I have to manually sort through 348 applications for an open role, talk to hiring managers about new vacancies, and handle admin work. But this is nothing, I can still take up nurturing candidates and manually sourcing for fresh candidates in the second half of my day – said NO recruiter ever!
As is common knowledge, recruiters and talent acquisition specialists are mostly in over their heads with the amount of work they handle. The simplest way to reduce their workloads is by automating repetitive tasks like screening applications or sending emails to candidates—this frees up time significantly and allows them to focus on more important tasks.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I am a big believer in letting technology do the heavy lifting and recruitment is one area that can greatly benefit from this.
Baking in recruitment automation in your hiring processes means posting job openings to different job boards, parsing through resumes, sending timely updates, and uploading candidate data in half the time and half the manual effort. It also means that you’ll be sourcing for better-quality candidates faster.
Can your company battle skill gaps, talent shortage, and mass quitting with outdated recruitment tech stacks? Especially when your competitors are embracing modern recruitment and automation. I didn’t think so! Without further ado, let’s look at recruitment automation platforms and how they can improve your overall hiring process.
How to automate your complete recruitment process
It can be tricky to identify which areas of your recruiting cycle need improvement. As they say, too many cooks spoil the broth and too many tools might end up hampering your recruitment.
After a lot of research, we’ve put together a list of common yet important pain points of recruiters that can do well with automation! Here they are:
1. Automate distributing your jobs to multiple job boards
You have a job role that fell vacant. Time is short and you need to fill this role within a small window of time. What do you do? Re-use your previous, possibly outdated job description, manually post it on generic job boards, and wait for applications (which may not be of great quality) to pour in.
Now let’s add a layer of technology to this. You have a job role that fell vacant. You have a recruitment automation platform at your disposal. It can generate targeted job descriptions for you, cross-post your job postings to relevant career sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and others, form a strong talent pipeline and improve the talent pool quality. All in half or even lesser the amount of time it would take for you to do it manually!
Additionally, you can also use the insights and analytics provided by your tool to see which sourcing channels got you the highest number of qualified candidates. Spend more time and money specifically targeting those channels in the future. Optimize your hiring and find the best of the best out there.
2. Boost your candidate sourcing abilities
Marketing your job postings right is half the battle won when it comes to candidate sourcing. As seen above, recruiting software can help you reach a bigger, better talent pool by cross-posting your job descriptions to targeted job boards and social media channels.
You can tailor candidate searches based on what job role you’re hiring for with AI-based candidate matching algorithms, years of experience, or geographic location rather than manually constructing your own Boolean search strings.
You will have extra time to leverage social recruiting, especially when hiring for niche roles. Also, GenZ is predominantly a big user of social media. That’s where you should be focusing your recruiting efforts on. Social recruiting also allows you to find passive candidates before they’re actively looking for work.
All of this slashes your cost-per-hire and betters the quality of your hire, which come with other benefits like,
- Reduced employee attrition
- Increased employee performance
- Improved employee engagement
3. Keep track of all candidate applications with an ATS
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a life-saver for recruiters. And a majority of the recruitment automation platforms in the market can be integrated with popular ATSs like Lever, Naukri RMS, and Zoho Recruit.
An ATS enables you to stay organized and comes in handy when dealing with high-volume internal tasks. Some of the tasks include storing candidate applications and data in a central database, candidate pipeline visibility, tracking a candidate’s journey at each stage, syncing emails and calendars, and collaborating with your team on these tasks.
Some ATSs offer a candidate self-service portal where candidates can upload their resumes, cover letters, and other documents directly.
An ATS alerts your candidates about the next steps in their application process. You can also use existing candidate data from your ATS to see what hiring strategies are working and what needs to be changed.
4. Streamline and enhance the pre-screening process
The quickest way to vet a candidate’s resume and make sure all the skills mentioned pan out is by conducting skill assessments. A good coding assessment tool offers specific tests for the majority of the skill sets out there. Some tools also allow you to create custom tests of your own.
Evaluate candidates and determine their expertise/skill level and culture-fit, objectively. Auto-reject candidates who don’t meet the selection criteria. A major advantage of such tools is the ability to shortlist candidates solely based on their skills, thus eliminating any unconscious bias, whatsoever.
Any recruitment automation platform would integrate with the top pre-employment coding assessment tools in the market. You can schedule assessments and invite candidates to take the test, right from your automation platform instead of switching between different apps.
A tech hiring platform like HackerEarth can help you screen the very best developers with ease. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial and check out all the features of our coding assessment platform to see for yourself!
5. Eliminate the need for manually scheduling interviews
Another time-consuming task that probably rivals screening thousands of resumes manually, is scheduling interviews. For each shortlisted candidate, you have to consider a suitable date and time. More hassle if the candidate lives in a different time zone.
This is one part of recruiting that can benefit greatly from technology. A recruitment automation platform enables you to automate the interview scheduling process. You can set up interviews with candidates at your convenience, offer candidates the option to self-schedule their interviews and make use of auto-generated interview reminders, emails, and updates to be sent to your candidates.
Any guesses on how many hours were saved, here? My guess is a LOT and that’s good enough!
6. Nurture your candidates better to create a memorable experience
By using HR recruitment software, headcount planning and other recruiting platforms, you get to prioritize your work better. More importantly, you free up your time to handle more important tasks, like nurturing candidates, for instance. It is a vital aspect of recruitment and more often than not, we recruiters do not have enough time or the capacity to give it the attention it deserves.
Automated recruiting enables you to reply promptly to any emails, set up customized email sequences to continuously engage your candidates, schedule follow-ups, reminders, and alerts, and provide chatbots to give automated responses to FAQs, and simple queries. It streamlines the overall candidate communication.
This shows your candidates that you care about them. That you want to keep them in the loop through every stage of the hiring process. It creates a lasting first impression right at the beginning and enhances your employer brand.
5 Benefits of using recruitment automation platforms
The biggest benefit of using a hiring automation platform is employee retention. Gone are the days when your recruiting teams were willing to work insane hours to close those open roles with little to zero help from ancient recruiting tools. According to research, 50% of recruiters’ would shift companies if the other one had better recruiting software.
Before you can focus all your energies on attracting the best talent out there, the first step would be hanging on to your talented recruiters and getting them to stay! Additionally, online recruiting platforms come with a few more key advantages:
1. Reduces time-to-hire and improves the quality of hires
A major strain on a recruiter’s time and effort is going through mountains of applications. And a major advantage of using a recruitment automation platform (a.k.a. HR recruitment software) is that it can take care of screening applicants for you. It also comes with a resume parser to check if minimum qualifications are met.
Voila! Slashed your time-to-hire by a huge margin already. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what such tools bring to the table.
You get to screen a lot more applicants now since it is automated. You also get to identify better-qualified candidates due to detailed, efficient screening. Recruitment automation makes sure the good ones don’t slip through the cracks. As we see next, it can also help diversify your talent pools by tailoring your candidate searches to every role, pulling up profiles of passive candidates, and in general, improving the quality of your sourcing efforts!
2. Expand and diversify your talent pipeline
A recruitment automation platform helps you cast a wider net when sourcing fresh talent. You can post your job postings on a varied range of job boards and social media channels with just one click. Without hurriedly copying and pasting generic job descriptions, you now have a good amount of time to create targeted job postings. Consequently, it will improve the quality of your applicants.
This expanded search leads you to source prospective candidates beyond your organization’s network or existing talent pool. You can also spend time searching for, connecting, and building relationships with passive candidates who might be a good fit for your company.
3. Hire for niche technical roles
Automated recruiting enables you to parse resumes against a chosen set of keywords and screen those that are a good match. Moreover, this feature comes in handy especially when you need to hire for specialized roles. You can select keywords that match a particular job description or skill set. The tool will shortlist your candidates from there.
4. Create a memorable candidate experience
A recent report shows that GenZ prefers working with advanced recruitment technology, and 54% say they would drop out of the application process of companies with obsolete methods and complicated processes. The future of the workforce is GenZ. By not using a recruitment automation platform, you are alienating a majority of the available talent pool.
The best recruiting platforms offer several practical features. Popular ones include easy-to-use online application portals, timely updates every step of the way, chatbots to answer any queries, and automated email drips to build better relationships with your candidates. Making sure all your potential candidates have a great experience right from the start will help you seal the deal quickly and seamlessly.
5. Streamlines the complete hiring process
Any good hiring automation platform provides data for the entire recruiting lifecycle. Armed with this data, you can identify which parts of your hiring process are broken, what’s working, which hiring practices are giving the best ROI, and so on. Such tools help you make data-driven decisions and optimize your hiring process to be more efficient.
Automated recruiting for the win!
With automated recruiting, fewer items slip through the cracks. The efficiency, productivity, and morale of your recruiting team go up. Tech recruiting platforms ensure recruiters can focus their attention on matching candidates with the right job opportunities instead of on administrative tasks.
Well, what are you waiting for? This is your sign to start using a good recruitment automation platform!
