Recruitment Automation: 8 Reasons to Implement It Now

As demand for talent continues to grow, recruiters face additional challenges, including access to resources and available bandwidth. At startups and companies with smaller teams, these challenges can be serious obstacles to growth.

Recruitment automation enables recruiters to work more efficiently. Tools and platforms streamline menial tasks across all stages of the hiring process, allowing teams to focus their efforts on assessing a candidate’s true fit for the company and role. This article will discuss how employers benefit from recruitment automation and seven ways to automate your hiring process.

Table of Contents

• What Is Recruitment Automation?
• 8 Benefits of Recruitment Automation
• 7 Ways to Automate Your Recruitment Process

What Is Recruitment Automation?

Recruitment automation is a category of technology that allows recruiters to automate parts of the hiring process, from the first point of contact with candidates to extending an offer letter. Because recruitment is a people-focused industry, recruitment automation employs artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to understand, evaluate and learn from the qualifications and characteristics of applicants. 

Furthermore, automation tools empower recruitment teams with data. Tracking key recruitment metrics — such as time-to-fill and employee retention rate — allows employers to more effectively monitor their growth goals and optimize their hiring process. In short, recruitment automation streamlines the process during every hiring round and provides important information to optimize the broader workforce strategy.

8 Benefits of Recruitment Automation

Before implementing a new tool or software, it’s important to understand the business case — how can your organization benefit from the product? Again, recruitment automation has a positive impact on each individual hiring process in addition to improving the business as a whole. Learn eight key benefits of automating your recruiting process below.

1. Engage talent faster 

The demand for tech professionals has never been higher. As businesses across industries become increasingly digital, they need skilled employees to build, implement and maintain new tools. On top of that, elite candidates are typically only on the market for 10 days before they accept an offer. Such a short recruitment cycle means every phone call, email and conversation counts. Utilizing recruitment automation ensures you engage talent faster and stay relevant among top candidates.

2. Identify better candidates 

Your candidate persona should drive every hiring decision you make for a particular role. Recruitment automation tools can help you source and screen candidates more efficiently and effectively. This translates into a higher-quality talent pool that ultimately leads to better, more qualified hires. 

3. Save valuable time

Recruitment automation tools save recruiters time to focus their efforts less on burdensome tasks like sourcing and candidate communication, and more on interview training, scorecards and recruitment training to optimize their efforts.

4. Eliminate scheduling errors

Scheduling interviews with candidates over email requires a lot of back and forth. So much so that errors and miscommunication are common, which can foster a poor image of your employer brand. Automating email correspondence and interview scheduling minimizes manual responsibilities, ultimately reducing errors and creating a stronger candidate experience.

5. Hire for multiple roles simultaneously

You’ve got massive growth goals, and a limited number of recruiters to help achieve them. With an average time-to-fill of 36 days, recruiters can’t afford to hire one role at a time. Recruitment automation widens bandwidths and improves productivity, allowing recruiters to fill more roles simultaneously. By shortening your recruitment cycles, you’ll lower the cost-of-vacancy, which can amount to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the role and level of seniority.

6. Better Candidate Evaluations

The best candidate for the job isn’t the individual with the most impressive credentials or years of experience. Employee engagement is all about personal investment and passion. Your people should believe in your core values and mission statement, as well as positively add to your company culture. Implementing recruitment automation tools frees up recruiters’ time to evaluate candidates on a deeper level, improving the likelihood of making a quality, long-term hire. 

7. Create a strong candidate experience 

A lackluster candidate experience can turn highly qualified candidates away from your employer brand and job opportunities. Alternatively, a stellar candidate experience can turn candidates into promoters and repeat applicants; 95 percent of candidates would apply to a company again if they had a positive first experience with the interview process. Simply automating candidate communication can significantly improve a prospective employee’s experience with your company and make them eager to join your team.

8. Eliminate hiring biases

Unconscious biases plague our lives, especially in the workplace and during recruitment cycles. A recent study revealed that only 10 percent of African-American candidates got callbacks when including details about their ethnic identity on their resume. Resume screening tools help eliminate these biases and cultivate a diverse workforce. However, you can’t rely solely on automation tools to promote diversity and inclusion in your organization — implement unconscious bias training to mitigate discrimination in other aspects of your business.

7 Ways to Automate Your Recruitment Process

As new recruitment tools and technologies become available, additional aspects of the hiring process will be open to automation. Until then, streamline the candidate experience and button up internal processes by implementing recruitment automation tools for the following seven principles.

1. Job advertisements and sourcing 

Automate targeted job advertisements to build a better talent pipeline and increase the quality of your applicant pool. These tools can automatically publish job postings to various platforms and even screen for gendered or biased language so you don’t unnecessarily exclude qualified individuals. Using recruitment automation tools to post job advertisements allows you to source candidates from a wider talent pool and across multiple platforms simultaneously like social media, which 79% of applicants use in their job search.  

2. Applicant tracking 

A huge part of a successful candidate experience is staying organized internally. Candidates don’t want to have to berate you for additional information or be confused with another candidate. An applicant tracking system is a commonly used recruitment automation tool to store candidate information, interviewer notes and automate communication based on their stage in the hiring process.

3. Resume screening

Though they’re usually only a single sheet of information, reviewing resumes is time consuming; recruiters spend roughly 23 hours reviewing resumes for a single hire. Utilizing an automation tool to screen and score candidates based on their fit for the role reduces your team’s time commitment and ensures the top candidates move forward in the process. Resume screening technology compares resumes against a set of predetermined keywords to confirm minimum requirements, and learn compatibility based on data from previous hires that were successful in the role.

4. Candidate communication 

Seamless, frequent communication is essential to a successful hiring process. While communication tools are typically integrated into other software applications, it’s the cornerstone of recruitment automation. Emailing is a rather low-lift stage in the process — especially when using recruitment email templates — and yet it always seems to make it to the bottom of the to-do list. Leaving eager prospects in the lurch without an update will make them disinterested in the role and push them toward other employment opportunities. 

5. Interview scheduling

Scheduling interviews requires a lot of logistics that can easily go wrong. Automating this process to coordinate between the candidate and interviewer’s schedules streamlines communication and improves accuracy when determining the best time for both or all parties. 

6. Offer letters

In addition to interview invitation emails, offer letters are a crucial point within the candidate experience. It’s vital that all relevant information — compensation, benefits, start date, etc. — is included and accurate. Recruitment software can help compile contracts and offer letters, as well as ship them out to the selected candidate. For the candidates you don’t extend an offer to, automation tools can send customized rejection letters with an invitation to join your talent community.

7. Onboarding 

Your onboarding program begins the day your new hire accepts the offer — not their first day on the job. Prior to their start date, your task list should include scheduling training sessions, preparing them for their first week and introducing them to the team. Recruitment software can help automate this process so you don’t miss a beat and your new hire doesn’t feel left in the dark.

All in all, utilizing recruitment automation can save you time, money and valuable employee resources. As with all business decisions, each organization is unique. Evaluate your entire recruitment cycle to determine the most vulnerable and time-consuming steps of the process. Then, implement tools that address those needs specifically and you’ll immediately see the benefits automation has to offer.