Although not entirely new, recruitment automation is a hot topic in the industry right now and something that is rapidly gaining interest.

Recruiting automations have risen in adoption by 316% year-over-year (YoY) (Workato), however, only 25% of companies report using HR automation for recruitment and hiring. (Zappy).

What is Recruitment Automation?

Recruitment automation automates recruiting processes by taking away the individual manual tasks involved in recruitment such as rejection emails, follow up emails and database hygiene. It improves the recruitment process by taking out any variables associated with someone carrying out manual tasks and can have a huge benefit on the efficiency of recruitment administration, personalised outreach and collecting feedback and data updates.

Why Recruitment Automation is the answer

There are huge benefits to recruitment automation.

69% of HR professionals that do use automation in hiring reported that it significantly decreased the time spent on this process. (Zappy).

Automating your recruitment process can result in:

• Increased Efficiency: Automating manual tasks and saving time.
• Cost Savings: Reducing the need for manual labour as well as minimising errors, resulting in reducing the time and resources needed to complete each stage of the recruitment process.
• Improved Candidate Experience: Automation can help improve the candidate experience by ensuring regular communication as well as being available to answer questions that candidates may have.
• Reduced Bias: Automation can help reduce bias in the recruitment process by removing subjective factors and relying on data-driven decision-making.
• Improved Data Management: Automation can help recruiters manage and analyse large volumes of data more effectively, such as candidate information and recruitment metrics. This can provide valuable insights into the recruitment process, helping recruiters identify areas for improvement, make data-driven decisions and have access to more top talent.

How to implement Recruitment Automation in to your process

The sky is your limit when it comes to automation. The aim is to automate tasks that are manual and that you could save time doing, tasks that can result in a cleaner database and tasks that can have a positive impact on the candidate experience.

Let’s look at some examples of automation:

1. Automated candidate communication to create a good candidate experience

As we know, candidate experience is everything when it comes to marketing your employer brand and securing top talent. Automating candidate communication is a great way to create a smoother candidate experience.

Examples of automating candidate communication includes:

• Candidate rejection emails
• Candidate follow up emails throughout the recruitment process
• Interview reminders
• Post interview surveys
• New hires check in texts/emails
• Chatbots to answer any questions candidates have

Automation Tech Channels

The three main channels to automate communication are:

• Email
• Text
• Chatbots

Email and text are the main channels used to automate candidate communication, with text being very successful. In fact, 89% of candidates prefer texting to phone calls or emails (Clear Company). Chatbots are on the rise! This channel is a replacement for a conversation with a recruiter, which is a time saver!

2. Automated administration tasks

There are so many activities to do as a recruiter or hiring manager - Automating recruitment administration can save a lot of time.

Examples of automating administration tasks include:

• Updating candidate status’ through candidate action or response
• Sending documentation at certain stages
• Notifying recruiters when top talent changes stages / makes certain actions
• Scheduling meetings/ interviews

3. Automated data health

Your database is the key to unlocking top talent and nurturing passive candidates in an efficient, cost saving way that also demonstrates a good candidate experience. However, an inconsistent database that doesn’t have the information you need is just a dormant data storage machine. Automating processes to maintain data health transforms your database into a value-adding function that can in turn completely transform your recruitment.

Examples of how you can automate your recruitment process to benefit your database includes:

• Automating finding people in your database that are missing details such as email addresses and phone numbers and then automating an action to collect this data
• Automating finding candidates on your database that you haven’t spoken to for a number of years and reactivating details

Conclusion

Implementing a recruitment automation strategy to overhaul your recruitment process across candidate communication, administration and data health can lead to increased efficiency, cost savings and more importantly better access to more top talent.