What Is Recruiting Automation?

What is recruiting automation?

Recruiting automation refers to technologies used to automate otherwise manual workflows related to recruiting and hiring. By using a blend of preset and customized event triggers, such as website or social media activities, recruiting automation can streamline a wide variety of tasks.

Although automated recruiting has existed in some form for many years, many businesses have recently equipped their HR departments with these technologies to develop a more strategic and competitive edge in the hiring world. Between economic changes, greater workforce skills gaps, candidate information overload and a generally competitive hiring climate, organizations need to stay ahead to ensure they’re building strong workforces without over-allocating budgets and resources to hiring efforts.

Benefits of recruiting automation

Recruiting automation is capable of driving your organization’s productivity and efficiency across several factors. Some advantages of automated recruiting include the following.

Streamlined hiring efforts

It’s important to note that automated recruiting is intended to empower rather than replace human recruiting. By automating and eliminating tasks such as applicant screening, candidate nurturing, data management and more, you can streamline recruiters’ workflows so they’re less likely to be overwhelmed with work and able to focus on more impactful tasks.

Enhanced candidate experience

In addition to your organization, automated recruiting can benefit candidates. By automating certain tasks, your recruiting and hiring team can focus more on connecting with candidates, providing application updates and collecting and addressing applicant experience feedback.

Improved quality of hire

By implementing consistent standards aligned with your organization’s vision, goals and job descriptions, automated recruiting can help you find higher-quality hires that possess characteristics indicative of success in their potential role. As a result, these hires may be more likely to demonstrate high performance in their jobs and more likely to stay with your organization long term, saving you business costs related to hiring and training.

Less biased and more inclusive hiring

Everyone has unconscious biases. Automated recruiting technology can use consistent and objective standards to screen, assess and rank candidates, countering potentially discriminatory hiring practices and helping improve hiring diversity and inclusion. However, it’s important to be aware that recruiting automation may also introduce bias in some cases.

Faster time to hire

Each day that a job is unfilled represents more expended recruiting resources. By automating tasks such as skills tests, interview scheduling and more, your recruiting and hiring team can potentially find the right applicants, interview them and present a job offer much faster than without automated tools.

Scaleable hiring

Whether you need 10 or 100 new hires, automated recruiting manages it all for you. Without compromising personalization, recruiting automation can get your job postings and emails to as many candidates as you need with little to no extra effort on your part.

Meaningful analytics and workforce insights

Especially as you scale up your recruiting, you’ll collect an overwhelming amount of data related to applicant skills, work history, expertise and other details and qualifications. Automated recruiting can help organize and index this information so you can gain meaningful analytics and insights about your current and potential workforce as well as talent gaps, diversity needs and other opportunities.

Applications of automated recruiting

Just as there are many steps to the recruiting and hiring process, so too are there many applications of automated recruiting.

Job advertisements

One of the most powerful applications of automated recruiting is in job advertisement and sourcing. By integrating with job boards, social media and other platforms with your automated recruitment software, you can target potential applicants that match your hiring profiles, employ branded content matched to each platform and potentially save time and money on manually creating job advertisements. As such, getting recruiting automated can help you develop a strong talent pipeline that’s well-aligned with your job descriptions.

Applicant tracking systems

A well-established form of automated recruiting, applicant tracking systems (ATS) help recruiters efficiently collect, track and organize information about applicants. As soon as applicants begin the hiring process, an ATS enables recruiters to analyze details such as applicant hiring stages, keywords and phrases and other valuable information. This tool is especially helpful when you have a large volume of applicants, as it helps you identify potentially great candidates without having to meticulously go through each application.

Candidate screening

Automated screening and pre-screening tools can offload work from recruiters as well as stack and rank your talent pipeline with well-aligned applicants that meet your organization’s needs. These screening tools can perform functions such as basic chat interviews, pre-recorded one-way video interviews and contextual application evaluations.

Social media recruiting

You can already find many great potential hires on social media sites. In addition to automating your organization’s recruiting posts, automated recruiting can harness social media to scan employee and candidate connections and organize social media data to source and reach potential candidates.

Pre-hire skills and personality assessments

Assessing skills, experience, personality traits and other characteristics is a crucial part of hiring and recruiting, and automated recruiting can do much of it for you. Automated assessments can assess relevant skills and characteristics to automatically evaluate and rank candidates, streamlining your talent pipeline and getting the best matches to your recruiters.

These automated assessments can often integrate with your other automated recruiting technologies to ensure data is communicated and centralized between software and HR teams, ensuring they can access a thorough overview of each candidate. These assessments can measure a variety of traits, such as:

Learning agility
Technical skills
Critical thinking

Interview scheduling automation

Few tasks are as tedious as setting up interviews and trying to align the schedules of your interviewing team and applicants. By implementing automatic interviewing scheduling tools, you can streamline the interviewing process and facilitate a better experience for both your candidates and hiring teams.

Candidate nurturing

Even if you don’t hire them on the first round, automated recruiting can help develop and maintain a talent pool of past applicants who may be suited for future roles in your organization. By employing automated candidate rediscovery, ranking and nurturing, you can continue to engage with past applicants and reach out with well-matched job postings.

Signs your organization may need automated recruiting

Nearly any organization can benefit from automated recruiting. Some signs that it’s time for your business to take advantage of automated recruiting include:

Overwhelmed recruiters. When overwhelmed with tasks and data, recruiters are more stressed and prone to burnout and less efficient connecting with candidates and making hiring decisions.
High workforce turnover . Misaligned hires often cause high turnover, which can impose significant hiring and training costs on your business.
Long time-to-hire. Unfulfilled roles and long recruitment cycles represent inefficient hiring methods and missed candidate opportunities.

FAQs about recruiting automation

Is a CRM the same as an ATS?

A CRM is an automated tool that nurtures and engages with potential candidates. In contrast, an ATS is meant to automate workflows related to evaluating and ranking applicants.

How can you start implementing recruiting automation?

With many automated tools and applications available, it can be hard to know where to start. To implement recruiting automation at your organization, start by identifying pain points in your hiring process, creating hiring benchmarks and goals and comparing available automation solutions.

Is HR going to be replaced by automation?

Automated recruiting can offload and manage many HR tasks, but there are still many responsibilities that require HR representatives and hiring teams. In addition to implementing and managing recruiting tools, HR professionals still need to connect personally with candidates and perform interviews.

What Is Recruiting Automation?

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