According to a survey by Human Resource Executive, 36% of HR leaders say recruiting and retaining key talent is their biggest challenge. That means many roles are either sitting vacant or filled by candidates who are a good fit — but not the best possible fit. Even worse, inefficient recruitment processes often lead to negative candidate experiences, making your company more likely to miss out on top talent.
Recruiting automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can help your talent acquisition team beat the trend and successfully hire quality candidates. Leveraging automated recruitment workflows and AI-powered tools streamlines your hiring practices from end to end, cutting out the fat and improving the candidate experience.
Keep reading for more about recruiting automation and AI and eight ways they can optimize your hiring process.
What Is Recruitment Automation?
Recruitment automation uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to simplify and automate tasks for recruiters. Your team can use automated workflows to engage candidates with quick, personalized messaging and streamline manual recruitment processes like resume screening.
Use AI to assist with tasks like writing job descriptions and optimizing candidate interactions, such as answering FAQs or scheduling interviews. This saves businesses time and money and allows your HR team to focus on the strategic parts of people management.
Recruiting automation tools, like an applicant tracking system (ATS), give your team a hub for all talent data. AI-powered analytics drive new hiring insights, which help your team target the right candidates and reduce time-to-hire. Your team can manage recruiting and hiring from a central source and concentrate on finding the best candidates.
8 Ways Recruiting Automation Helps Hiring Success
Let’s look at eight ways to achieve better hiring processes through recruiting automation.
1. Minimizes Admin Cost
Recruiters and hiring managers lose valuable hours to monotonous administrative processes, such as writing emails, entering candidate information, and scheduling interviews. Why not use automation and AI for recruiting to save that valuable time?
Think of recruitment automation and AI like virtual assistants. Automated recruitment processes take repetitive manual tasks off your team members’ plates. Then, your recruiting team can use the time they save to focus on more critical tasks and fill open positions sooner, adding up to a lower cost-per-hire.
One of the top benefits of talent intelligence is reduced recruitment costs. Image source
2. Personalizes Candidate Communication
Did you know that 71% of applicants want to know as soon as possible if they didn't get the job? Automation and AI-assisted communication help recruiters respond to candidates quickly with tailored messages that maintain their voice. Recruiting automation enables your team to send emails and text messages as soon as someone applies for a job. You can do this for every interaction, including receiving applications, scheduling and confirming interviews, making offers, and notifying of rejections.
ATS platforms also automate candidate segmentation. This helps guide all HR communication, tailoring messaging for every applicant based on their segment. One helpful way to look at this is by considering how a busy and thriving call center manages its communications.
Some of the core call center quality assurance best practices, for example, include friendly and rapid service. Likewise, effective hiring and recruitment requires quick communication with candidates on application status and answers to questions.
Automated recruitment tools take inspiration from call centers by using AI chatbots. Chatbots can field many candidate questions, answer FAQs, and resolve potential issues as quickly as possible.
3. Eases Interview Scheduling
68% of recruiters say one of their biggest challenges is coordinating with candidate and hiring teams to schedule interviews. Think about it. You spend weeks searching for the best candidates, only to spend days going back and forth to schedule interviews.
Automating interview processes with an ATS alleviates the pain and guesswork of scheduling. Sync calendars with your system, and recruiters can generate interview scheduling links in their first email to candidates. Candidates follow the link to view time slots that work for the hiring team and can quickly choose the time that works for their schedule.
68% of hiring teams could benefit from recruitment automation to handle interview scheduling. Image source
4. Simplifies Application Tracking
Recruiting automation and AI screen, segment, and track every candidate who enters your talent pool. Your team can view candidate details, scoring, and progress with just a few clicks. An ATS also automates resume parsing. Your team can bring up candidates prioritized by experience, education, or skills.
Many recruiting tools offer cloud storage for applicant data. Store anything from PDFs to CSVs to a parquet file format, and access applicant data from anywhere at any time.
Recruiting automation can notify your hiring managers immediately when an applicant interaction occurs. Email alerts ensure that nothing is overlooked and that your team responds appropriately and promptly.
5. Helps Eliminate Hiring Bias
Unconscious bias often occurs in recruitment and hiring, but that doesn’t mean you have to live with it. You can’t reduce bias, let alone eliminate it, if you don’t know what it looks like.
Responsibly developed AI systems can help you avoid biased language in your job descriptions, suggesting more neutral language to use instead. Automation and AI can evaluate resumes and skills objectively without considering other factors like the candidate’s name, gender, or age. The technology can also help create structured interviews and interview questions, focusing on candidates’ competencies instead of subjective traits.
6. Optimizes Job Posting
A recruitment platform with automation can take over a wide variety of tasks from your HR team. For example, many platforms offer tools that allow your team to post job openings to multiple job boards and social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook simultaneously.
Your team can use the platform’s analytics features to learn where to reach the right pool of job seekers. Factors such as verbiage, skills, and candidate ratings all drive an improved recruitment strategy. Your team can make better-informed decisions when creating job ads and save tons of time creating and managing job postings.
You can also build custom automated workflows that operate based on triggers and events. For example, when someone creates a job post, the app notifies managers to review and approve it. You’ll get your job ads out as quickly as possible to ensure you don’t miss that next top-notch candidate.
As a result, your recruitment team is more productive, and they can spend more time filling positions quickly and reduce your cost-per-hire.
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7. Streamlines Candidate Screening
These days, a single job post can receive hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. Research by Ashby found that applications have grown by nearly 300% since 2021. That means increasingly heavier workloads for your screeners, especially if you’re relying on manual screening. A recent study found that 48% of recruiters said sorting through a large volume of resumes was the biggest challenge in screening candidates.
You can automate prescreening and skills testing to prevent hiring lag. For example, the next time your team puts out an IT job posting, they can automatically rank candidates with the appropriate work experience and the best data engineer certifications at the top of the list. Then, they can prioritize recruiting efforts and reach out to top candidates first.
8. Improves Compliance
Your organization has many policies in place to enforce compliance. You also go to great lengths to protect sensitive customer data and company assets. Are you also protecting the privacy of your talent pool? If you’re using recruiting software, automation can help protect all your people data, including that of your applicants.
That’s because recruiting software does more than centralize candidate data. Platforms like ClearCompany handle all of your data in a secured cloud environment. All applicant data is GDPR and CCPA-compliant and protected with two-factor authentication (2FA). That means users automatically receive a text or email to verify their identity before they can gain access to the system.
Thanks to automation-driven security protocols, both onsite and remote employees can securely access recruitment portals. Endpoint protection keeps information safe on candidate devices, mitigating the risk of data breaches and reputational damage.
Recruiting Software With Automation and AI
Recruiting automation and AI may sound complex at first, but they’re actually quite simple. Your recruitment team eliminates mundane tasks so they can spend more time finding top talent. Candidates receive a streamlined, positive hiring experience. The business saves time and money while filling vacant positions quickly and with more diverse talent.
So, what’s the catch? You need modern recruitment software with automation and AI tools like the ClearCompany Applicant Tracking System. With ClearCompany, you get:
- A unified, cloud-based platform for consistent experiences and accurate information
- AI-powered sourcing engine to instantly source and match top candidates for any role
- Update multiple job board posts from one central location
- Leverage AI to create job descriptions in record time
- Send text messages and emails to candidates and employees in bulk
- Use AI to generate templates and personalize communications
- Automatically generate and attach video interview links to candidate emails
Learn more about what your recruiting team can achieve when you use an ATS with automation and AI capabilities.
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