How to Use Recruiting Automation to Enhance Your Hiring Efforts

With millions of available jobs in the U.S. alone, and candidates firmly in control of the labor market, organizations are under enormous pressure to fill open roles as quickly as possible. Resources are being stretched thin, and talent teams everywhere are searching for ways to save time, increase efficiency, and streamline processes.

Recruiting automation streamlines the recruiting process, taking tedious tasks away from recruiters and freeing them up to do more important tasks like nurturing relationships, promoting the company’s employer brand, and developing more strategic recruiting strategies, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

That’s why smart recruiting teams are incorporating automated recruitment tools into their everyday processes. The recruitment automation solutions available today — like automated job posting and messaging, resume screening, interview scheduling and more — can improve recruiting efficiency without sacrificing hiring quality or the candidate experience.

6 Smart Ways to Apply Recruiting Automation In Your Business

There’s no question that recruiting is a human-focused job. Yet within the scope of the recruiting function, there’s a wide variety of tasks that can benefit from automation. These include the more tedious and repetitive parts of any recruiter’s job description, where automation can be applied to get the job done quickly and efficiently. For example:

#1: Job posting: Using an automated tool, you can automatically distribute job descriptions to hundreds of job boards, from top job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter to targeted boards for specific industries and audiences. You can also customize posting destinations based on specific job attributes to make sure it’s seen by the most relevant candidates. And centralized management of all your job postings means you can edit or update your job postings from one system, across all locations.

#2: Resume screening: Automation makes it easy to find the right skills and experience at scale. With automated resume screening, you can streamline the time-consuming (but necessary) process of reviewing resumes. Automatically ingest resume or profile data into your CRM, review candidate qualifications, collect feedback from internal stakeholders, and capture decisions about whether to advance a candidate to the next stage in the process.

#3: Passive candidate nurturing: Passive candidates represent an incredibly valuable talent pool, but it takes effort to develop them into engaged, active applicants. Recruitment automation lets you nurture passive candidates with automated email or text campaigns to keep them up-to-date on job openings, company news, and other relevant content. These automated communications help keep passive candidates moving toward eventual conversion with minimal effort.

#4: Candidate communications: Automated messaging solutions can be used to streamline a variety of candidate communications: invite candidates to apply for a job, send interview confirmations, answer common questions, deliver personalized rejection letters, and so much more. Automated messaging can be managed through your ATS, allowing recruiters to view every text thread in one place and creating an easily accessible audit trail.

#5: Interview scheduling: Slow, inefficient interview scheduling can cause applicants to lose interest — and while you’re busy juggling schedules, they may already be meeting with your competition. Automated scheduling tools eliminate the tedious process of checking calendars and sending invitations, allowing you to automatically propose interview times, confirm availability, and book meetings. Scheduling changes and unexpected cancellations can be communicated instantly, so neither side is left hanging.

#6: Internal feedback and collaboration: Sharing information within the hiring team is essential to collaborative hiring, but it’s a resource-intensive process when recruiters have to chase down stakeholders for their input. Automated internal communication tools allow hiring managers and other stakeholders to enter feedback on each candidate and store it in a central location, where it’s visible and accessible to the entire team — taking the guesswork out of next steps

What Are the Key Benefits of Recruiting Automation?

No matter how large or small your recruiting team may be, automation lets you turn repetitive manual tasks into a more manageable workload that can easily scale up or down along with your hiring needs. And recruitment automation offers a number of benefits over traditional, manual processes. Here are a few of our favorites:

Free up valuable time: Recruiters spend countless hours on manual, repetitive tasks like posting job openings, screening applicants, and scheduling interviews. While these tasks are necessary to keep the hiring process moving forward, they don’t contribute much to the company’s long-term success. Recruitment automation helps to streamline these time-consuming tasks, so recruiters can focus on the critical, strategic elements of recruiting that require a “human touch.”

Enhance the candidate experience: When talent is tight, keeping candidates happy is critical — and communication is one of the key elements of a great candidate experience. Recruiting automation can help to ensure that every candidate receives consistent, timely communications that put your employer brand front-and-center. Remember, automation won’t remove the “human” element from your hiring process; instead, it can actually create a more personalized, engaging experience for your candidates.

Improve hiring metrics: Performance metrics fall into two main categories: quantitative and qualitative. Recruitment automation tools can help with both sides of the equation. On the quantitative side, automation streamlines the end-to-end hiring process, leading to improve measures like time-to-hire and conversion rate. On the qualitative side, automation reduces friction in the candidate experience, which can help to keep top talent engaged and lead to improved quality-of-hire.

Increase process visibility: Recruiting automation can help to improve transparency throughout the hiring process, keeping teams aligned and ensuring that candidates never get lost in the shuffle. Candidate profiles are managed in a single location, giving recruiters and hiring managers access to details about their current status, communications they’ve received, and next steps in the process.

Reduce unconscious bias: Eliminating bias from the hiring process is difficult because it’s seldom intentional. Recruiting automation can help to reduce unconscious bias by taking the human subjectivity out of tasks like resume review and candidate screening. Some tools even hide personally identifiable information from a candidate’s profile, enabling an unbiased evaluation based entirely on relevant skills and experience.

What Are Potential Challenges of Recruiting Automation?

The benefits of recruiting automation are clear and there are countless ways to use it, but that doesn’t mean the path to adoption will be easy or stress-free. By anticipating the pitfalls you may encounter along the way, you can prepare appropriately and increase your chances of success.

Fear of automation: Among the top challenges of adopting recruitment automation is people’s knee-jerk reaction to the concept. Automation is often depicted as a replacement for the human workforce — and no one wants to feel expendable. The truth is, automation isn’t meant to replace recruiters, but instead to supplements their capabilities by taking over repetitive manual tasks. Show critics how automation can make their work easier — and advance their careers — and they’ll become fans in no time.

Internal adoption: Humans are naturally resistant to change, so successful implementation of any new technology can be a struggle. Start by ensuring that you have buy-in from the top down, to create built-in support and accountability. If possible, recruit your most supportive stakeholders to help champion the initiative. Implement a thorough training program to get everyone off to a great start and celebrate your successes along the way.

Brand and experience concerns: You may face resistance from people who believe automation will make the employer brand feel robotic and sterile, leading to a poor candidate experience. You can reassure those individuals that automation can actually enhance your brand by delivering consistent messaging that’s timely, engaging, and personalized. And because automation leaves recruiters with fewer manual tasks to complete, they can focus their attention on delivering the best possible experience to the most qualified candidates.

Technology integration: Proper integration can be a point of frustration with any technology — but especially one that’s intended to make your life easier. Systems that don’t integrate seamlessly end up creating more work and delays for recruiting teams. So take the time to question your vendor thoroughly on integration capabilities and be sure your IT team is involved in the selection process.

Wondering Where to Start? We Can Help.

The first step in adopting automation is to assess the current state. Look for inefficiencies in your current workflow, then implement automated tools to relieve the burden of those manual tasks. While you may be inspired to apply automation throughout the hiring process, it’s easier to monitor results if you stick to automating one thing at a time.

Be sure to look at common metrics like conversion rate and time-to-hire, then set goals to measure how automation impacts recruiting performance. And don’t forget to review your results periodically to see where you’re making progress — and where there’s still room to improve.

When you’re ready to get started, JazzHR offers leading recruiting automation solutions to help you streamline the recruiting process and take your hiring to the next level. Contact us to learn more or view our blog for new recruiting trends and insights.