8 Recruitment Activities You Should Automate

The challenges of recruitment. So much to do, so little time.

Thankfully, automation allows you to focus on high-touch activities without wasting time on mundane and repetitive tasks, saving recruiters roughly 14 hours each week! Embracing AI also enhances the quality of hire (QoH) and talent retention. Luckily, we’re not alone in this belief, considering a whopping 96% of senior HR professionals agree with this statement.

And if all that’s not enough, automating your recruitment activities will also:

• Increase HR productivity by streamlining the entire recruitment process
• Improve the scalability and consistency of the recruitment process
• Increase profits by lowering the cost per hire
• Improve the candidate experience with better communication

HR activities are anything but monotonous, so we understand it may feel overwhelming to automate something as complex as the recruitment process. Where to even begin?

Not to worry, as we will walk you through the top 8 recruitment activities that automation will take to the next level. Buckle up and enjoy!

Posting Job Openings

So the journey begins – posting the brand new job offer for the first time. And right off the bat, we can start automating the recruitment process.

Rather than manually placing and optimizing the vacancy to multiple job boards one by one, Programmatic Job Advertising software allows you to choose which websites you’ll be targeting and post your vacancy with one click. Whether it’s the mighty Linkedin & Glassdoor, niche job boards specific to the role, or all of the above, automating this recruitment activity will create efficiency like never before. In fact, research shows that 60% of companies agree programmatic job advertising speeds up the average hiring timeline.

But wait, there’s more!

Rather than your candidates simply applying through those job boards (as they normally would for most vacancies), they will instead be redirected to your custom-made landing page to apply.  Create personalized fields to gather the information truly relevant to your vacancy and your firm, then just kick back and relax while all that data will be automatically migrated and stored in your recruitment CRM. First impressions matter, and it’s always a good idea to stand out from the crowd if you want to attract the best of the best. Well, creating a unique and capturing application process will do just that!

Finding Candidate Details

For those recruiters who can’t simply wait around for the perfect candidate to apply, headhunting becomes their next plan of action. Assuming the HR team has been around for some time, your candidate relationship management (CRM) system should be stacked with a pool of qualified candidates ready to be called upon when a new opening comes to life.

But let’s say you don’t have such a database at your disposal. That is still no excuse to spend countless hours scrolling through the thousands of resumes on all the different job boards.

Candidate sourcing software will automate this recruitment activity by discovering top talents at scale based on your specific criteria (e.g. skills and experience). Considering that nowadays almost a third of all new hires are proactively sourced by recruiters, it should definitely be on your priority list of tools. Afterward, this automation software creates a detailed digital dossier on those potential candidates by gathering their professional and contact details from multiple sources and storing them in your CRM.

Who knows, maybe your future dream candidate has already been sourced and qualified, with all their relevant details right in front of you.

Reviewing Resumes

Each job posting attracts 250 applicants on average. That’s 250 resumes that recruiters have to review and decide whether to qualify or not for every single job opening!

And this is where AI comes to the rescue once again.

Resume parsers are automation tools that extract, structure, and store the most relevant information from all the hundreds of resumes that come your way via email, job boards, websites, etc. Recruiters can then efficiently analyze those organized key criteria to pick out the most suitable talents for the specific job opening. Besides just saving your precious time, boosting productivity, and reducing overhead costs (as if all that’s not enough), a resume parser eliminates the margin of error when interpreting the data. Crucial information that may be poorly emphasized or simply overlooked by the human eye will not be able to slip through the AI.

These tools are constantly developing, and are now juiced up with machine learning capabilities that can analyze candidates’ data along with your company’s hiring trends to automatically suggest the most suitable matches. As the icing on the cake – most reputable resume parsers are pre-installed with your ATS (more on that later) and seamlessly integrate with your existing CRM platforms.

Engaging With Candidates

To begin with, why is candidate engagement essential?

Well, for starters, more than 50% of surveyed candidates had declined a job throughout their lives solely due to a poor hiring experience. And who can blame them? On top of that, candidate engagement maintains their interest & helps prevent ghosting by keeping them in the loop of the hiring process throughout its timeline, which 83% of candidates greatly appreciate. There are multiple stages of candidate engagement, most of which can be completely automated for efficiency.

Chatbots and automated Q&A systems have gained popularity over the years by ensuring that candidates’ questions or concerns do not go unaddressed (most tend to be repetitive). Next in line is creating some thoughtful, customized email templates for every stage of engagement. With email integration software, these template emails are then sent out on autopilot whenever a specific action occurs. For instance, the moment you push a certain candidate down the hiring pipeline – they instantly receive an automated email congratulating them and outlining the next step.

Whether your candidates turn out a good fit for your vacancy or not, they deserve to be communicated with and kept informed. In today’s fast-paced world, the right message at the right time can prove to be invaluable, be it in acquiring new clients or hiring the best candidate.

Scheduling Meetings

This recruitment activity was one of the first on the block to become automated. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given just how time-consuming it is going back and forth coordinating, checking availability, and scheduling meetings with numerous candidates all at once. Instead, you could save all this time and resources to focus on the high-value tasks, unleashing your full productivity. After all, HR is so much more than just recruiting.

For this automation, you will simply need a meeting scheduler of your choice, integrated with your already existing calendar, be it Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc.  To make things even better, you could sync your calendar with your CRM, email, and mobile phone to get constant reminders of upcoming meetings.

If we’re talking about online meetings, your new meeting scheduler will also generate and send out invitation links for Zoom or Google Meets. This automation also removes the barrier of needing to coordinate with one another, as the candidate has 24/7 access and freedom to choose their preferred date and time with recruiters’ availability in mind. This is great news for the 40% of candidates that book their meetings after business hours.

And hey, last but not least, it does create a much more enjoyable experience for the candidates with the convenience and pleasant visuals in place.

Assessing Candidates

There is so much to consider when assessing your candidates besides simply reading their CVs. Although AI can help with candidate screening, most of those factors will require a human touch to determine: whether the person would be a great cultural fit, how well they treat others, their willingness to learn, etc.

The preliminary assessment stage is usually an interview with the recruiter, where they can already filter out the ones lacking in skills or personal qualities. Next in line would be assessing the candidates’ skills, cognitive abilities, or situation behavior, which can and should be automated right away. Standardized assessment platforms can combine a few of these tests, customized to be directly related to the specific job at hand.

Although assessment and question overload result in candidate dropout, 89% of companies are utilizing some form of pre-employment automated assessments one way or the other.

Why, you might ask? They improve the QoH, decrease employee turnover rates, decrease hiring bias, and reduce the time-to-hire. At the end of the day, a candidate can oversell in their CV and interview, but there’s no faking in assessments.

The assessment results are integrated into the CRM, ATS, or database for easy management. These results are then automatically compared to industry/company standards to discover the best potential hires.

Tracking Candidates Through the Process

There’s no point in automating all these key recruitment activities if you have no way to track your candidates throughout their journey. Sure, you could use a simple Excel file to keep track of your candidates and their stages in the recruitment process, but when you’re dealing with hundreds of rows and columns – it becomes quite the challenge. As a result, 99% of all Fortune 500 companies incorporate an Applicant tracking system (ATS) in their overall recruitment strategy.

An ATS is one of the most popular recruitment automation tools in existence because it’s an all-in-one kind of software. For businesses whose recruiters go through thousands of applicants per year, investing in an ATS is really a no-brainer. It carries out numerous functions besides just candidate tracking, such as reviewing resumes, filtering applicants, setting meetings, engaging with candidates, and much more.

This solution has also proven crucial in tracking candidates and staying organized. All your potential hires will be grouped in your Applicant Tracking System, showing you exactly where every candidate is in the hiring pipeline for each open position.

Make your hiring decisions faster and better with an ATS, without ever losing track of a single candidate who could turn out to be a hidden gem.

Onboarding Successful Recruits

And Voila! You did it! You’ve successfully brought a new team member on board with some tough decisions along the way.

The recruitment process doesn’t fully end here as there’s one last vital step to tick off before the new hire can dive into their new role, and that is onboarding. The main goal of onboarding is to facilitate the new hires with the training and resources necessary to become their most productive selves, as well as settle into their new role, team, and corporate culture quickly and efficiently.

Employee onboarding software comes in different shapes and sizes, but most of it is heavily automated and cloud-based. This software often contains welcome letters, training guides, handbooks, videos, organizational charts, and much more, placing the onboarding process on autopilot. Recruiters will also create accounts, give access, and explain the firm’s tool stack, which is nowadays present in virtually every firm, remote, hybrid, or in-person.

In case there’s still debate on whether onboarding is necessary, research has shown that it skyrockets employee engagement and job satisfaction. In addition, it creates a standardized and consistent onboarding process for all future team members to follow. But perhaps most importantly, it improves the employee retention rate by 82%! Recruiters know the true cost of employee turnover, so you can also imagine just how much money saved we’re talking about.

Over To You

Both the candidates’ and recruiters’ time is too valuable to be wasted on recruitment activities that have the capacity to be automated.

With many countries facing record-high levels of unemployment and showing signs of talent scarcity, candidates are now placed at the core of recruitment, so the focus should be on making their journey as smooth, pleasant, and efficient as possible. It’s also in the best interest of the hiring company to identify and ‘close’ the best talents with minimum time and money invested, and that’s exactly what automation brings to the table.

Fun fact, Gen-Zs will soon make up the vast majority of all workforce worldwide, but over 50% won’t even apply for a job believed to have an outdated recruitment process. Yikes!

And since we have these modern tools at our disposal to make more precise, suitable hires – why not use them to your advantage?

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