Hiring managers can spend up to 100 hours sourcing quality candidates for each job opening. But as recruitment technology evolves, more and more recruiting teams are using automation to streamline the recruitment process, reducing the time it takes to source candidates, extend a job offer, and onboard a new hire.
Recruitment process automation helps HR professionals make better hiring decisions, while spending less time on manual recruiting tasks. Here’s how hiring managers can use automated systems to optimize the recruiting and hiring process, and provide a better experience for qualified candidates and job seekers alike.
What Is Recruitment Process Automation?
Recruitment process automation is the use of human resources automation software to perform routine or repetitive tasks in the recruiting process. This could take the form of automated systems that can write job descriptions and manage job postings, or more advanced tools that can perform resume screening and follow up with applicants.
For example, some AI recruiting tools use machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence to conduct video interviews or pre-screening assessments.
Recruitment process automation doesn’t eliminate the need for human decision-making in the talent acquisition process, but it can help you field potential candidates when you have a high volume of applicants and need to accelerate the screening process.
Benefits of Recruitment Automation
HR automation has benefits throughout the employee lifecycle, but it’s especially useful in the recruiting process. Here are three ways it can benefit your recruiting team:
Reduce Time to Hire
First, recruitment automation saves recruiters time and effort. Instead of spending their time on manual tasks, recruiting teams can automate the tedious stuff, like scheduling interviews and posting about open positions on social media sites and job boards.
By delegating time-consuming tasks to automated recruiting tools, hiring managers can spend more time on candidate engagement, ensuring a seamless interview process for top candidates and resulting in a shorter time to hire.
Improve Candidate Matching
Candidate matching involves pairing job descriptions with potential candidates based on their skills, education, and other criteria. But with hiring managers spending only a few seconds reviewing each resume, it’s easy to overlook some of the best candidates.
Recruiting process automation tools can match candidate profiles with job requirements automatically, including passive candidates and previous applicants. This allows you to tap into a broader talent pool and use your candidate relationship management (CRM) software to engage top talent and attract them to your company.
Facilitate Hiring Decisions
Automated recruiting tools can help you make data-driven hiring decisions based on a candidate’s qualifications, rather than on superficial characteristics. Qualified applicants may face unconscious bias if their name, gender, or appearance doesn’t conform to a hiring manager’s expectations of what a successful applicant should look like.
Recruiting tools can help reduce unconscious bias by creating anonymized candidate profiles and identifying discriminatory hiring patterns in real-time.
Types of Recruitment Automation Tools
Recruitment automation tools can help you at multiple stages of the recruiting and hiring process. Here’s what that looks like in five key areas:
Pre-Screening
Pre-screening questions can be useful for identifying unqualified candidates or ranking candidates based on predetermined criteria. For example, if your job opening requires employees to be located in a certain time zone or eligible to work in a specific country, you can automatically reject applicants who don’t meet that criteria.
While automatically rejecting applicants may seem harsh, it allows you to get back to them promptly rather than leaving them waiting for days or weeks for a reply.
Automated Shortlisting
After eliminating unqualified applicants, you can use automated shortlisting to narrow down your list of candidates to the most promising five or 10. Many applicant tracking systems (ATS) allow you to rank candidates based on their answers to pre-screening questions or automated skill assessments.
By identifying the most qualified candidates automatically, you can jump right into the interview process and increase your chances of finding a good fit.
Interview Scheduling
Conducting interviews with candidates is one of the most time-consuming parts of the recruitment process. Recruitment automation systems provide several options: On the one hand, you can simply use them to schedule interviews and reduce the amount of back-and-forth it takes to find a time that works for all parties.
If you want to go one step further, you can use a chatbot to conduct virtual interviews and answer questions about the job description from potential applicants.
Background Checks
Depending on the role, you may need to conduct a background check or confirm an employee’s work authorization before making a job offer. With recruiting automation tools, you can schedule these things to happen automatically when you reach the appropriate point in the hiring process.
Pulpstream can automatically generate documents, such as contracts and job offer letters, and connect with e-signature tools like DocuSign.
Onboarding
HR automation can help you make a seamless transition from the hiring process to the onboarding process. From collecting new hire paperwork to delivering custom training modules and workplace safety programs, employee onboarding automation helps you prepare employees to succeed at their new job from Day One.
Pulpstream’s cloud-based platform also includes a self-service portal where employees can go to access important paperwork and update their information online.
How Recruitment Automation Software Works
Now that we know which parts of the recruitment process you can automate, how does it actually work in practice? Follow these three steps to get started:
Automate Recruitment Workflows
Recruitment process automation starts by assessing your existing workflow. Create a recruiting process flowchart to help you visualize the steps in your recruiting process, then decide which repetitive or time-consuming tasks you want to automate.
No-code platforms like Pulpstream make it easy to automate existing workflows with a drag-and-drop interface that you can use even if you don’t know how to code. Simply reorder tasks and identify which triggers will initiate which follow-up action.
Integrate with Applicant Tracking Systems
Next, integrate your HR automation platform with your applicant tracking system, talent management system, and other HR tools. By linking all of these platforms together on the backend, you can eliminate data silos and reduce human error.
For example, Pulpstream integrates with Salesforce, ADP, Workday, and other tools, so you can easily share data between your recruiting team, accounting team, and other departments as your candidate moves from one stage of the process to another.
Enhance the Candidate Experience
Once you’ve implemented recruitment process automation, track key metrics like your time to hire and employee retention rate to ensure you’re providing a positive candidate experience. While automation technology has the potential to streamline the application process, it can also present roadblocks if your processes are clunky or inefficient.
An effective recruiting and hiring process improves your employer brand by simplifying processes, shortening time to hire, and keeping applicants engaged and informed.
Streamline Hiring with Recruitment Automation Software
The recruiting process involves many time-consuming tasks, from sourcing candidates and scheduling interviews, to generating a job offer letter and conducting background checks. Recruitment automation can speed up the process by screening and ranking applicants and putting the best candidates at the top of your shortlist.
Once you’ve made a job offer, get new hires to work faster by automating the training and onboarding process and facilitating employee relationship management.
Pulpstream’s no-code interface makes it easy to create custom recruitment workflows that connect with other HR tools. Request a demo today to see it in action!
