When it comes to using automation in your recruiting process, it’s quality over quantity. Automation can help you find the right talent, faster, without compromising the candidate experience.
Using automation to address your challenges head on
To understand where automation best fits into the recruiting process, the most logical place to start is where the process seems most broken. And, when it comes to today’s labor market today, there are two that come to mind.
Challenge #1: Sourcing passive candidates.
Hands down, the biggest challenge to solve is finding top talent. You simply can’t fill your positions with only the 3.7% of the US population who are unemployed. And, in some fields like technology and healthcare, finding top talent is even more challenging.
The answer? Recruiting passive candidates. While not everyone is actively job searching, their current employed status doesn’t stop them from being open to something new. A July CareerBuilder study found that 78% of employees would consider leaving their jobs if the right opportunity came along.
Leaving it to recruiters to find passive candidates on their own requires a significant amount of legwork that includes blind outreach to unresponsive targets. The result is a low success rate in finding potential candidates, a high recruiter burnout rate and the start of an unproductive cycle.
Here’s where automation comes in, bringing some much-needed intelligence into the sourcing process. What recruiters don’t know, technology does. Passive candidates leave plenty of online clues to the fact that they might consider switching roles. For example, if someone conducts a search for salary averages in their field, that might indicate that they’re unhappy with their pay. Or, someone who’s suddenly active in their local industry organizations could see networking as a way to learn about new opportunities.
In these situations, automation can help you advertise your open positions where these individuals are more likely to see them. Targeted outreach increases recruiting efficiency, shortens time-to-fill and lowers the opportunity cost of positions remaining unfilled.
At Advanced RPO, we’ve successfully helped clients with their fluctuating hiring volumes by better leveraging technology. Especially in saturated markets, this strategy helps us to diversify our sourcing efforts to reach new pools of talent. For one client in particular, we were able to reduce their time-to-fill for exempt positions by 67% by leveraging technology.
Challenge #2: Improving the candidate experience.
With automation, it is possible today to optimize much of the talent acquisition process, from interview scheduling to offer creation and new hire onboarding.
But we have to ask: would you accept a position having never spoken to an actual person? Not likely. Human interaction helps us establish an emotional connection and tap into our gut feelings about whether or not a role is a fit. And, with more employees seeking meaning and personal fulfillment at work, the human piece of the recruiting puzzle is crucial.
That’s not to say that automation can’t help. When used appropriately, automation can enhance the candidate experience. Auto-scheduling interviews and follow up communication keeps the process moving for candidates to maintain their interest while freeing up recruiters to focus on more strategic work.
Technology can also help address the challenge of sourcing candidates for remote positions, a rising employment trend, or for efficiently moving through the interview process with employed candidates who need to maintain a travel schedule for their current roles. In these cases, video interviewing takes location out of the equation.
Today’s tech-driven recruiting process also provides businesses with an abundance of data, and technology helps to make sense of it. New data visualization tools can pull data from your ATS and other sources to create a single view of reporting. Having this helps you identify trends and anomalies in real time that are impacting recruiting. Think geographical trends, hard-to-fill positions, source of candidates and more.
There is certainly more to come as it relates to automation in the recruiting process. It’s tempting to apply it across many areas of the process, but the smartest approach is to consider where it delivers the highest value as it relates to your specific challenges.
