Mar 05 2019
To address the demands of today’s fast-paced hiring market, hiring managers need recruiting automation. People often think “recruiting automation” means a loss of control or a loss of quality, but recruiting automation is also a term used to describe efficiency.
For example, a car with automatic transmission means your car gets to decide what gear it needs to be in. While some people may miss having that control, there’s no arguing that automatic transmission is much more efficient for your gas mileage.
With an automated recruitment process, you can still find the right candidate—you’ll just find them more efficiently.
Similarly, automated recruiting solutions still allow hiring managers to choose the candidates they want to hire, the timelines, the interviews, and the steps in the process — but with a fraction of the manual labor of conventional methods.
Signs You Should Invest in Recruiting Automation
Problem: No-shows.
Hiring managers often complain that one of their biggest pain points is no-shows. These are applicants that a hiring manager has taken the time to screen but who don’t show up for their interviews. Why? Well, the best applicants are usually looking at several employment opportunities at once.
Some businesses report that up to 90% of candidates fail to show up to their interviews. No-shows leave a diluted applicant pool since the best candidates are the first ones hired, and whoever is left may not be as qualified.
Solution: Automate the recruitment process for personalization and timeliness.
Applicants report that personalized contact reduces attrition, but communication with applicants is often a manual process. Usually, a great deal of a recruiter’s time is spent sorting through Excel sheets, tracking numerous applicants and their stages in the process, and tracking whether they’ve been sent the appropriate email. You can reduce the workload of engaging with candidates by investing in tools that are built on recruiting automation.
Problem: Reaching out to applicants manually is inefficient.
The actual email-writing process often requires several templates and even more Excel use to track who has been sent what.
To reduce this hassle, hiring managers need to lean on the power of recruiting automation. An automated recruitment process can send out communications when certain conditions are met —for example, when a candidate moves to the next stage, is rejected, or has been offered an interview.
Recruiters can use personalized templates so the applicant feels like they’re communicating with a real human. A one-size-fits-all email blast simply does not work . Rather than attracting candidates, this tactic might actually repel them from further considering the job opportunity.
Solution: Harness the power of recruiting automation for communication.
Harnessing the power of an automated recruitment process for communication via template-based emails and pre-formatted SMS messages can lower no-show rates from 50% to 15%. Instead of spending hours drafting individual emails, communication with an applicant should only take a few clicks.
Using Recruiting Automation to Lower the Barriers of Interview Scheduling
Another major pain point for any hiring manager is scheduling interviews. Practical time-savers such as automatic scheduling integrations and automated replies can alleviate communication woes of the hiring manager who is juggling numerous applications, and of the candidate who is potentially speaking with several companies at the same time. With automation, phone tag is now a thing of the past.
Fountain’s Instant Interview helps dismantle this barrier by allowing qualified candidates to initiate an on-demand phone interview with a recruiter or hiring manager while they are applying.
Recruiting Automation Provides a Comprehensive Applicant View
A hiring manager should be able to see the status of an applicant in seconds.
Businesses often build their own hiring software because they don’t want to lose any control over the hiring process. But these self-created systems are usually clunky, inflexible, and often require just as much time to manage as the actual hiring process itself.
Even worse, as the company grows and hiring needs change, the software is usually rendered obsolete or restrictive. Parts of the manual recruitment process may be stored in one section of the software while applicant data could be someplace else. In short, it’s a mess.
What hiring managers need instead is a flexible and transparent platform that allows them to create positions and manage, edit, and customize every stage of the process. This all starts with data.
Hiring managers should not only be able to see the applicants in the various stages they’ve created, but they also should have visibility into communications that have been sent and received.
Old in-house software often requires managers to create an applicant’s file themselves. Then they’d have to gather the different interview notes from their team members and manually enter the data. But an automated profile solution would automatically create an applicant profile and then populate it with second-party data through integrations. With the proper centralized interface, a hiring manager can see all of their team’s comments on an applicant with a single click.
But this is only the beginning. The power of data and automation can give hiring managers insight they’ve never had before. They can see the raw numbers of how many people have been hired and rejected, how many people have passed certain stages, and where the bottlenecks are within the hiring process. A data-driven, automated approach can even determine how much it costs the company to hire an applicant.
Final Thoughts: Recruiting Automation
As the labor market continues to evolve, businesses that can adapt by implementing recruiting automation will be the ones that succeed. For too long, the hiring process has been full of bottlenecks and manual tasks that distract and detract from the central goal: hiring the best team possible.
Businesses will also look to solutions that offer flexibility while streamlining the hiring process. By leveraging the power of automation, hiring managers will find they have more free time and a team full of more qualified workers.
Finding the right talent is an uphill climb, and businesses that can shift into the right gear will succeed. Those that fail to take advantage of automated solutions will find themselves stuck in neutral.
