WP Job Openings
Find the right set of candidates and deliver a good candidate experience throughout the hiring process. This is what all recruiters wish to do. But in reality, they end up doing only the former, being much more focused on the hunt for the right candidate.
But even then, nothing is guaranteed as to when you will find the right one. The process can take a bit longer than you initially expected as you come face to face with certain impediments. These minor roadblocks can be avoided in your journey to find the right set of candidates by implementing automation into your hiring process.
Automation allows you to improve your productivity, deliver a good candidate experience, and complete tasks more efficiently. We will take a look at what automation is in the hiring process, its advantages, and the top ways you can implement it.
What is Automation in Recruitment?
Firstly, automation doesn’t mean entirely replacing the human factor in the recruitment process. It refers to various technologies that help to lessen the burden on your shoulders. By use of these technologies, you can automate certain aspects of the hiring process instead of doing them manually and move from one stage to the next in an efficient manner and in less time.
An example would be to automate candidates’ alerts about their status change in the hiring process or pre-screening candidates.
How Automation in Hiring Can Help You?
Do you want to find the right candidate or do other tasks? Yes, the other tasks like email alerts and status updates are all a part of the hiring process, but as the number of applications increases, the time required to do all these tasks also increases. This, in turn, will greatly affect your productivity and increase the time to fill.
This is where automation steps in and makes you efficient and let you complete the hiring process expeditiously. We can explain these two with scenarios.
Scenario 1
Imagine you don’t adapt automation to your hiring process. You still tag along with the traditional methods. Yes, you can get through the recruitment process, but at what cost? You are sacrificing more time and effort than what is needed.
You have manually posted to various job boards, which has taken a lot of time, but you have the result you wanted. Your inbox is full of applications and as a recruiter, this is a good sign. You start reviewing the applications and realize that most of them don’t even align with your expectations and are from candidates just trying their luck. This is when you realize that going over all these applications will take a long time.
Then after going through all the applications, you have maybe a good 10 to 15 candidates. At least that’s what you like to assure yourself. But you have already spent a lot of time, going over all the resumes, so there is no guarantee that these candidates are available now. There is a high probability that they have been bagged by competitors. Then comes the stage where you have to rate and track them and so on.
Now, what about the other candidates that you have rejected? You have to let them know about their status. So, the only possible way since you haven’t adopted automation is to write them an email. How much time is it going to cost you? Of course, you can skip this, but if you want to provide the best candidate experience, this is a must, letting candidates know about their status.
Scenario 2
This is where you have adopted automation into your hiring process. You have established a candidate pre-screening method to limit the number of applications that reach you, you also have an ATS that helps you track and rate candidates and notifies them automatically about their status.
Now all that is left to do is to initiate the interview phase. See, how quickly you were able to reach the interview stage and, at the same time, deliver a good candidate experience and also cover the communication stage.
Benefits of Automation in Recruitment
Now the above two scenarios clearly show you how automation can help you. It’s time we look at the benefits automation has for you as a recruiter and for an organization.
1. Impact on productivity
Automation affects productivity in a couple of ways. First, by limiting the number of applications that reach you by implementing pre-screening, one can be sure that the resumes you are looking at meet your set criteria. Thereby allowing you to find great talents in a shorter time frame and reducing the time to hire. Then secondly, an ATS will help you to effortlessly track, rate, and communicate with all the candidates in real-time and keep them in the loop.
2. Helps you cut down recruitment costs
With a reduced time to hire, you can effectively cut down the recruitment costs. The more time required to fill open positions, the more resources and revenue you have to spend to attract talented candidates.
With candidate pre-screening and other hiring technologies, you can reduce the time needed to find the right candidate by a good margin.
3. Impact on candidate experience
Keeping all the candidates in the loop and alerting them about their status is a big task, especially when it comes to candidates that didn’t make it. But the communication can be automated with predefined email templates that are automatically sent out when the candidate’s status changes.
It’s a win-win situation for both parties. For the candidates, it will be a good experience as they are updated about their status from time to time, and for you, a good brand image will be created.
4. Improves the hiring workflow
The main way automation impacts your hiring flow is how fast you can complete each stage without compromising on anything. The hiring phases that will otherwise take a lot of time if done manually can be completed in seconds with automation.
Top Ways to Automate Your Hiring Process
Now that we have a clear picture of automation can help you, it’s time we look at the top ways to incorporate automation into your hiring process.
1. Post to multiple job boards at once
The faster and wider you can spread the news about the opening at your place, the better it is. But in reality, accomplishing this is not easy. Moving from one job board to the next takes a lot of time and greatly affects your productivity.
But modern recruitment software can solve this problem. All you have to do is come up with a well-written job post and you can post to multiple job boards at once, from one place. There is no longer the need for you to move from one job board site to the next, repeating the procedure of posting a job opening every single time. By automating posting to multiple job boards with a click, you can ensure the openings reaches the maximum number of candidates without sacrificing a lot of time.
2. Pre-screen the candidates
Now that you have got the word out, the applications will start to come in. Here you have two choices, either allow all the candidates to submit the applications or filter them out. If you allow all the candidates to apply, the majority of the resumes you receive will be from candidates that do not meet the criteria. For them, there is no harm in trying, but for you, as a recruiter, a great of time will be spent looking at the resumes.
To avoid such a scenario where most of your time will be spent going over resumes that are not up to your expectations would be to pre-screen the candidates. There are a lot of ways to pre-screen the candidates, you can set up a screening questionnaire, and if you allow all candidates to apply, the modern-day ATS can pre-screen and filter out the resumes for you, make use of chatbots, one-way interviews, and so on.
By implementing all these, you make sure that the resumes that ultimately reach you are the ones from the best candidates.
3. Make use of an ATS
Applicant Tracking System (ATS) reduces the workload of recruiters to a great extent. The system does wonders when it comes to keeping track of all the candidates. With our job board plugin WP JOB Openings, you can track the progress of each candidate, rate them, leave notes and feedback for other recruiters, and also the system updates the candidates automatically about their status in the hiring process, and more.
Now how does this benefit you? Without an ATS this is how you will be able to track and rate candidates:
- Open a new document or an excel sheet
- Copy the names of all the candidates that made it past the screening
- Group them according to the position they applied for
- Routinely move from one window to the next to update their status
- Share the file with other recruiters for them to leave their feedback
Now, this is entirely possible but will consume a lot of time. But as the number of candidates and open positions increases this is not the optimum way of doing it. But with an ATS, keeping track of all open positions and candidates is fairly an easy task. You can effortlessly filter candidates based on the open positions, or based on the rating you have given them and more. Thereby saving time and being more organized.
4. Automate personalized emails
Communication is vital if your aim is to deliver the best candidate experience. What happens if candidates don’t hear from recruiters? They will move on and spread the news about how you left them in the dark. Updating all the candidates about their status is a time-consuming process, with the recruiter having to write one email after the other.
But this communication stage can be automated with the help of email templates. Predefine an email template and the recruitment software will take of it. Depending on the stage the candidate is in, an email alert will be sent to them automatically. Most of the ATS out there are configured to send out emails with the candidates’ names and the position for which they have applied. This greatly improves the candidate experience.
5. Scheduling interviews
Sometimes it takes multiple calls and emails to schedule an interview. The higher the number of candidates, the more emails and calls, and interview invitations. But that’s not it. You also have to consider the situation where multiple recruiters will be joining the interview. If that is the case then you have multiple calendars to sync once the candidate is ok with a proposed date.
This can get tiresome, easy to lose track of, and will affect your productivity. But modern recruitment solutions allow candidates to choose the date and the time. How it works is you can send a link to the candidates to schedule the interview, the software already houses the synced calendar of all the recruiters and shows only the relevant dates and times when the recruiters are free. Once a candidate updates his/her preference, all the recruiters that are synced to the system will be notified immediately.
See how easy it was. You only had to send one email and didn’t have to make multiple calls or emails to both the recruiters and candidates to set up everything.
Wrapping Up
Implementing automation into your hiring process has a lot of benefits. It increases your productivity and efficiency, reduces the time to hire, and delivers a good candidate experience.
