Like every industry in the past twelve months, recruitment has had to shift and adjust. Recruitment firms are receiving and processing more candidate applications than ever before. In our conversations with recruiters, we’ve heard plenty of stories of job adverts that before the pandemic would attract 20-50 applicants, now receiving ten times that number.
This huge volume of applications means recruiters have more data to organise and sort through. Couple this with the fact that many recruitment businesses are operating with reduced staffing levels, and it’s easy to understand how recruiters have a bit of an administrative nightmare on their hands.
Faced with this prospect, it makes sense for recruitment teams to look at solutions that can automate some of the manual processes and workflows their recruiters are carrying out.
Getting over the fear of automation
Automation isn’t a new concept in the recruitment industry, but there has been some misunderstanding about its application. For some time, there’s been a fear that automation and AI meant job losses, but this isn’t the inevitable conclusion. Just as the rise of marketing and sales automation hasn’t taken away the need for marketers and salespeople, recruitment automation doesn’t take away the need for recruiters.
Instead, automation is about taking away the tedious, repetitive tasks from recruiters to give them more time to focus on the human element of recruitment – engaging with candidates and clients. Think of recruitment automation as a solution designed to save your recruiters time, boost their productivity and ultimately make them more effective and happier in their roles.
Knowing what to automate
One of the common challenges recruitment agencies face with automation is knowing what parts of the recruitment process to automate. Most businesses will already have some level of automation in place, but there’s no “one size fits all” approach to recruitment automation.
Different recruitment automation solutions cover various stages of the recruitment process. There are tools available to help you with: sourcing candidates, loading and coding candidates into your database, updating candidate records, nurturing, interviewing and hiring.
Despite the many positives to recruitment automation, there have been cases of automation getting it wrong. Most of these incidents have centred around automated outreach tools sending incorrectly focused or incorrect and inaccurate subject matter to their target audience. The key to automation working for a business is good data – correctly compartmentalised and structured data.
Make sure you’re asking the right questions
When you’re considering new solutions for your recruitment automation tech stack it’s important to get an understanding of the pain points your recruiters are facing and how your current processes are working. You can begin to do this by auditing current workflows and assessing the utilisation of your existing technology, including:
- Are there particular tasks overwhelming your recruiters?
- Are your recruitment team hitting their KPIs?
- What does your current tech stack look like?
- Can the different solutions in your tech stack integrate with one another?
As you begin to answer some of these questions, you’ll begin to get a clearer picture of the biggest pain points your recruiters are facing. This will help you decide which processes and workflows to look at automating and the recruitment automation solutions that can help you achieve this.
Automation is about helping your recruiters
The recruitment landscape will continue to change as 2021 progresses, and businesses will need to innovate to deal with the new challenges that arise. One thing is certain – recruiters will be busier than ever before. With sectors of the economy reopening and companies ramping up their hiring, there’s never been a better time to evaluate your current processes and tech stack.
It’s important to remember, automating parts of your recruitment process is about taking some of the heavy lifting off your recruiters’ shoulders, so they can spend more time on placing candidates.
