If you’re considering recruiting automation because your recruitment and selection process is taking longer than you’d like, you’re not alone.
Harvard Business Review points out that a top complaint from HR personnel focuses on how difficult hiring is. It also mentions that most of the $20 billion that companies spend on HR vendors is allocated to hiring, suggesting that both time and costs hinder recruiters.
With that in mind, is it any wonder that we want to speed up the recruitment process?
Thankfully, there’s an answer to reducing your time and cost per hire—and that answer is recruiting automation.
Read on to find out exactly how recruiting automation will revamp your hiring process!
Table of contents
- What is recruiting automation?
- Why use recruitment automation?
- Recruiting automation driving factors
- Benefits of automating the recruiting process
- 8 recruiting automation approaches to make hiring easier
- Automate the recruitment process, save time, and make better hiring decisions
- ✅ Automate recruitment with the help of skills testing
What is recruiting automation?
Recruiting automation is a technology that helps organizations automate recruiting tasks or HR activities that take much of the recruiter’s time. These tasks may include creating job postings, sourcing job candidates, evaluating their skills, assessing their resumes, conducting interviews, and more.
Automation tools used in recruiting can work independently or integrate with other recruitment automation software you use to put repetitive processes on autopilot.
Why use recruitment automation?
Various organizations and businesses are already using recruiting automation approaches in their recruitment processes. According to a report, AI will be embedded in 50% of jobs by 2020 to support various recruiting processes.
Organizations aiming to outdo their rivals when it comes to hiring top talent will use recruiting automation processes to get the upper hand.
These organizations are typically looking to improve their recruiting process and achieve better results to hire top talent with ease.
HR personnel that also want to avoid certain biases during the recruiting process will also use recruiting automation processes. This is because top tech recruiting tools that help to automate the recruiting process can give an organization an objective perspective on their candidates.
Recruiting automation driving factors
So, why is recruiting automation needed? Well, various factors contribute to the rise of and need for recruiting automation. Here are the two main factors:
1. Competition
The increase of competition between organizations to source and take on top talent sometimes leaves businesses no choice but to turn to recruiting automation. It’s a great way to win the recruitment race and make the best hire for your vacancy before your competition snaps up the candidate you might have been interviewing.
2. Data overload
When hiring, the influx of data, information, and facts that need to be processed by HR personnel is immense.
For example, each corporate job offer attracts 250 resumes on average. This a lot of work for HR personnel, who will have to go through each resume meticulously and at speed.
Recruiters and hiring managers need other means to speed up the way they analyze candidate data, and using recruitment automation tools is the ideal way to achieve this.
Recruiting automation is a solution for various recruiting challenges. But if you’re wondering how else you’ll benefit from implementing recruiting automation strategies, they also provide various other advantages.
Benefits of automating the recruiting process
If you’re still unsure whether you should invest in recruiting automation approaches, here are some of its advantages.
1. The data collected by recruiting automation is reliable
Recruiting automation offers reliable approaches to hiring.
When you use hiring automation, you’ll notice that it can eliminate unconscious human bias (which we’ve touched on earlier) by giving you access to data and helping you analyze it. This means your hiring decisions are less likely to be subjective or biased towards certain candidates, as AI tools can be more reliable in this sense.
Recruiting automation is also more efficient than traditional recruiting methods, helping you to simplify mass communication with multiple candidates.
2. Improves on manual resume screening in some ways
Manual resume screening is one task that might be better left to a recruiting automation approach. Why?
Because it’s less time-consuming and more efficient. Automated resume screening typically involves keyword analysis and helps you focus on those candidates who have indicated they have the specific skills required.
However (yes, there’s a ‘but’ coming here), the fact that some candidates might use an excessive number of keywords deliberately to trick automated resume screening tools means you might end up approving a candidate who doesn’t have the skills they say they do.
3. Saves time and lowers your time to hire
One big plus for using recruiting automation is that you’ll save a lot of time and won’t need to worry about repetitive tasks.
You will no longer need to spend hours looking at resumes manually. You’ll no longer need to tailor all of your outgoing emails to selected candidates manually. You won’t have to worry about tailoring answers to your candidates’ individual questions (if they have the same queries as a previous candidate, for instance).
This, in turn, will significantly reduce your time to hire.
4. Helps you discover top talent for your organization
With 86% of companies planning to invest in intelligent sourcing software, automating talent sourcing can help them improve their targeted recruitment efforts and find exceptional candidates for their businesses.
Recruitment automation is ideal for evaluating top talent and deciding whether they are a good fit for your organization.
8 recruiting automation approaches to make hiring easier
We have lined up some of the best recruiting automation approaches here, which will make your hiring process simpler.
Keep reading to get some ideas and start automating your recruitment processes.
1. Use skills testing platforms to find the most qualified applicants
Before you decide to take your candidate through to the next stage, you’ll want to automate the process of evaluating their skills. This is the best time to use a skills test platform like TestGorilla to make reliable, fast, and suitable hiring decisions for your organization.
TestGorilla will help you:
- Make bias-free hiring decisions
- Reduce your time to hire
- Enable you to analyze your candidates’ skills data easily, and
- Help you to compare top candidates
With a vast selection of regularly enhanced skills tests, TestGorilla is the best way to automate skills evaluation. It’s better than resume screening and the results are always accurate.
Want to know more about how to use skills tests to improve your hiring? Check out our comprehensive recruiter’s guide to pre-employment assessments.
2. Use AI-powered applicant tracking systems for recruiting automation
If you’re looking for an efficient way to manage and keep track of the interview process, you might already know that an ATS is what you’ll need. But did you know that current ATS systems feature AI (artificial intelligence) software that you can leverage to enhance your recruiting process?
ATS powered by AI not only assists you in the process of filtering your applicants, but you can also use it to send recruitment messages and manage conversations with your candidates. Thus, they streamline repetitive tasks such as these and ensure they are carried out efficiently.
3. Use pre-screening approaches like chatbots to save time
A long time to hire is one of the biggest complaints by candidates and HR personnel, but you can reduce this by using pre-screening approaches and tools.
An example of a popular pre-screening tool to help with this is a chatbot, which works by asking your candidates pre-determined questions.
As they can interpret your candidates’ answers, you’ll be able to reduce your time to hire. In addition, it helps you pre-screen your candidates quickly.
4. CRM systems are ideal for recruitment automation
Once you’ve got past the pre-screening stage, you’ll need a way to stay in contact and maintain your relationships with your candidates. This is where a relationship management system can be useful. They help with:
- Making hiring faster
- Enabling you to automate tasks
- They give you insights into how efficient your hiring process has been with analytics, and
- Help you communicate effectively with your candidates
The surveys, analytics, and data collection offered by CRM tools also mean you can focus your time on quality candidates as they inform you where you should focus your recruiting efforts.
5. Use social media platforms like LinkedIn which feature AI tools
As 98% of HR personnel use social media platforms, it’s clear this is a popular approach to automating the hiring process. In addition, social media platforms like LinkedIn also feature artificial intelligence software that lets you know if you’re hiring the right candidate for your vacancy and help you save time.
Explore the Talent Solutions data and insights option on LinkedIn, for instance, which will give you insight into top talent suitable for your team.
6. Improve candidate communication with automated messages
Whether you’re planning to invite a candidate into the next step or regretfully inform them that they’re not moving forward in the process, ongoing communication is important.
If you’re pressed for time, it makes sense to create autoresponders or templated messages. While it’s best to avoid them as much as possible, autoresponders can still be used effectively in recruiting. For example, you can use a short automated message to remind a candidate about an upcoming interview.
7. Get feedback quickly from hiring managers and interviewers with automation
Get feedback quickly from hiring managers and interviewers with automation
Assessing and evaluating candidates soon after an interview has a two-fold benefit: it improves your time to hire and helps hiring managers provide feedback more effectively because the interview is still fresh in their minds.
You can fast-track this step in the recruitment process through automation. For example, you can schedule an email with candidate scorecards for the hiring managers an hour or two after the interview.
8. Automate employee onboarding
A good onboarding experience is important to make new employees feel welcomed and valued by your organization.
However, onboarding employees manually can be time-consuming. Imagine onboarding ten new employees at once!
The good news is there are onboarding automation tools that can help streamline the onboarding process, such as sending welcome emails, setting up meetings with their teams, and sharing documentation in the employee portal.
Recommended reading: Automate your recruitment like a pro with the right tool. Check out our hiring team’s guide to recruitment tools.
Automate the recruitment process, save time, and make better hiring decisions
Although recruiting top candidates can take a long time, remember that there are various ways to make the process faster. Recruiting automation is the way forward, helping you to:
- Collect reliable data
- Improve diversity hiring
- Save time, and
- Discover top talent for your organization
And don’t forget to explore our skills tests either. They are a great way to streamline your candidate skills assessment, reduce hiring bias, decrease your time to hire, and automate your recruiting process even further.
Our guide to candidate skills assessment tests has all the information recruitment teams need to make more informed hiring decisions faster and with greater confidence.
