As the market for recruiting automation gets increasingly crowded, how do you decide what’s the right automation solution for your organization? What parts of the recruiting process should you automate and how can you measure ROI? We address all this and more in this post. Read on.
Recruitment automation is the use of a range of technologies and tools to streamline recruiting workflows and tasks. This results in improved recruiter efficiency, faster time-to-hire, decreased cost-per-hire, and an enhanced talent pool for their organization.
When considering what recruiting process steps to automate, start by identifying the gaps across your hiring process. By doing this, you will avoid the risk of burdening your team with quick-fix point solutions that address only a sliver of the problem—but have uncontrolled costs, tech overhead and minimal impact. For example, your recruiting software may help drive more inbound applications, but hiring success depends on continuous candidate nurture and engagement on channels that candidates prefer.
So if you are addressing recruiting process automation, take a strategic approach. To get started, here are three critical areas where automation can drive the maximum impact.
Read More: Recruiting Automation Playbook
On average, nearly 50% of candidates sourced from job boards are already in your ATS. And yet, we see companies spend millions on job boards. While we aren't saying you should write off job boards, you may want to prioritize sourcing from your own database because it is a goldmine of qualified candidates. Unfortunately, this is where hiring teams struggle because most Applicant Tracking Systems carry outdated or incomplete candidate data. But with automation, you can turn your ATS into a self-cleaning, self-generating sourcing machine. It helps you reach out directly to candidates to ask questions like “Are you currently available for full-time work?” or “Are you skilled in Microsoft Excel?” You can update or overwrite any field in your ATS — even previously unsynced fields. Without your team lifting a finger, fully-integrated technology will target designated audiences to collect and update addresses, phone numbers, placements, skills, and more.
Would you rather your recruiters spend their time on grunt work like prospecting and data entry or building meaningful relationships with candidates? A no-brainer, isn’t it? With AI-driven solutions like recruiting chatbots, you can automate up to 90% of the application, screening and interview scheduling process. AI chatbots can screen top-of-funnel candidates using a custom set of questions based on predefined criteria (“Are you able to lift up to 50lbs on a regular basis?” “Do you have Javascript skills?”) and instantly schedule qualified candidates for interviews without the exhausting back-and-forth emails.
Hiring is an incredibly personal activity both for the candidate and for the recruiter. But given its scale and complexity, it feels impersonal. Most candidates feel no connection with employers and find it easy to drop off or ghost them. But with automated journey-builders, recruiters can meaningfully engage candidates at multiple touchpoints across the hiring journey. They are designed for a multichannel approach and enable recruiters to engage candidates through personalized messages based on application status, time-lapse, specific events and more.
So now that you are aware of how recruiting automation helps, you’d probably want to think through the common concerns and objections your stakeholders may have.
Objections and concerns are a good thing because they tell you what to look for in a recruitment automation solution. And because recruiting process automation involves multiple stakeholders, you are bound to encounter a few. The most common objections that crop up are:
Does automation of the recruitment process mean we have to overhaul our existing recruitment systems and processes?
No. It helps to have a recruiting automation solution that layers on your ATS and syncs automatically with it. Solutions like Sense easily integrate and speak to your core tools—syncing candidate data and working in the background to simplify hiring.
Will candidates be talking to bots when you automate the recruitment process?
Not always. Ideally, you’d want to look at a hybrid setup where your recruiters and chatbots work together as a tag team. For example, AI chatbots handle all the customary checks and routine queries, and when a candidate seems like the right fit, pass on the information to the recruiter who can then have a meaningful conversation with the candidate around their career goals.
How do you measure ROI when you automate recruitment processes?
By automating your recruiting, you can capture data at every step of the hiring funnel—and easily gauge if you’re getting bang for your buck. At Sense, for instance, we’ve comprehensive analytics and reporting engines that give you a view of candidates reached, hires influenced, FTE hours/weeks saved and so on. Tracking candidate response rates, drop-off rates, time-to-hire and NPS can help you understand if automation is truly helping you move the needle.
Now that you know what hiring steps to automate and what common concerns to factor, here’s a 14-point checklist to help you evaluate your next recruiting automation solution!
☐ Website digital recruiters
Engage with 100% of candidates directly on your website. Collect their experience and preferences, and use preference-based job matching to present relevant job opportunities.
☐ Automated referral campaigns
Launch and scale referral campaigns and enable employees to submit, track, and pay out referrals in seconds.
☐ Field updates/writebacks
Source candidates from within your database by first keeping data clean and accurate. Automatically update field values from survey responses, data age, or online behavior and write back data to the ATS.
☐ Built-in, automated surveys
Intelligent surveys that capture work availability, upload resume, prescreen candidates etc.
☐ Event-triggered enrichment surveys
Leverage chatbots to collect follow up information from candidates, saving recruiters thousands of hours and enriching candidate profiles at scale.
☐ Automated screening chatbots
Automatically screen high volumes of applicants with customizable questions.
☐ Custom, broadcast messages
Send multiple broadcast messages to hundreds of contacts at once.
☐ Text to Apply
Attract candidates anywhere by letting people apply to job positions via text.
☐ Self-scheduling and rescheduling
Let candidates select their own date/time and can even self-reschedule if needed before their interview (with automated notifications and alerts).
☐ Two-way texting
Seamlessly operate between automated texts and 1:1 texts between recruiters and candidates, and leverage templates to easily personalize messages.
☐ Visual, multi-channel journey-builder
Easily create automated workflows with zero code.
☐ Built-in NPS surveys
Track NPS over time and correlate with engagement and response data to uncover drivers that annual surveys miss.
☐ Dynamic variables/tags
Personalize every communication using field values directly from entity records and dynamically use information relevant to the candidate or client.
☐ FAQ chatbot
Provide candidates with instant support and remove burden on recruiters by answering frequently asked questions via an automated solution.
If you’d like to download this checklist, check out our Recruiting Automation Playbook. Our playbook offers in-depth insights, best practices and tips with real-world examples straight from the hiring trenches. And if you'd like to know how Sense can help you achieve your automation goals, get in touch with us here.
