How Automation in Recruiting Frees HR Teams to Focus on People
Automation in recruiting uses technology to streamline repetitive hiring tasks—such as job posting, resume screening, candidate sourcing, interview scheduling, and onboarding—thereby freeing HR teams to focus on building relationships with top candidates and improving overall recruitment efficiency.
The most effective recruiting practices are a combination of automation and the personal touch. Implementing automation frees up your HR team to focus on the person behind the résumé, and helps your company recruit top talent. Consider some of the many benefits of automation in hiring.
What Is Automation in Recruiting?
Automation in recruiting refers to using technology tools to streamline certain repetitive or time-consuming hiring tasks. Many administrative tasks work well when handled by automated processes, freeing humans to develop relationships with the most promising candidates. Applicant tracking systems can provide the framework for automation, keeping your recruiting organized and efficient.
Recruiting Tasks That Benefit from Automation
If you envision the typical process of hiring for a new position, it may go something like this:
- An open position is identified and approved
- Post the job description on job boards
- Receive resumes
- Begin the process of screening, culling, and categorizing applicants
- Schedule initial interviews with promising candidates
- Schedule later-round interviews
- Send offers
- Receive acceptances
- Begin onboarding
Within almost all of those steps, automation can save time and energy, the most precious commodities for hiring teams.
Recruiting
Automated tools can scan popular networking sites for keywords, company connections, or specific skills to identify potential new hires who fit open positions. They can be used to organize and run internal referral programs that remind current employees about available roles and incentives for bringing quality referrals to the hiring table.
Resume Screening
Automated software can screen for keywords in education, experience, and skills from the resumes of every applicant. This ensures only the most qualified applicants end up in the pile to be considered. These tools can even rank resumes so you start with those most likely to fit the open role. Automated screening can process resumes in a fraction of the time of manual screening.
Communication
For job applicants, response time along each point of the hiring process can be the deciding factor between your company and another opportunity. Automated communication ensures you make contact at each step: acknowledging receipt of the resume, a gracious rejection if the qualifications don’t match, an interview offer with an automated calendar scheduling tool, confirmation of the interview time, and a reminder as the date approaches. While personal contact is important along the way, certain parts of the process can be entrusted to the automation tools.
Onboarding
The onboarding process consists of two types of tasks: administrative and training. For the administrative half of the process, automation tools remove a tremendous workload from HR. Required payroll paperwork, benefits information, and contracts can all be managed through an automated system, with a step-by-step process that ensures all contracts, payroll information, and benefits enrollment are completed by the required deadlines. This frees up HR and managers to focus on helping new hires integrate into their teams and on providing meaningful training and mentorship.
Benefits of Automation
- Improved Efficiency. Many parts of the hiring process can be time-consuming. Human workers have weekends, sickness, vacations, scheduling challenges, or urgent other projects that take priority. Efficient hiring relies on timely decision-making and communication, and automation doesn’t need time off. You can rely on it to keep a schedule.
- Decreased Time-to-Hire. The moment a job is requisitioned or posted, the clock starts ticking on the time-to-hire metric, a useful way to track how quickly your company can move from posting to offer and identify bottlenecks. Automated processes are often the solution to those bottlenecks, ensuring quality hires don’t slip through because of delays.
- Equitable Hiring Practices. Automation can help eliminate instances of unfair hiring by removing conscious or unconscious bias from the process. When you set your screening parameters to be fair and equitable, your tools will screen to those exact specifications. These standardized criteria can assure candidates that their resumes were reviewed objectively against the required criteria.
- Better Use of Resources. When hiring teams are stretched thin, they may experience burnout, which further reduces hiring efficiency. Automation can offer them relief from certain tasks, allowing their focus to be on the more meaningful act of forming connections with the most qualified candidates. This helps you avoid quick hires to solve an immediate problem and enables you to choose the right person for the job.
Implement an Automation Tool
Some automation tools can get a bad rap in the hiring game. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the newest and shiniest tool, research which tools can really serve your company best in the long-run. Make your investments in tried-and-true technology that supports your human workers while delivering great efficiency at every step of the process.
ApplicantStack is the ideal addition to your stack, as it’s easy to implement and offers advanced automation. Recruiting and hiring can become more streamlined, ensuring that your company gets top candidates and can bring them onboard with ease.
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