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Small business hiring teams often have to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities that can be time-consuming, manual, and inefficient. The good news? Recruiting automation can address these issues.
“Automation takes on the tactical burden of talent acquisition, allowing humans to focus on strategic elements,” Aptitude Research Founder Madeline Laurano noted in a report by the firm.
Most parts of the recruiting process can now be streamlined and sped up considerably when HR teams use an applicant tracking system (ATS) with automation capabilities built into the platform.
And we don’t just mean rapidly growing and enterprise orgs. Small businesses like yours are increasingly investing in recruitment automation solutions to make their recruiters’ jobs far easier.
The key benefits of recruiting automation
“Now is an excellent time to overhaul your recruiting process and improve hiring efficiency by getting back to basics,” HR expert Corey Berkey shared with Checkr. “Getting recruiting plans in order and creating a scalable, replicable process is key to improving your recruiting efficiency in the future,.”
And one way to realize this greater talent acquisition efficiency is to put advanced automation technology in place for your hiring team that helps you streamline day-to-day process and better connect with potential candidates deemed strong fits and move them into the interview process.
From posting jobs universally to job boards, to keeping all hiring team members on the same page during the recruiting cycle, to auto-rejecting unqualified candidates based on a lack of certain skills or expertise, there are many ways in which recruitment automation can aid your SMB hiring team.
- (Not to mention free up hours for them weekly so they can handle other core recruiting tasks.)
At its core, recruiting automation leverages cutting-edge AI and rules-based workflows to tackle repetitive, manual tasks. But, what specific benefits can your SMB enjoy when adopting this tech?
Here are several pros of adding automated workflows throughout your recruitment process.
1) Save your entire recruiting staff (a lot of) time
As noted above, one of the top benefits of recruiting automation is the time savings.
By automating manual tasks such as resume screening, scheduling interviews, and managing job boards, your talent team can focus your efforts on more strategic initiatives. (Think the human side of recruiting, like building relationships with talent of interest and revisiting archived candidates.)
With automation infused in your candidate sourcing efforts, specifically, your recruiters can spend less time searching through resumes and more time engaging with qualified candidates on LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and other career communities where they typically find top talent.
- What’s more, automation can streamline the end-to-end recruitment process.
Sending candidate feedback reminders to interview panelists. Sharing updates on the current state of the hiring process with prospects. Constructing and sending job offer letters. There are several TA-related duties you can put on (mostly) autopilot — and get precious time back in your day.
2) Strengthen candidates’ recruiting experience
Candidate experience is a crucial factor in attracting and retaining top talent. When applicants have a positive interaction with your org, they’re more likely to accept an offer and refer others to apply.
Recruiting automation can help enhance the CX by streamlining communication, providing timely updates, and ensuring that applicants feel valued and heard by your hiring team.
An applicant tracking system (ATS) with automated messaging features — like JazzHR — can help your recruiters maintain consistent, personalized communication with candidates throughout the hiring process. By keeping candidates informed and engaged every step of the way, you invariably improve your employer brand reputation and foster stronger relationships with top talent.
3) Realize an increasingly better quality of hire
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities enable recruiting automation software to analyze candidate data more effectively than a human ever could. By utilizing AI in the resume screening process, your recruiters can ID qualified candidates more efficiently and accurately.
Ever wonder what would happen if you could sift through dozens — even hundreds — of resumes in a fraction of the time you typically do? Well, with automation, you can comb through the info tied to recent applicants in a matter of minutes.
- (Translation: Not hours or days.)
With more accurate candidate matching, you ensure you only reach out to the best leads for open roles. (Applicants you pass on can still have profiles created so you can revisit them later, of course. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be a fit for a future role.)
4) Increase collaboration among your hiring team
Recruiting automation software provides a centralized platform for communication and collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers. By streamlining the exchange of candidate info and feedback, automation tech can enable smoother decision-making and faster hiring.
Shared dashboards that show your pipeline progress for each role and requisition can also help your recruiters and HMs work together more effectively to understand your ideal candidate profile and develop targeted recruiting strategies that better attract active candidates over time.
It’s simple, really. By fostering greater comms and collaboration internally, you make savvier and smarter hiring decisions. Ones that indirectly impact the long-term success of your SMB.
5) Simplify interview scheduling with candidates
One of the most time-consuming aspects of the recruitment process is scheduling interviews. Your hiring team often must send multiple emails, make endless phone calls, and chase candidates to confirm interview times. This cumbersome process can be streamlined (a lot) through automation.
Recruiting automation tools synchronize calendars for hiring team members, send reminders to interview panelists, and auto-reschedule interviews as needed. By simplifying interview scheduling, you can focus on what really matters: finding the right person for the job.
With JazzHR’s small business recruitment software, you can even allow candidates you screen and deem worthy of advancing in the interview process to self-schedule the next calls with your team.
6) Enhance your team’s data-driven decision-making
With automation, your SMB can also aggregate and analyze large volumes of data related to candidate profiles and hiring trends. This insight means you can make data-backed decisions in real time.
But, for your hiring team to make analytics-centric decisions, every HR specialist needs access to relevant and accurate data. With the right tech, recruiters can view reports that show the top-performing job boards, the most effective nurture messaging, and metrics tied to diversity hiring.
Advanced Visual Reporting, the talent analytics suite in JazzHR, enables HR pros to easily and efficiently find data tied to candidate sources, funnel workflows, and overall hiring speed.
As Product Marketing Manager Corey Long noted, “having access to intuitively uncover insights in their hiring process isn’t just beneficial [for today’s small businesses] — it’s essential.”
7) Big cost savings for your business at large
Your leadership team is laser-focused on efficiency at all times. That applies to your HR hiring team. With automation in place, you can easily realize this enhanced efficiency and show your execs not just how much time your recruiters save each day and week with automation, but also money.
Consider your recruitment marketing. By auto-posting job listings to the job boards where you tend to get the highest quality and quantity of applicants, you get more top talent added to your candidate pool and, shortly after, into your active pipeline.
The math here is simple: More qualified leads in your database means you don’t need to spend as much money on targeted paid ads. (At least for some parts of a given year, like when you have hundreds of “warm” opportunities in your system.)
8) Increase the diversity makeup of your company
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become a top priority for most orgs. And recruiting automation is the perfect ally. Why? Because it can help remove human bias from the hiring process.
Consider blind recruitment functionality. This capability can anonymize candidate profiles during the screening phase. This, in turn, ensures job seekers are assessed solely on their qualifications rather than factors such as gender, age, or ethnicity.
Leading TA automation tech can also review job descriptions for gender-neutral language. Ensuring only inclusive language is used in these increases the likelihood of attracting a diverse talent pool.
Streamline your recruiting team’s work and make smarter hiring decisions with JazzHR’s applicant tracking system for small businesses, including our advanced recruitment automation technology.
