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To speed up hiring and secure top talent in today’s competitive hiring market, the most successful hiring managers are turning to recruitment automation tools. Such tools enable hiring and HR leaders to support an engaging candidate experience while saving time that can then be dedicated to interacting with candidates and working on more strategic tasks that will move the business forward.
What is Recruitment Automation?
You’ve likely heard a lot about automation across various industries – some talk of automation is positive and some is negative. But recruitment automation tools can greatly benefit your business and role as a hiring or HR leader.
Recruitment automation enables you to streamline manual tasks and busy work and, as a result, spend more time making personal connections with candidates. And once you have new hires on board, you’ll also have more time to focus on keeping your employees engaged and setting them up for success.
Below, we’ve outlined how you can make the most of recruitment automation tools to empower your hiring and talent management each step of the way.
Tap into Recruitment Automation Tools to Attract Top Talent
The historically-low unemployment rate and tight labor market means most job job seekers aren’t actively seeking new roles. With recruitment automation, you can reach passive candidates, meaning those who might not have otherwise considered joining your team. These candidates might be happy in their current roles but still open to new jobs if the right opportunity comes along.
Using recruitment automation, your team can send emails to passive, prospective applicants based on their background, experience and current location. This will enable you to reach a wider talent pool than you would if you simply expected job seekers to apply to your open roles on job boards – 80 percent of potential job seekers today don’t even visit job boards.
Leverage Easy Technology to Empower Your Hiring Process
HR leaders spend an average of 12 hours each week – equivalent to 30% of a typical 40-hour work week – on routine tasks such as answering calls, responding to emails and updating spreadsheets. But spending this much time on manual tasks takes time away from interacting with candidates and employees, and other strategic tasks.
One of the most time consuming tasks for any hiring manager is reviewing job applicants. Many hiring managers read through each and every job applicant – even if they aren’t qualified for the open role. Not only does this take a significant amount of time, but it will also slow down the hiring process, leading to a poor candidate experience.
With recruitment automation tools, you can make the entire applicant review process for your team. Prescreen surveys are automatically sent to potential candidates as soon as they apply. The typical format for these surveys is a series of true/false questions, which only take candidates a few minutes to complete. And once complete, prescreen surveys are automatically scored, immediately eliminating applicants who aren’t a fit so your team only spends time on qualified candidates.
Once you have qualified candidates, the next step is typically to schedule interviews. But this can result in a game of phone tag if you’re not tapping into the right recruitment technology. Rather than using traditional communication methods like phone or email, consider text messaging with candidates.
Up to 90 percent of job seekers would be open to receiving text messages during the application and hiring process. Your team can tap into text messaging to schedule interviews, share directions to your workplace, follow up with feedback post-interview and remind candidates of actions they need to take – such as completing prescreen surveys. And Hireology data found that text messaging can save up to eight days on your total time to hire.
Recruitment automation tools also come into play during the interview process. Instead of having your hiring managers and other team members run ad hoc interviews and take handwritten notes your team can benefit from leveraging interview guides that are automatically scored post-interview. This enables you to run compliant, impactful interviews and get back to candidates sooner rather than later with interview feedback and next steps – keeping top talent engaged. Recent data found that 70 percent of job candidates lose interest in job opportunities if they don’t hear back within a week of an interview, so the sooner you get back to candidates, the better.
Post-interview, you’ll want to verify candidates’ background and experience – and this can be streamlined through recruitment automation. To seamlessly complete reference checks, candidates simply fill in their references’ contact information and surveys are automatically sent out. This saves your team from playing phone tag with potential references – which would ultimately slow down the hiring process. References can fill out the survey on their own time and automated reference checks take less than two days to complete, with an average response rate of 85 percent. And for background checks candidates submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
Streamline New Hire Onboarding
After using recruitment automation tools to support a top-notch candidate experience, your engagement efforts shouldn’t stop there. Your employee onboarding is critical to your business success and without effective onboarding in place, your new employees will not have the best first impression of your organization.
Onboarding doesn’t have to be tedious or complicated as some might think. Rather than manually completing each onboarding step, automated onboarding can make the process seamless for both your HR team and new hires. Since most of today’s job applicants are already employed, they’re likely to have two weeks or longer between when they sign a job offer and start a new job. And during this period, there’s plenty of time for new hires to get ahead with onboarding.
Sending automated onboarding documents digitally will help keep employees engaged and excited to get started, and will save your HR team a significant amount of time during the employee’s first day and week. And no new employee wants to spend the majority of their first day in the HR office filling out paperwork.
Digital onboarding enables new employees to start contributing to the company on the first day, rather than focusing on required paperwork. Automated onboarding tasks that can be completed before the first day include: filling out direct deposit information for automated payroll, completing tax forms, filling out benefits paperwork and signing the employee handbook. When employees read through your employee handbook before they even get started, they’ll get a chance to learn more about your company culture and core values, making them even more eager to contribute to your team.
Automation tools empower you to hire your best team. By tapping into recruitment automation tools every step of the process – from attracting top talent to hiring new employees, you can boost candidate engagement and, as a result, hire motivated employees who are excited to do great work for your team. You can also save your team time that otherwise would have been spent on manual processes.
For additional information specific to successfully onboarding new hires, read our resource, “The Hireology Onboarding Playbook.”
