Signs that you need a recruitment automation solution

If you’ve been trying to hire for weeks—or even months—and haven’t been able to find the right people for a role, it might be time to consider automating your recruitment process.

Hiring can be a long, difficult process that involves multiple rounds of interviews and endless emails back and forth with candidates who don’t quite fit the bill. These signs indicate that recruitment automation is time-appropriate.

Recruitment is taking too much time

Recruiters spend too much time on data entry, interviews, candidate rejection, and management.

Recruitment is a process that requires a lot of manual effort and can take up to 50% of your hiring team’s time. The most common issues include:

• Assessing and evaluating candidates’ qualifications and experience is difficult as it requires manual work of going through each resume or application one by one.
• Interview scheduling takes up a lot of time since each interview needs to be scheduled separately; this means recruiters often have to reschedule interviews if the interviewer is not available.
• Rejection letters have to be sent manually and there are often mistakes in them which leave candidates feeling frustrated with your company.

• Automating for faster turnaround
  • Recruitment automation helps recruiters use AI/ML algorithms to skim through applications and assess the qualifications, experience, and relevance of a candidate for a particular role. Further, self-service portals can be created for automated interview scheduling to identify ideal time slots for interviewees and hiring teams. Along with this, automation can also help communicate and follow up with candidates for their acceptance or rejection.

High cost of recruitment

The process of hiring for a position is an expensive one. The cost of managing HR and hiring teams, the training expenses, overtime, and other incentives and benefits that they may be provided.

Moreover, the hiring team executes a variety of roles such as developing job descriptions, conducting interviews and background checks, and even simply advertising the position can be considerable. A comprehensive understanding of the costs of hiring is crucial before making any recruitment decisions.

All these factors contribute to increasing the cost per hire of a candidate.

• Automating for cost
  • Automating certain tasks can easily optimise the recruitment process for reducing the cost of hiring a candidate. Processes such as vetting applications, scheduling interviews, and checking references can easily be automated with the help of self-serve tools and virtual assistants. This helps recruitment save billable hours, and overtime payment, and eventually lowers the cost of hiring by reducing the time to hire.

Quality of hire

When it comes to recruiting, quality of hire is one of the most important factors for a company. The hiring pipeline is long, intricate, and time-consuming. Therefore, the chances of errors compound with each step of the process. Consequently, any errors in the process will result in hiring the wrong candidate, and eventually become detrimental to the organization.

A mismatched candidate pool, or the inability to gauge candidates’ abilities, might be signs that your organization’s recruitment process needs to be automated.

• Automating for quality
  • Automated tools help recruiters by providing a more accurate picture of each candidate’s fit with the company culture than traditional processes do. Automation eliminates inefficiencies during assessments by recording everything so there’s no room for error when evaluating potential employees based on their skill set. Further, automation helps recruiters score, and rank candidates based on data sets with virtually no errors — ensuring that the best candidates get the spotlight.

Biased decisions

Recruiters are not immune to making biased decisions. It’s easy to do, especially when we’re faced with a stressful situation and given little time to make a decision.

There are also a number of other factors that can contribute to bias in the hiring process. For example, if you’re looking for candidates with a particular skill set, it’s easy to overlook someone who doesn’t fit the description. If you have 20 candidates and only one of them has experience in your industry, it’s easy to put more weight on that one person’s experience than on all the other applicants combined. Moreover, inherent and subconscious biases affect the process more than anything.

The problem with bias is that it can lead you to hire candidates who aren’t the right fit for the job. It’s also important to note that many of these biases are unconscious and therefore difficult to avoid.

• Automating for eliminating bias
  • Automation tools rely solely on data for yielding results. Therefore, when they observe a data set consisting of candidates they look at factors that directly affect the candidate’s ability to perform a particular job instead of irrelevant factors that are attached to their race, gender identity, or religion.

Hindrances due to manual dependency

Evaluating candidates is one of the most labor-intensive processes in a hiring cycle. The evaluation consists of individually looking through every single candidate’s qualifications and previous work experience, as well as checking references and recording their responses. Further, the process also requires recruiters to rank candidates based on the results of such evaluation.

Evidently, the process is vulnerable to the ill effects of manual dependency such as human error, unavailability, and the time required to execute tasks manually. Should a recruiter be unavailable for any period, the hiring process comes to a crawl, while the smallest of errors in evaluation can lead to inadequate hiring outcomes.

• Automating for efficiency
  • Automating this process can significantly reduce reliance on manual processes, reduce hiring time, improve the quality of hire and candidate experience, eliminate bias in the hiring process, and reduce the cost of hiring. Manual dependency on hiring means that recruiters rely on humans to do tasks that can easily be automated by software. Automation, perhaps, eliminates one of the biggest drawbacks of manual dependency: the margin for error. As recruiters automate their processes, they improve the accuracy of the entire recruitment by reducing human-induced errors in the system.

Inconveniences and bottlenecks in the recruitment process

Recruitment automation also helps you clear away some of the inefficiencies and bottlenecks that can crop up during the hiring process. Listed below are a few ways it can help:

• Unclear communication with candidates
  • Recruitment automation platforms allow recruiters to track candidate activity so you don’t lose contact with them after they apply for a job. By tracking their progress, you’re able to make sure they’re aware of what’s happening every step of the way—and if there are any bumps in the road like if someone else has been hired or if an offer hasn’t been extended yet, you’ll know about it right away so that your team doesn’t get blindsided by these setbacks later on down the line when they need answers from these candidates’ files.
• Lack of communication between recruiters and interviewers or hiring managers
  • Recruiters and interviewers often suffer from gaps in communication. Such gaps lead to inefficiencies in the process of recruitment. When you use a recruitment automation platform, it can help you keep track of each person’s responsibilities and timelines. This means that if each party involved in the process is aware of the progress of others, assigned tasks automatically, and can track the status of the hiring efforts for a role.

Conclusion

As the hiring process is rapidly moving to an online-first approach, the competitive landscape of hiring the best talent has completely changed. Therefore, at such a critical turning point for the recruitment process, organisations are in dire need of next-generation and advanced solutions to gain an edge over their competition. Automation helps resolve many of these inefficiencies through a faster turnaround, reduced costs, and overall reduction of dependency on individuals — helping you hire the best talent.