling software, ATS or even chatbots to automate interview scheduling and save time on endless back and forth messages to find a common availability time. They also send automatic reminders to both the interviewer and candidate to ensure that they do not forget about the appointment.
Along with a communication automation tool, you can incorporate the link to your calendar in your automated messages to let them book the interview and all you’ll need to do is conduct the interviews.
If your ATS doesn’t have this feature, Doodle or Calendly are excellent scheduling software with a freemium offer.
7/ For One-Way Video Interviews
Also called asynchronous interviews, one-way video interviews are a type of job interview that can be conducted remotely using video conferencing software. In a one-way video interview, the candidate records their responses to a set of predetermined questions and submits the video recording to the recruiter or hiring manager for review.
One-way video interviews can be an efficient and cost-effective way to screen candidates, especially for companies with large numbers of applicants or geographically dispersed teams.
8/ For Candidate Assessment
Automating the candidate assessment can help recruiters and hiring managers save time and resources by automating the assessment process and providing objective insights into candidate performance.
Use assessment software to automate candidate assessment tasks, such as personality tests, cognitive ability tests, or skills assessments. The software will provide you with a detailed assessment report you can use to evaluate the candidates fit with the role.
It can take various forms such as an online skills assessment, online games, personality tests or cognitive ability tests.
9/ For Reporting
In the case of reporting, you can automate the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting recruitment metrics and data. Recruiting reporting automation can help hiring managers and you to make data-driven decisions, identify areas for improvement, and track the success of recruitment initiatives.
Every recruiting software has their own reporting features. Some, like ATS and of Business Intelligence software, enables you to centralize all your recruiting metrics and analytics into a single and centralized dashboard.
How can Leonar CRM automate your recruiting process?
As the talent wars intensify, the ability to leverage technology effectively may be the key to success for organizations looking to secure the best talent available.
Which is why, as a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) software, Leonar can automate several tasks in the recruitment process to help you build and maintain relationships with top talents.
Here are some examples of what you can automate with it:
- Candidate sourcing: Leonar provides you unique filters and scoring system in order to quickly select the best potential candidates to engage with.
- Candidate engagement: you can automate multi-channel sequences with personalized messages, follow-ups through LinkedIn messages, InMails and emails. You can also choose to manually validate a message before sending it.
- Communication management: instead of checking your incoming messages from candidates through multiple inboxes, we automatically centralize all your communication channels in one place.
- Pipeline management: Leonar can automatically manage candidate pipelines by tracking candidate progress.
- Talent pool management: you can automate talent pool management by easily adding, removing, and categorizing candidates in the CRM system for future hiring needs.
- Reporting: you can get a complete dashboard of your multichannel outbound recruiting performances per recruiter and per campaign. You can also set weekly performance goals and see your progress.
Recruiting automation won’t replace recruiters, far from it.
But by automating these tasks, it can help you improve your recruitment process, focus on building stronger relationships with candidates, and ultimately, make better hiring decisions.
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