Recruitment Automation: 8 Ways To Automate Your Recruitment Process

Recruiting potential candidates is a tough job with lots of moving parts. You need to get your job openings onto the right job boards, screen dozens (or hundreds) of applications and resumes, shortlist the right candidates, then go through a series of interviews. Not to mention all the paperwork along the way.

Whew—that’s a lot. And this is why automation is becoming so popular among recruiters and human resources departments. Many recruitment tools can handle postings and marketing, perform assessments and screenings, and give you a candidate relationship management system that keeps your talent pipeline flowing smoothly. 👌

Let’s dive deeper into this topic to learn more about the advantages—and show you a few essential ways you can automate the recruitment process.

Why is recruitment automation increasingly important?

To put it simply, recruitment is tough.

Let’s start by looking at a recent Glassdoor survey that finds that 86% of HR professionals think that recruitment is becoming more like marketing. When you unpack that statistic, you’ll see how recruiting is becoming more and more complex, with lots of data to wade through to find the right people for the right job.

Just consider the skills that modern organizations require to thrive. As technology continues to advance, organizations need more skill sets to complete daily tasks—and that leaves recruiting teams scrambling to sift through resumes and applications to find the exact right skills for the job.

Today’s recruiters also need to consider factors like diversity, potential alignment with company culture, and more. 

It’s all a lot of work for hiring managers and recruiters, making automation crucial because it can reduce strenuous workloads, which frees up HR professionals to focus on recruiting tasks that can’t be automated.

What are the benefits of recruitment automation?

By far, the greatest overarching benefit of recruitment automation is improving workflows to make it easier for recruiters to find qualified candidates in an organized, timely fashion. But let’s drill down into specifics so you can see which parts of the process reap the most significant rewards. 💪

Saves time by eliminating manual processes

The recruitment process is loaded with manual tasks that you can easily automate. Just think about the time you spend sending out reminder emails for upcoming interviws, or sending status updates to applicants as their application moves through your recruitment pipeline.

Automating these tasks instead can free up your time to focus on other things that aren’t so easy to automate.

Creates high-quality and consistent leads

Recruitment automation technology should provide you with tools to filter candidates, applications, or resumes based on a variety of predefined traits. This means you can pre-select leads based on traits that are historically successful in the positions you’re hiring for. It also means you can filter out leads with potentially problematic indicators.

The result is higher quality, more consistent leads. This reduces the time spent on a manual screening process and improves your odds of securing and retaining the ideal talent.

Creates a streamlined employee onboarding process

Once you finish the rounds of interviews, the hiring process can begin—and your recruitment automation tools can prove useful here, too. With the right software and workflows, you should be able to select the candidates you’ve decided to hire. 

From there, you can automatically trigger the next steps of the process: sending out the forms and tax documents for the new hire to fill out, flagging the people on your HR team who will need to complete background checks, payroll, benefits setup, etc.

Increases the social reach of open positions

Some recruitment automation software offers tools that let you automate the promotion of job postings. As positions open, you can automatically place listings on career sites or social media platforms, freeing up more time for advertising efforts.

That’s one way to increase the social reach for your listings, but automation also opens up another way to increase social reach: data collection. 

Software makes it possible to gather information about preferred social sites, and you can use that information to identify which social platforms will be the most useful in your recruitment process.

8 essential ways to automate your recruitment process

If you use it right, automation can work wonders to speed up day-to-day tasks while drawing in greater numbers of quality candidates. So, how do you go about it? We’ve got some tips, tricks, and best practices to follow below.

1) Use AI to automate your communication with candidates

Artificial intelligence is booming, with a projected annual growth rate of 38.1% over the next decade. It’s not just for data analytics, either: Between answering questions and sending out updates, communication can be one of the biggest drains on recruiters’ time. You can eliminate a huge amount of work with AI and automation designed to answer frequently asked questions or send out follow-up emails.

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Use chatbots to create a self-service portal where job seekers can ask questions about how to submit their applications or resumes to your job postings.
• With AI, chatbots can also give applicants a quick answer about the status of their application.
• Set up automated reminder emails for when pre-hire paperwork needs completing and for other important dates.

2) Distribute job postings and reach out to potential candidates faster

It’s possible to automate job postings. Recruiting automation makes it easy for candidates to find and apply for positions in the places they already are. Technology can also make it easier to initiate conversations with interested or passive candidates. 

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Use recruiting automation technology to post open positions on relevant job boards, social media, and search engines
• Utilize your existing network of employees to refer open jobs
• Leverage automated outreach to reach out to individuals in your existing candidate pool

3) Monitor and track social networking opportunities automatically

Social platforms are another great place to recruit, especially for frontline talent. In 2021, 86% percent of job seekers used social media during their job search, with Facebook leading the pack. They use it to explore job descriptions, evaluate employers’ reputations and culture, dive into employees’ stories, and ultimately apply for the job. 

Why not automate here, too? There’s more to social media opportunities than just paid ads. You can build a talent pool and pull in candidates through content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok. Automation will help you keep up with postings and track their engagement.

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Use a social media management app that lets you schedule social posts within the app for posting later.
• Utilize your recruiting platform to generate trackable links so you can automatically track where your best candidates are coming from.
• Create content designed to engage job seekers—and tailor it for the platform you’re posting on.
• Feel free to mix in “universal” content, like image assets that work well across all platforms, to keep followers engaged with quick bites between long-form postings.
• Use your social media management app to collect data on your postings. This lets you track interest and engagement so you can zero in on the most valuable platforms and content types.

4) Automate your team’s planning, scheduling, and interviewing process

Busy recruiters work with massive talent pools. Your team may have an active talent pipeline, but if you don't, you may want to consider establishing one—it really streamlines the searching and hiring process! 🔍

The nice thing about modern automation is you can automate major chunks of your pipeline. Doing so takes a lot of busy work off your team’s shoulders so everyone can focus on what they do best: talent sourcing.

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Use software designed with the talent pipeline in mind. This will give you the most robust tools for automating steps along the pipeline.
• Use software to automate as much scheduling as possible—like sending out notifications when new job postings open, when old ones will close, deadlines for submitting resumes and applications, etc.
• Automation tools should also be able to help you with scheduling throughout the interview process. Set up your recruitment software to send out emails notifying candidates that they’ve been selected for interviews. Depending on the tools you use, you may even be able to automatically send interview question templates to the interviewers.

5) Automate manual, repetitive tasks

There are dozens of small, repetitive tasks to do daily, weekly, or monthly to keep everything running smoothly. Depending on your organization, those tasks could vary widely—some may be specific to talent acquisition, while others are specific to human resources or day-to-day business management. Either way, there are almost certainly lots of opportunities here for automation.

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Think about team meetings. Can you automate reminder emails for those that happen simultaneously every week?
• Human resources departments can often find many aspects—like payroll processes and benefits renewals—to automate or set up recurring reminders in a platform optimized for HR tasks.
• Automated recruiting software should be capable of doing some of the heavy lifting for you, like combing through your database of hundreds of potential candidate profiles to identify who to add to your shortlist.

6) Identify the best candidates by automating the screening process

If your marketing works well, you’ll see lots of candidate engagement—and hopefully, a high volume of applications and resumes. This is one of the biggest areas where automation can help you, and things like AI or machine learning can make it even better. Rather than going through all those resumes by hand, use recruitment software to pre-scree you.

Aside from reducing your workload, automated pre-screening comes with one more significant: It reduces the chances of accidentally filtering out great candidates because of unconscious bias: biases for or against traits, people, and groups.

You may not even be aware you have biases—which is why they’re “unconscious.” But whether you realize it or not, these biases can be strong enough to cause well-meaning recruiters to pass over an applicant who may have been a great fit for the job.

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Continuously analyze key metrics like your interview-per-hire ratio and the long-term success rates of candidates hired. Then, use that information to refine your pre-screening process.
• Filter for traits or red flags that your analytics have shown to be predictive of poor performance post-hiring.
• Conversely, be sure to filter for traits, positive aspects, and candidate experience that correlate with long-term success in the roles you’re hiring for.
• If you regularly handle multiple candidates at once, consider investing in screening tools powered by machine learning. These tools use AI to continuously optimize the pre-screening process, making it easier for you to find top talent.

7) Send automatic event reminders to candidates to limit no-call, no-shows

Job candidates are busy people. Some may have multiple interviews set up around an already hectic work schedule. Automated reminders can help minimize those no-call, no-shows simply by reminding an interviewee of a commitment they may have forgotten about. 

Reminders also serve as a gentle nudge that you take the interview process seriously—and potential candidates should, too.

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Use a tool that allows you to send out interview scheduling reminders via various mediums—like email and text—and check with interviewees about their reminder preferences.
• Keep the messaging short, welcoming, and professional. It doesn't need to be more than a sentence or two with a greeting, plus the date and time for the interview. If you’re holding video interviews, send the link along, too.
• Use integrations wherever possible to make it easier for interviewees to add important dates to their calendars. For instance, an email can feature a link or button to add the date to Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar.

8) Streamline the hiring process by automating background checks

Recruiting software should include an applicant tracking system (ATS)—and the ATS should offer functionality that allows you to streamline background checks. Ideally, once you screen candidates and interview them, the ATS will trigger the background check process as part of the workflow.

Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Automate research on candidates so that your ATS produces an easy-to-read report.
• Be sure the ATS can notify you of potential red flags so that you can investigate further.
• A smart ATS will also remove most or all false/invalid hits (like people who have the same name as the applicant in question but aren’t a match).

Supercharge your recruitment efforts with Emi

Making the right hiring decision is much easier with the right recruiting tools. If you want to automate significant parts of the process using the methods above, try Emi. Our platform specializes in recruitment for frontline workers, and we can take you through every step of the process, from resume screening to onboarding.

If you’d like to learn more, the best way is to take a tour. Request a demo to see how we can help your business hire better workers—faster.

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