Save time, save money, attract greater numbers of candidates who are a perfect fit—and retain them for longer. Those are some of the benefits of automated hiring.

But what else can automation do to help you level up your talent acquisition game? Quite a lot. 

This guide will take an in-depth look at which tasks you can automate with an applicant tracking system or candidate relationship management platform. We’ll also go on a deep dive to explore the advantages of automation. And since data collection is part of the functionality of these platforms, we’ll also show you which metrics to track so that you can fully optimize your recruiting process.

What is automated hiring?

Automated hiring sounds like all you need to do is push a button, and artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning does the rest for you—probably with mixed results.

However, that’s not what automated hiring is all about.

Yes, automated hiring makes the hiring process much easier—but it’s more about automating the dozens of manual tasks involved in recruitment so that you’re free to focus on the big-picture things that need a human touch. When you use automated recruitment technology, you can optimize your process end-to-end, automating things like postings to job boards, interview scheduling, applicant tracking, emails, workflows, and more.

What are recruitment tasks that you can automate in the hiring process?

The global market for AI is projected to grow at a rate of 38.1% from 2022 to 2030, and with its booming popularity, you can use AI to automate the recruitment process. We’ll explore some of the top tasks to automate below.

Communicating with candidates

Communication is one of the top ways to automate. You can use chatbots for a variety of things, like answering applicant questions about the application process or providing status updates on filed applications. Automation lets you send out updates and reminder emails with ease, too.

Distributing job posts

Integrate your automated recruitment platform with the job posting sites that you like best, or use a platform that offers automated outreach to job board applicants. You’ll save time, and you can leverage analytics to zero in and source candidates from the sites that prove most productive. From there, you can optimize job posts to ensure they land in front of the right eyes.

Monitoring social network opportunities

These days, social media is big for recruitment—and it’s not just Linkedin, but other platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Automate your company's recruitment-related social media postings to ensure that your job offers get plenty of exposure. Then, you can use sophisticated AI and analytics tools to track posts and measure their engagement to actively improve future job posting campaigns.

Improving the candidate screening process

Candidate screening comes with lots of little tasks to handle—and this is where automation really shines. Make the decision-making process easier with automated filters that search resumes for specific keywords.

Once you narrow your talent pool down, if your company does any pre-screening aptitude or personality tests, you can use automated tools to send out the tests (or links to the testing platform). This saves you the trouble of writing and sending those emails yourself.

Scheduling and interviewing process

Once you’re this far in the recruitment process, it’s time to schedule interviews. Without automation, the interview process can turn into a time-consuming back and forth as you and your interviewees figure out which times work best for both of you. Automation allows you to set up the times you’re free for interviews, and then your interviewees can pick what works from the available times.

What’s more, your automation tools should handle the communications by automatically generating appointment confirmation emails featuring the date, time, and location (or link to the virtual meeting room), plus reminder follow-ups closer to the interview itself.

Onboarding process

When you do it right, the onboarding process is lengthy—and rife with opportunities to automate.

• Automate background checks on new hires.
• Send out tax, payroll, benefits, and legal forms to new hires.
• Deliver employee handbooks and training materials.
• Send emails with the date, time, and location of on-site trainings.
• Send emails with the date, time, and location for the first day.
• Generate reminder emails.

You’ll likely find even more tasks to automate when you dive deeper into the intricacies of your own onboarding strategy. Make this process easier to save time for you and your team and set new hires up for long-term success.

8 benefits of automated hiring

Automation saves you time and makes hiring easier, but the benefits go much farther. You may be surprised to find that recruitment automation can improve things like employee turnover. In fact, recruiters and HR departments who rely on Emi for automated hiring experience an average of 25% turnover improvement.

Keep reading—we’ll expand on more advantages below.

1. Time savings for recruiting team

Manual tasks are a huge drain on recruiters’ time. HR teams and recruiters using Emi report between 25% and 50% daily time savings—and that comes from automating communications, candidate screening, scheduling, and automating other time-consuming manual tasks.

If you’re thinking about automated recruitment tools, take a deep look at your hiring process to see which tasks can be automated easily. There are probably more than you think—and if you make a list of them, you can use that list to choose a platform like Emi that covers all the bases.

2. Candidate source efficiency

Marketers know to always go back to the sources that brought in the best leads, and the same is true for recruitment. You wouldn’t keep posting to a job site that never offered up any candidates. Instead, you’ll rely on the sources that turn up the largest numbers of qualified candidates because that speeds up the hiring process and gives you access to the best talent pool possible.

Emi makes it easy to tell which sources are providing the best candidates. The platform collects a wealth of data to help you measure your hiring funnel, track the ROI of your hiring sources, and optimize campaigns to attract top talent for your open positions.

3. Measuring recruiter activity

It’s not just the candidate sources and time savings that you’ll need to track. Recruiter performance is important, too. Track the right metrics, and you can help your recruitment team streamline their process to bring in the right hires faster—and onboard them successfully. You can use Emi to access different dashboards and indicators that measure your team’s performance.

4. Recruiting process standardization

Gallup finds that only 12% of employees feel that their workplace does a good job onboarding new hires—meaning that 88% think their onboarding was lackluster. The recruiting and onboarding experiences are a new hire's first impressions of your company as an employer. Getting it wrong can be a turn-of for candidates and send them away in droves.

With Emi, you can use automated tests, templates, documentation modules, and other tools to standardize your recruitment process and your onboarding.

Another way in which Emi standardizes your process is through rejection notifications. When using Emi, 100% of rejected candidates receive a notification—compared to 10% without Emi. Even when candidates may be disappointed at not getting the job, these notifications can still boost satisfaction with the process since no one likes to wait and wonder indefinitely.

5. Cost efficiency

There are many ways to tighten recruitment cost efficiency, from reducing the amount of time spent attracting new hires to reducing your spending on marketing, recruitment firms, and more. Emi is especially useful for clients using workforce agencies to hire new talent. When you compare the costs, you’ll find Emi is less expensive than a talent agency, which gives you a direct cost reduction.

With that, reduced time to hire helps you save costs incurred by vacancies, and it also creates a competitive advantage. Think about how job seekers search. They’ll apply to multiple positions at the same time—and many are more interested in securing a new job quickly rather than waiting around to see if other opportunities turn up. This means not just lower time to hire but also fewer interviews with candidates that ultimately decline your offer and an overall better ROI for your organization.

6. Referral program automation

Eighty-eight percent of employers say that referrals are the most effective way to hire. If you have a referral program—and most companies do—then you should know that Emi can give it a 10x boost when you utilize Emi’s referral tools properly. This translates into a much larger pool of great talent and helps you extend your reach to draw in even more potential candidates.

7. Smoother onboarding

We mentioned above that smoother onboarding increases employee retention—a benefit that cannot be overstated. Your organization does not want to become known as a “revolving door,” and there are lots of reasons why:

• It develops a bad reputation and leads to fewer applicants.
• New hires can take up to a year to reach full productivity.
• You’ll pay extra for excessive hiring and onboarding costs and for employees that turn over before reaching full productivity.

Use Emi to boost your employer brand and make onboarding smoother. Emi features an 88% candidate satisfaction score, which means it makes a great first impression on new hires. Part of that satisfaction score comes from immediate engagement compared to traditional hiring approaches, which feature at least a two-day delay.

8. Employee retention

We’ve discussed employee retention in the context of reducing costs, which is important. You also know that lowering retention helps you maintain a more attractive reputation that draws in new hires.

But what about the candidates themselves?

If you consistently choose poor fits, you’ll experience high turnover no matter how amazing the rest of your recruitment and onboarding process is. Manual application and resume screening can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Use Emi’s tools to help you filter applications and perform pre-hire testing so that you can narrow your talent pool down to those most likely to stick with your company for the long term. Emi users, on average, see a 25% improvement in employee turnover.

How to gauge the effectiveness of automation in the hiring process

Tracking your effectiveness is all about key performance indicators (KPIs). There are two main groups to consider: Primary KPIs, which are things most organizations need to track, and secondary KPIs, which have more limited use cases and are something you may or may not need to track depending on your hiring process.

Primary KPIs

Nearly all Emi clients use all of the following KPIs one way or another.

1) Time to hire

Emi will help you reduce your time to hire—and to track this stat, you’ll need to analyze the following three indicators:

• Total time to hire
• Time to hire from application to first interview
• Time from interview to hire

Hiring managers using Emi report an average 82% time to interview, from 10 days to two days, and a 50% reduction in time to hire, from 21 days to just 10 days.

2) Candidate efficiency and churn reduction

Emi improves your approval ratios and reduces the churn of people who go through the selection process.

Track these metrics using these two indicators:

• Candidates approved divided by candidates interviewed
• Interview assistance ratio, which is the number of candidates assisted divided by the number of candidates confirmed

3) Recruiter efficiency

Emi helps you automate and optimize HR tasks that you previously performed manually. Track how much time (and labor dollars) you save by subtracting the time spent on recruitment tasks after automation from the time spent on recruitment tasks before automation.

How much does Emi help? On average, Emi users see a 2.3x increase in productivity.

Secondary KPIs

Not everyone tracks these metrics, but if you want to improve your recruitment process further, these KPIs can help.

• Number of hires: This number is useful to compare against a variety of other statistics—and you’ll need to know this if you want to increase your number of hires or obtain certain job opening coverage using Emi. To take things a step further, keep an eye on volume of hires by source. This will tell you which channels to double down on in order to pull in more qualified candidates.
• Talent interview ratio: This metric is a way to keep track of the number of candidates you interview before finally filling a position. Tracking this information provides valuable insights, like how long it takes you to fill positions. If it takes you a long time to fill open roles, it may be a sign that there are some fundamental weaknesses in your screening process that you need to address.
• Candidate net promoter score: Emi makes candidate experiences better using artificial intelligence—and this score is a measure of that improvement.

Experience the benefits of automated hiring with Emi

Level up your recruitment game with advanced AI tools designed to help you attract greater numbers of qualified candidates—all while tracking data to help you optimize your high-volume recruitment process. That’s what Emi is all about.

Request a demo to get started today.