A winning strategy to upscale hiring: Recruitment automation
The need for automating recruitment
Recruiting top talent is crucial for maintaining high levels of productivity and innovation within a company. As the job market becomes increasingly competitive, companies need to be able to attract them and quickly fill open positions.
However, the top talents entering today’s job market belong to the tech-savvy Generation Z. They have grown up with technology, and so, to attract them, you need to match their expectations of convenience, speed, and personalisation in their job search process.
Also, recruitment is demanding. It consumes time and is costly, particularly when done manually.
Recruiting automation comes as a relief and has emerged as a game-changer, transforming the way companies hire talent. With the increasing competition for top talent, recruiters are turning to automation to upscale their recruitment efforts.
Benefits of recruitment automation
Diamonds in the rough are waiting to be found, and will propel your company to new heights. What is required is to empower recruiters to find them. Free up their time, and allow them to build relationships and sell the company’s unique value proposition to potential candidates. Let automation tools take care of other mundane, time-consuming tasks. They are very capable of mass processing at high speeds with remarkable accuracy. Here are some ways recruitment automation tools can benefit you:
Effective use of time, cost and human resources: A recruiter’s to-do list is long: resume parsing, candidate communication, interview scheduling, job advertising, documentation, etc. Recruitment automation relieves recruiters of these tedious activities, allowing them to spend more time with applicants and on meaningful responsibilities.
Enhance productivity: There are thousands of job applicants and not much time. Without recruitment automation tools, hiring would have taken many more hands and hours. Automation tools operate with speed and accuracy, making the hiring process more streamlined and productive.
Increase diversity: Talent knows no colour, race, gender, or location. Unconscious bias sometimes sneaks in on human assessments. Thankfully, automated solutions can help eliminate any potential prejudice. By screening candidates unbiasedly, recruitment automation tools help build a more diverse talent pipeline.
Improve quality of hire: With applications pouring in on various job portals, sourcing suitable ones from among those is best left to automation. A positive beginning sets a positive tone for the hiring journey for candidates as well. Even at subsequent recruitment stages, automation tools can help filter the most qualified candidates much faster and with a higher skill-role match than humans can. With quality candidates passing down the recruitment funnel, the quality of hire naturally improves.
Enhance candidate experience: An employer’s brand, a smooth hiring process, effective communication, prompt responses, and transparency enhance the candidate experience. In a candidate-centric market, this is a key factor in hiring success.
Enhanced employer brand: Digitally savvy and spoilt for choice, this generation is hooked to mobile phones and social media, constantly judging companies and looking out for the brand that vibes with them.Your social media campaigns, work culture, hiring process smoothness, promptness of communication, etc., are all up for judgement. You want to leave no stone unturned in building a strong brand image.
What can be automated
Recruiting is a complex process with many moving parts. To ensure a successful outcome, all components of the recruitment machine need to work efficiently. Here are the tasks of the hiring process that can be automated to boost efficiency and improve your overall recruitment results.
Programmatic job advertising: To meet hiring goals, recruiters face tight budgets and time constraints. They keep looking for quality candidates despite a growing flood of hurdles at practically every level of the hiring process.
Technology can help them find excellent candidates from the start.
Programmatic job (or recruitment) advertising targets the most qualified job seekers by placing the most relevant job ads on appropriate channels at the right time and at the right price.
The market has witnessed a steady rise in recent years and is expected to grow to a $7.62 billion industry by 2028 at an annual CAGR of about 31%.
Candidate sourcing: Who would you rather hire? The one who says, ‘I need this job’, or, ‘I want your association’? Know this: the former’s choice is fear-driven, while the latter’s is value-based.
People who choose your organisation for the right reasons stay longer. However, they are not actively seeking a job, and make the majority of candidates (about 64%). The upside is that you do not have to face competition from others, but the challenge is connecting and engaging with such candidates.
Why is networking with passive candidates important? Because (a) you want to be ready with the right candidate when the next position opens up, and (b) you do not want to trade talent quality for timelines. The process of identifying and connecting with passive candidates is called candidate sourcing and is a precursor to hiring.
AI-powered automated solutions are a boon to candidate sourcing. They match skills to job descriptions, making it easy and fast to identify individuals with the right qualifications and zero-in on the best role-fit. The tool also helps expand and diversify talent pools.
Resume screening: It is crucial to evaluate candidates at each stage of the recruitment cycle and advance the deserving ones to the next stage.
However, huge volumes of resumes make it difficult for hiring managers and recruiters to screen them manually. Automated tools employ keyword-based screening to grade resumes, enabling recruiters to find competent prospects, swiftly.
Candidate assessing: To succeed in a role, many skills must come together, including technical, domain, communications, problem-solving, etc. A résumé alone cannot tell if a candidate is skilled enough for the role. Many applicants look good on résumés. But if you want to know if they can handle the position’s responsibilities, it is imperative to assess them.
Today, AI-driven platforms offer pre-built assessments to test candidates on various competencies: technical, functional, behavioural, aptitude, etc. Additionally, you can customise the assessment to meet your unique needs.
Video interviewing: Interviews serve two purposes: they allow you to determine candidates’ suitability for your firm’s needs & culture and give applicants an opportunity to elaborate on their qualifications and accomplishments.
Today, video interview technology is improving as digital, remote interviews become more popular. The available features extend beyond teleconferencing.
It includes features such as automatic ID verification (to ensure only the qualified candidate who was scheduled is interviewed), interactive interviewing (to allow in-depth discussion on topics ranging from job-related to life experience-related), live coding (to gauge a candidate’s creative side and problem-solving ability), whiteboarding (to assess a candidate’s coding knowledge), screen sharing (to evaluate a candidate’s on-the-fly troubleshooting abilities), and asynchronous interviewing (which allows evaluation of recorded interviews at your convenience).
Virtual onboarding: A successful hire needs to be followed by efficient onboarding. Document collection and verification are essential parts of onboarding. Educating new hires about your organisation’s philosophy, culture, organisational rules, and workings will help them feel at home. Virtual onboarding tools facilitate digitising documentation and training new hires in a remote and hybrid work culture.
Candidate tracking and process workflow: To track a candidate’s journey from sourcing to onboarding, and get a comprehensive view of the recruitment process, the Application Tracking System (ATS) tool helps.
An ATS offers a unified platform for all stakeholders with end-to-end process automation that streamlines hiring. Additionally, its detailed analytics and customised reports provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the recruitment process, allowing for continuous improvement and better decision-making.
Scheduling: In hiring, planning, coordinating, scheduling, reminding, and approving are all necessary evils. By automating them, recruiters can focus on more meaningful tasks such as candidate assessment and engagement.
Automation also reduces scheduling conflicts and provides candidates with timely updates, greatly improving the candidate experience. Automation in recruitment scheduling streamlines hiring and ensures a more efficient and effective recruitment process.
Communication: Automating recruitment communication enables recruiters to keep candidates informed and engaged throughout the recruitment process. It can trigger emails and text messages to candidates at each phase of the hiring process. This provides regular updates on the application’s status and next steps.
Automated communication notifies candidates immediately, even if they are disqualified from the position. This allows candidates to move on to other opportunities and reduces the likelihood of disengagement or frustration.
Meanwhile, top candidates are encouraged to stay in touch for future opportunities. This not only helps maintain a positive relationship with candidates but also increases the likelihood of them considering the company for future roles.
Embrace automation, soar high
Recruitment automation is a powerful tool. It can help organisations attract and hire top talent, reduce recruitment costs and improve candidate experience.
By implementing automated recruitment processes, companies can focus their resources on the most critical aspects of recruiting, while allowing automation tools to handle the more mundane and time-consuming tasks.
Moreover, recruitment automation enables companies to keep up with the Generation Z tech-savvy job seekers’ expectations.
As the job market evolves, recruitment automation will become increasingly critical for companies that want to remain competitive and attract the best talent. By embracing automation tools, organisations can streamline their recruitment processes, make more informed hiring decisions and ultimately build a more robust and productive workforce.
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