The Role of Automation in the Recruitment Process

Between year-end drives to fill open positions and setting goals for the future year, there is seldom a season when recruiters are not trying to fulfill a time-sensitive target. To get on top of this "always on" recruitment scenario, companies began their initial forays into recruitment automation.

Automation is revolutionizing recruitment by streamlining the recruitment process and leading it towards a better future. Let's now understand what automation is and how it benefits the recruiters.

What is Recruitment Automation?

Recruitment automation is a process that involves the automation of the steps in the recruitment process. It relieves the recruiting team of repetitive and manual tasks and allows them to focus on other crucial aspects of the process.

It also helps the hiring managers streamline and speed up candidate placements by implementing AI tools and platforms for candidate sourcing, CV screening, applicant tracking, conducting and scheduling interviews, candidate relationship management, and enabling data-driven hiring.

Why is Automation in Talent Acquisition Necessary?

As a recruiter or an employer, you always have more to do in areas that have scope for improvement. And with increasing hiring needs, it is challenging to meet the growing expectations. This is precisely where recruitment automation proves to be helpful. You can be more productive in your operations just by automating specific time-consuming and repetitive tasks.

Moreover, agency recruiters and talent acquisition experts across the globe are focusing on automating their recruitment workflow. They help organizations acquire quality talent within a lesser time span, improve candidate experience, and build rich talent pools. As a result, recruiters can achieve higher candidate closures.

Fast Fact - According to a study conducted by LinkedIn, 56% of talent professionals and HR managers say that new interview tools are the top trending factors that impact how they hire.

Recruitment automation is creating a buzz across sectors, and here are some of the most promising ones.

Benefits of Using Recruitment Automation

Improved productivity: Automation empowers recruiters by freeing their time from the most repetitive and time-consuming tasks, leaving them to work more efficiently on more essential duties.

Reduced cost per hire: Automation helps optimize strategies for large-scale recruiting on a lesser budget by freeing up the resources and making them more productive.

Faster and quality hiring: Recruiting automation improves hiring quality and speed by automating repetitive tasks like candidate screening, sourcing, interview scheduling, and applicant tracking.

Better candidate experience: By automating certain steps, recruiters can build a stronger relationship with the candidates and deliver faster responses.

Let’s understand where does automation fits within a typical recruitment process.

5 Steps that can be Automated in Your Recruitment Process

Various stages in the recruitment process could be automated or semi-automated. Most successful organizations and start-ups already use recruiting automation in their hiring procedures. Here are five stages of a typical recruitment process that automation can simplify.

1. Candidate sourcing

Sourcing refers to locating and qualifying active and passive candidates who haven’t applied to a given job position. Though recruiters and employers can make online and offline efforts to source candidates, it wouldn’t suffice without the support of AI and automated sourcing tools.

Some of the most widely used manual talent sourcing channels include conducting and attending job fairs and seminars, job advertisements in print media, and gathering referrals. With the development of the internet, online sourcing methods such as job boards, job websites, professional communities, social job networking platforms, CV databases, and job marketplaces started gaining fame. With further advancements in technology such as AI and automation, candidate sourcing could be even more streamlined with targeted talent search strategies that enable scraping websites and databases and fetching candidate profiles.

2. Candidate screening and shortlisting

Candidate CV screening is one of the most challenging steps in talent acquisition, occupying a significant amount of a recruiter’s productive time. When HR teams receive thousands of CVs it becomes a challenge to go through each one. This is when automation gives a set of scalable solutions. Here are the most commonly used CV screening techniques.

Automated prescreening tests: Helps eliminate candidates who do not qualify for the basic requirements.

Resume parsing software: Helps rank and grade the most likely CVs based on the comparison of the keywords present in the JD with the CVs.

Online talent assessment software: Helps conduct aptitude, personality, technical, and job-specific skill assessments using job simulations.

Here the automated screening tools manage all the steps from scheduling, sending notifications, and conducting the tests to generating the test results. They also come with a dashboard feature that can enable searches, send important notifications, and provide periodical reports.

3. Applicant tracking and building a talent pool

Tracking each applicant’s application status and creating an in-house talent pool is one of the vital recruitment steps. As this process is data-heavy, HR professionals are automating this process with the help of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

The system manages applicant data by keeping track of everything from when a candidate applies to when he or she is employed or rejected. It also works as a data repository as it stores and helps fetch data related to all applicants, thereby acting as a talent pool. Several ATSs these days have an easy-to-use user interface with a dashboard where you can search and stay updated regarding day-to-day activities. Recruiters can also receive necessary notifications and reports. Further, ATSs have integrations with interview scheduler tools, CRMs, CV screening, online talent assessment tools, and an integrated platform for candidate CV uploading.

4. Interview scheduling and automation

Scheduling interviews manually involves several back-and-forth communications with the candidates and calendar sharing. A recruitment automation solution saves time and creates a better experience for candidates and recruiters.

Robotic interviews can help conduct automated virtual interviews and prescreening interviews. Here an AI bot enables feeding a set of questions and the assessment method using which the algorithms can be trained to deliver the interview results.

The main drawback that comes with robotic interviews is the technology is still under development. Therefore, robotic interviews are no alternatives to traditional interviews instead they are uses as a supporting tool to conduct prescreening interviews and it is recommended to analyze the recorded versions of such robotic interviews to make hiring decisions. Further, these tools deliver periodic reports on the interview feedback so that you can work on improving this step.

5. Candidate relationship management

HR teams and recruiters must establish a relationship with candidates by communicating effectively. A typical acquisition process includes initiating a conversation, sending notifications, email updates, status updates regarding the recruitment process, answering queries, and sending offer letters. Companies are now looking at automation to unlock efficiencies in this manually-intensive process.

Automation saves time by providing templates to kickstart bulk notifications and emails with a tinge of personalization for engaging with each applicant—a task that can quickly be done via a candidate relationship management system. The benefits are manifold—improved efficiency, hiring process optimization, better candidate experience, and shorter candidate hiring cycles.

Fast fact- According to the Gartner 2019 Artificial Intelligence Survey, seventeen percent of organizations use AI-based solutions in their HR function and another 30% will do so by 2022.

Final takeaways

Automation is the future of recruiting. A recruiter armed with tech can efficiently refine the recruitment process, mitigate biases, eliminate redundant steps, and effectively engage with top talents. Another increasingly popular aspect is automation by outsourcing hiring where an AI enabled recruitment management suites serve as a one-stop hiring solution.

In summary, recruitment automation helps detect top-notch candidates, lowers resource burnout, and expedites hiring time. Most importantly, it empowers independent recruiters and organizations by giving them a competitive edge to filter and network with ideal candidates easily.

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