Finding and attracting top talent in your industry isn’t easy, particularly if you’re recruiting in high volumes.
Getting the best people to fill multiple vacancies while ensuring an efficient recruitment process is a hard balance to strike, and this is why recruitment automation is so crucial for volume hiring.
Introduction to Recruitment Automation
Recruitment automation is the use of tools and software to automatically manage and optimise different stages of the recruitment process, from job posting to offer letter generation.
Examples of recruitment automation tools include:
- AI-powered job description writing;
- Posting job vacancies across multiple job boards simultaneously;
- Automatically screening candidate CVs for relevant skills and qualifications;
- Scheduling interviews with potential candidates;
- Sending automated candidate follow-up emails; and
- Any software that eliminates tasks that would previously have had to be done manually.
Importance
The amount of admin work involved in recruitment, especially volume hiring, can sometimes feel overwhelming. Constantly posting new jobs, reviewing CVs and conducting background checks, communicating with candidates, scheduling interviews and liaising with internal teams take a lot of time, and all of these tasks come with hidden costs that can rapidly increase your cost per hire. What’s more, there are other hidden costs to the business when hiring for job roles get delayed.
This is why recruitment automation is so important for modern hiring teams. By handling repetitive manual tasks automatically, this frees up time to focus on the more complex parts of the hiring process, such as connecting with candidates and onboarding new hires.
Key Components of Recruitment Automation
There are three key components of recruitment automation:
- Recruitment software
- Automation tools
- Data-driven approaches
Let’s explore each of them in more detail.
Recruitment Software
Recruitment software, such as an applicant tracking system (ATS), is the foundation of modern hiring processes, and it’ll be difficult to automate any elements of that process without it.
Recruitment software (like Occy) manages every element of the recruitment process, and it also provides the automated tools to take repetitive manual admin tasks out of the hands of your recruitment team.
Although there is other software that can manage and automate elements of the recruitment process, they’re not designed specifically for recruitment and these disparate platforms can’t provide a seamless and connected hiring process from end-to-end.
Automation Tools
Modern recruitment software offers various automation tools that significantly reduce the time spent on manual tasks. For example, organisations can automate a wide range of admin work that would previously have to be done by a person.
An ATS will allow you to set up automations in each stage of your hiring pipeline, including setting up interviews, sending emails, reference checks and CV smart filtering. These filtering tools allow you to auto-decline unsuitable candidates as they enter your pipeline, while scoring and ranking candidates based on criteria you set. This makes it easy for recruiting teams to focus on the top candidates and not waste time with bad fit candidates.
Automation can also be used for maintaining on-going comms with candidates, for example application acknowledgements, screening requests, interview calendar invites and contract e-signing.
Data-Driven Approaches
One of the biggest challenges faced by recruiters is getting visibility over recruitment performance.
Applicant tracking systems use data analysis and machine learning to empower recruitment teams to make informed decisions and predict candidate success, while analytics tools allow them to see what’s really happening within hiring pipelines.
This data-driven approach allows you to identify what areas of the recruitment process need some work and make continual improvements to drive better hiring outcomes and candidate experiences.
Benefits of Recruitment Automation
There are many benefits of investing in a recruitment automation platform like Occy, but three of the most important are the time it saves, how it improves candidate experiences and, ultimately, delivers higher quality candidates.
Time Savings
Your recruitment team is spending hours on manual tasks that could be automated, and the time saved when you invest in a platform like Occy is invaluable.
Instead of sending out acknowledgment emails and scheduling interviews, recruiters can focus on connecting with the best candidates and making decisions faster, reducing time-to-hire and cost-per-hire.
Improved Candidate Experience
When the recruitment process is slow or lacks regular engagement this causes poor candidate experiences, which will often increase candidate attrition rates. To hire the best people you need to nurture them throughout the process, and this is made so much easier with recruitment automation software.
Timely and relevant communications, such as application acknowledgments and interview reminders, keep candidates informed while allowing recruiters to focus on more impactful human interactions to get the best applicants over the line.
Higher Quality Candidates
Streamlining talent acquisition improves candidate quality in two ways:
- It allows you to attract more candidates into your pipeline faster
- CV smart filtering ensures you auto-disqualify bad fit candidates and find your best applicants faster
Recruitment analytics software will also help you to refine candidate acquisition over time, meaning your organisation keeps getting better at attracting a consistently higher standard of applicants.
Applications of Recruitment Automation
We’ve explored the key benefits, so let’s take a look at three real-life applications of recruitment automation.
Job Advertisements and Job Boards
Recruitment automation makes it quick and easy to advertise job roles across multiple channels simultaneously and with just a few clicks. ATS’ has access to all of the most popular job boards, as well as niche sites for sector-specific recruiting.
If you’re hiring for the same roles again and again, automated job campaigns will save your team time each month by repeating recurring job ads.
Pre-Screening and Background Checks
Sifting through hundreds of CVs takes up a lot of your team’s time, but recruitment software can automate much of this initial screening work, making sure the best candidates get put through to the interview stage faster.
Smart filtering tools can auto-decline applicants based on preset questions, while AI-powered scoring and ranking of candidates will highlight the best people for the job quickly.
Screening shortlisted candidates is another essential but time-intensive process. With recruitment automation software, background checks and references can also be handled through automation, while candidates and referees can be sent automated reminders so you don’t have to.
Interview Scheduling and Video Interviews
Setting up interviews can also be time-consuming, especially with volume hiring, but this can be simplified too.
Interview scheduling tools sync the recruitment software with your team’s calendars, allowing candidates to choose the best interview time based on their schedules. Once an interview is arranged, you can also implement an automated process to keep them on track.
Challenges and Considerations
Recruitment automation software offers a wide range of benefits to volume and hourly hiring recruiters, but there are some challenges and considerations you need to be aware of before implementing it for the first time.
Integration with Existing Systems
The biggest challenge, whenever an organisation introduces a new software platform, is ensuring it will work seamlessly with existing systems in the tech stack.
The best platforms will provide exceptional end-to-end candidate experiences, but you’re still going to have other software that intersects with recruitment, and it’s important that your software can integrate with these systems to ensure a smooth and seamless process workflow.
With this in mind, it’s important to consider available integrations when evaluating an ATS.
Maintaining Human Touch
Automating processes and admin tasks saves a lot of time, but you can’t let it manage every single touchpoint of the recruitment process. You’ll need to find the balance between handing off repetitive tasks to automation while maintaining human interactions at the moments that matter most.
Not only is this important for creating positive candidate experiences, but it’s also an essential part of candidate evaluation. While machine learning can be useful in screening out bad-fit hires initially, only real people can identify the best applicant for the job. Face-to-face interactions, whether during formal interviews or informal meetings, allow recruiters to gauge soft skills such as communication skills, teamwork and problem-solving ability. This isn’t something AI-powered tools have mastered yet.
Data Privacy and Security
Although AI and machine learning offer businesses opportunities for streamlining and increased efficiency, it’s not without challenges. One of the main concerns is around data privacy and security, with an increasing amount of consumer data being processed by opaque algorithms.
This is a particular issue within recruitment, with candidates sharing demographic information (such as age and gender), job histories, contact information and, in some cases, medical information. As a result, recruiting teams are responsible for managing a huge database of sensitive personal data.
When implementing automated processes it’s essential that you carefully assess data risks and take steps to mitigate those risks. Failing to do so could see the organisation get into hot water relating to GDPR and other data privacy legislation.
Automation software has come a long way in the last few years, particularly as AI and machine learning technology has developed. We expect to see continued rapid development in these areas, and this will have a big impact on recruitment automation in the future.
Advancements in AI and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence and machine learning is still relatively new technology, but they’re developing at a rapid pace.
AI is already being used in recruitment automation software for CV smart filtering and candidate screening, and according to a 2023 survey 65% of recruiters are already using AI during the recruitment process.
Expect to see it introduced to more elements of the process in the near future. This could include everything from chatbots handling initial interactions, through to AI-generated avatars conducting live interviews with candidates.
AI technology could also help to reduce unconscious bias and prejudice during the hiring process, although this needs human oversight. After all, AI learns from humans, so it’s possible these biases are learned by AI algorithms too. For example, Amazon scrapped an AI recruiting tool back in 2018 after it started to show bias against women candidates.
Predictive Analytics
Another development that will be enhanced by AI and ‘big data’ is the use of predictive analytics for recruitment.
Automation software will be able to interrogate huge amounts of data at scale, before providing trends and insights that can power better decision-making. For example, predictive analytics can be used to identify which candidates are more likely to succeed in a particular role based on past performance and any other relevant factors.
In the future, organisations will also be able to identify potential issues before they even arise, such as highlighting when a new hire is thinking of leaving the company early. This will allow the recruitment team or HR to take proactive steps and reduce staff churn rates.
Continuous Improvement
Ultimately, recruitment automation, both now and into the future, will empower recruitment teams to implement continuous improvements to the hiring process. The job landscape is constantly changing and evolving—sometimes very quickly—so it’s essential that you stay on top of the latest trends from the industry, as well as gain insights from your organisation’s own historical data.
Recruitment automation will ensure you continue to deliver exceptional candidate experiences, even as expectations change with new generations, while giving recruiters time back so they can stay at the top of their game.
Conclusion
The future of recruitment automation is exciting, particularly when you consider all of the developments AI and machine learning will offer as the technology develops, but the time to invest in it is now—not years from now.
Dedicated ATS like Occy are already transforming the recruitment process for volume and hourly hiring teams, and it’s important your organisation implements some degree of recruitment automation now in order to keep up with your competitors.
