Here’s a dream HR scenario:
You tell your automated recruiting system you’re hiring for a new Customer Service position. It automatically creates the job description and the job ad. Then it posts them to multiple job search sites (including Indeed, Monster, and Google for jobs). It reaps a massive harvest of 500+ resumes, then instantly discards the 300 that aren’t even close to matching your requirements.
The automated recruitment tool then screens the other 200 candidates. It ranks them in order, based on your criteria and its built-in resume parsing skills. It flags the top 50, then sends out 50 one-way-video interview invites with a single click.
Next, it uses AI to screen the videos, administers a skills test, and serves up a list of the cream-of-the-crop top 20 job seekers, automatically scheduling several in-person interviews. Oh and by the way, it checks their references also.
Sound like a pipe dream? It’s not.
By using AI tools and recruitment automation techniques, you can dramatically cut the time it takes to hire, and get better results.
Automated recruiting tools can write and post job ads, screen resumes, create candidate scorecards, handle candidate outreach, and much, much more.
Fill Jobs Faster,
With High-Quality Candidates
Meet with our hiring coaches today to see how AI can slash 90% of the time from your hiring process. Start filling jobs faster right away, with 10x higher quality people.
What Is Recruiting Automation?
Recruiting automation is the use of technology to carry out recruiting-related tasks (hiring and HR) automatically. This can save recruiters’ and hiring managers’ time, particularly on administrative tasks like communication, scheduling, administering assessments, and onboarding candidates.
Advanced recruiting automation (powered by artificial intelligence) can even handle complex tasks like writing job descriptions, producing candidate scorecards, and crafting interview questions. Depending on the company’s needs, automated recruiting tools can also build careers pages, conduct one-way video interviews, and handle employee referrals.
Recruiting Automation Benefits
Recruiting automation has far-reaching benefits for organizations, recruiters, and candidates alike. These include saving time on repetitive tasks, speeding up your hiring process, and finding top talent faster.
Save Time on Admin Tasks
Many recruitment tasks are so repetitive they can make you feel like a robot version of yourself. Sending rejection emails, contacting shortlisted candidates, and scheduling interviews (with all the back-and-forth that entails) takes up a soul-sucking amount of time. In fact, in one all-too-typical example, Jacob Kaplan-Moss found that it took his team 100 hours over 4 weeks just to hire a single person, with 10 of those hours spent on interview scheduling alone.
In blindingly sharp contrast, recruiting automation tools can handle admin tasks like that in an instant. For instance, instead of manually sending out emails to shortlisted candidates, your software can generate emails as soon as you move a candidate from one stage to the next. Those emails can contain built in self scheduling links your candidates can use to book a time convenient for everyone. You don’t have to lift a finger.
Dramatically Speed Up the Hiring Process
Recruitment automation could cut 90% of the time from your hiring process. The faster you hire, the more quickly you’ll fill critical roles, so your organization can operate more effectively. If you’re taking weeks to find the right person, then you’re consistently losing momentum on important projects.
Even worse, a slow hiring process means you risk losing out on top candidates, who are on average only on the market for 10 days before being hired. Using automation can get you through the hiring process fast enough to keep these talented individuals engaged.
Find and Focus On Top Talent
The goal with recruiting is to hire the best of the best for your organization, but identifying top candidates can be slippery at best. Automated recruiting tools help you find and focus on the most talented individuals. You can automatically filter resumes to find exactly what you’re looking for, and you can quickly move through the hiring process with these candidates.
If you’re not using automated recruiting tools, you’ll lose top talent to your competitors who are. In fact, 83% of U.S. employers are already using AI in some way, with 40% relying on AI tools to screen and assess candidates during the recruitment process.
Improve the Candidate Experience
Whoops — there goes another one! Almost half of all job seekers (49%) have declined a job offer due to a poor candidate experience. If your hiring process is long and drawn out, with only haphazard communication, then your candidate experience triggers red flags about the way your organization is run.
Automated recruiting speeds up the process, keeping candidates informed about their progress through your hiring pipeline. This sends a clear message that your company is well-managed, starting the employee relationship off on the right foot, and keeping them engaged.
Reduce Bias in Recruiting
Bias is rampant in the hiring world, and the wrong kind of automation can make that bad situation even worse. Women are 30% less likely to be interviewed (even when they have the exact same level of experience as men) and candidates with “distinctively black” names are less likely to be contacted by employers than candidates with “distinctively white” names.
You want to hire the best candidates, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, age, or any other factors, and automated recruiting can help you avoid unconscious bias. By using automated tools to filter resumes and create candidate scorecards, you can base your hiring decisions on facts, skills, and experience. Some automated tools even let you hide candidates’ names until you’re ready to move forward.
What Does Automated Recruiting Do?
Recruiting automation can slice your time spent on recruiting tasks from 100 hours down to 10. It can produce automatic job postings, screen resumes, create candidate scorecards, schedule interviews, and even manage your referrals program and check references.
Automates Your Job Descriptions
Get your afternoons back. AI (artificial intelligence) recruiting tools can write thorough, enticing job descriptions for you, saving a huge amount of time at the start of the recruitment process. Writing a job description for a single open role can easily take a couple of hours. Even then, you might struggle to attract the right candidates.
AI hiring tools can also optimize your job descriptions for search engines, helping your perfect candidates easily find your open roles.
Automates Your Job Ads
A compelling job ad can increase the size and quality of your talent pool. But your job ad isn’t the same thing as your job description. If you’re simply posting your job description to job boards, you’re failing to market the role effectively.
Thankfully, automated recruitment tools can write job ads for you, pushing these out to your chosen job boards (like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn) with a single click.
The best AI-powered tools will create an ad that incorporates key details about your company, based on your website, and gets potential candidates excited about working for you. Not only will you save tons of time, you’ll have a much more effective job ad, too.
Automatically Screens Resumes
If you’re a hiring manager or recruiter, you might shudder to think how much time you’ve spent poring over resumes during your career. Picking up all the details from an endless string of resumes can be exhausting. Even with due diligence, you can easily miss a small but crucial skill or experience in an otherwise underwhelming resume.
Automated recruiting can instantly parse resumes for you, letting you know which ones are the best match for your role. It can screen out resumes that clearly aren’t a good fit, saving you from wasting time on them. With 62% of recruiting teams applying more scrutiny to potential candidates, automated tools can save countless hours of hiring time.
Creates Candidate Scorecards
A candidate scorecard can unstick you from the hiring swamp. It’s an indispensable tool for objectively assessing candidates. It lets you select specific qualities and traits, decide how much weight to give each one, and create custom interview questions that let you know whether your candidate has what it takes to succeed in the job opening.
Coming up with a candidate scorecard yourself is a lot of work. Automated recruiting tools can produce the scorecard for you, with just a little input. You can then use the scorecard as the basis for a structured interview (shown to be almost twice as effective as unstructured interviews at predicting job performance).
Schedules Interviews
It can sometimes seem impossible to find a time when your candidate and the necessary decision-makers in your org are available for an interview. Perhaps it’s no surprise to you that two-thirds of recruiters take between 30 minutes and 2 hours to schedule interviews for just one candidate. Almost one in five (17%) say they spend 2–5 hours per candidate on scheduling alone.
Automated recruiting can save you from sending even one more scheduling email, reducing this time to virtually nothing. The software handles it all for you, making it easy to schedule interviews at a time that works for everyone.
Writes Your Interview Questions
Coming up with interview questions can be tricky. You need to ask the same questions of each candidate, so that you can compare apples to apples. You need those questions to dig deep into the skills, qualities, and attributes you’re looking for. But you also need to avoid the surprisingly long list of things you can’t legally ask candidates about.
Automated recruiting software can come up with interview questions for you in next to no time. It can also match those questions seamlessly to your candidate scorecard, letting you know which questions relate to which qualities.
Automatically Handles Employee Referrals
Employee referrals are one of the most effective ways to find highly talented candidates, essentially acting as a form of pre-screening. Almost 9 out of 10 employers (88%) rated employee referrals above all other sources in terms of the quality of new hires. However, that same study found that only 26% of external hires currently come from employee referrals, leaving a huge amount of room for improvement.
Automated recruitment systems can easily run an employee referral program for you, saving several hours of admin time each week, increasing buy-in from employees, and delivering better hires, faster.
Handles Candidate Outreach
Candidate outreach can be one of the most demanding parts of your hiring process. If you’re currently sending emails and follow-ups to candidates each time you identify a potential fit, automated recruiting can be a lifesaver.
Whether you’re inviting an impressive individual to apply for a role, or following up when a candidate hasn’t responded to an offer, you need to get every word right to avoid costly errors. High-quality candidate outreach makes a massive difference in your candidate experience.
Instead of simply using templates, you can use AI recruitment tools to craft warm, personalized outreach emails that fit seamlessly with your organization and role to build rapport. As many as 73% of potential candidates are passive job seekers, not actively applying but open to hearing about job opportunities. With the right outreach email, you could snap up the perfect person without them ever applying for a role anywhere else.
Builds Your Careers Page
At some point early in the hiring process, candidates are likely to see your Careers page. About 59% (almost 6 in 10) candidates visit a company’s website after seeing a job posting or offer. They might also come across your page through a Google search, while hunting for a particular role, or they might be sent there by a friend who currently works for your organization.
Your Careers page must create a great impression. It could well be the deciding factor in whether or not a candidate applies. Putting together a well-written, attractive, SEO-friendly Careers page is a huge task… but recruiting automation software can handle it all for you, potentially saving you weeks of time.
Automates Your Assessments
Pre-employment testing is highly effective at predicting on-the-job performance. It also reduces turnover, since it identifies more skilled job seekers, who are more likely to succeed in the role. But pre-employment testing can take time — both to choose the right tests and to administer and score them.
Thankfully, automated recruitment software can handle the assessments for you. The best software, like Discovered’s Performance Hiring Software will give you skills tests and behavioral assessments that are custom-tailored to the roles you’re hiring for. It can even implement the tests for you, score them, and deliver the results in an easy employee-ranking system.
Conducts One-Way Video Interviews
While initial phone screening is a popular tool for vetting candidates, it’s also time-consuming and requires a lot of scheduling. One-way video interviews (pre-recorded interviews) make the initial stages of the hiring process much easier for both candidates and employers.
Automated recruiting can conduct these videos for you, presenting candidates with each question, recording their responses, and saving their interviews so recruiters, hiring managers, or anyone else involved in hiring can watch at their convenience. Some AI hiring tools can even watch, evaluate, and score the videos for you, fully automating the process.
Manages Onboarding and Training
Too many companies think the hiring process ends when their chosen candidate accepts the offer. But onboarding is an important part of the hiring process. To save on recruiting resources, you need to get your new hire up to speed and fully contributing as quickly as possible.
You also want them to have a great experience in their first days and weeks at your company. Companies with a strong onboarding process improve new-hire retention by 82%.
A good automated recruiting system will carry candidates through to onboarding and training. It can send emails prompting candidates to sign onboarding documentation, and store the signed document securely, so HR won’t need to chase down so much paperwork. Systems like Discovered can even move your successful candidate onward into an integrated performance review system, supporting all your future training and evaluation workflows.
Runs Your Recruiting Workflows
You’ll waste a painful amount of time if you have to reinvent the wheel every time you need to hire for a new role. Yet some companies end up hiring chaotically, with different hiring managers coming up with their own idiosyncratic (and flawed) processes. In fact, as many as 71% of recruiting leaders are currently missing out on key hires due to inefficient processes.
Automated recruiting lets you streamline your processes so you’re always recruiting according to best practices. The software can keep you on track, prompting you to carry out vital tasks at different stages of hiring, so nothing slips through the cracks.
Summary
Automated recruiting isn’t just one tool, but a powerful set of tools to help you recruit faster and get better results. From writing job descriptions to onboarding candidates, automated tools can help you succeed at every step along the way, saving an incredible amount of time, both during recruitment and in the future, thanks to lower turnover and fewer bad hires.
