Recruiting candidates is a difficult job that always involves constant changes. You need to post your vacancies on the right job boards, filter dozens (or hundreds) of applications and CVs, select the right candidates, go through a series of interviews; not to mention all the paperwork in the process.

It's too much! For this reason, automation is becoming increasingly popular among recruiters and human resources areas. The right tools can help manage publications and marketing, evaluate and filter candidates, and provide a candidate relationship management system that keeps the company's talent pool dynamic. 👌

Let's dive into this topic to learn about all the benefits and show you some essential ways to automate your recruitment process.

Why is automated recruitment increasingly important?

Simply put, recruitment is a difficult task.

Let's start by looking at a recent Glassdoor survey that says that the 86% of HR professionals think that recruitment is becoming a form of marketing. Statistics show that recruitment is increasingly complex as more information needs to be analyzed to find the right person for the position.

Just consider all the features that modern businesses need to succeed. As technology continues to advance, companies require more skills to complete daily tasks. Therefore, recruitment teams must examine CVs and applications to find precisely these skills.

Currently, recruiters also have to consider factors such as diversity and alignment with company culture, among many others.

It's a lot of work for recruitment managers and recruiters, making automation crucial to reducing heavy workloads. This allows HR professionals more time to focus on recruitment tasks that cannot be automated.

What are the benefits of automated recruitment?

The main benefit of automated recruitment is that it improves work dynamics, making it easier for recruiters to find qualified candidates in an organized and fast manner. But let's get specific so you can see what parts of the process will benefit you and your company the most. 💪

Save time by eliminating manual processes

The recruitment process involves a lot of manual work, but it can be easily automated. Just think about the time you spend sending interview reminders or updates as the candidate progresses through the recruitment process.

Automating these tasks can give you time to focus on other issues that aren't easy to automate.

The Key to Attracting Reliable, High-Quality Candidates

Automated recruitment technology should provide you with tools to filter candidates, applications, or CVs based on a variety of predetermined characteristics. This means that you can shortlist candidates who have the characteristics that have been historically successful in the positions you are looking for. You can also rule out candidates with potentially problematic indicators.

The result is more reliable and higher-quality candidates. This reduces the time you spend on the manual filtering process and improves your chances of securing and retaining talent.

Create an organized onboarding process

Once the interview stage is complete, the hiring phase begins and your automated recruitment tools can be very useful. With the right software and a good workflow, you should be able to select the candidates you've decided to hire.

From here you can automatically activate the following steps in the process: send the forms and tax documents for the new employee to complete, notify your HR team that they will have to corroborate records, pay salaries, set up benefits, etc.

Increase the reach of your vacancies

Some automated recruitment software offers tools that allow you to automate the promotion of job advertisements. As vacancies open up, you can automatically post multiple ads on job boards or on social media, freeing up time for advertising efforts.

This is one way to increase the reach for your ads, while automation also opens up another possibility: data collection.

Softwares allow you to collect information about candidates' favorite sites and you can use that information to identify which platform will be most useful for your recruitment process.

8 Essential Ways to Automate Your Recruiting Process

When used correctly, automation can work wonders to accelerate daily tasks and, at the same time, attract a greater number of quality candidates. So what's the best way to do that? Below, we have some tips, tricks and best practices for you.

1) Use AI to automate your communication with candidates

Artificial intelligence continues to grow, with a projection of a 38.1% annual growth rate over the past decade. It is used for data analysis, as well as for sending responses and updates. Communication is one of the most time-consuming tasks for recruiters. Using artificial intelligence and automation to answer frequently asked questions and send follow-up emails can save you a lot of work.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use chatbots to create a panel where candidates can ask questions about how to submit their application or CV to apply for your vacancies.
• With AI, chatbots can also provide quick answers to candidates about the status of their application.
• Set up automatic emails to send documents that need to be completed before hiring and to send reminders of important dates.

2) Distribute your job advertisements and reach candidates faster

It is possible to automate the sending of job advertisements. Emi makes it easy for candidates to find and apply to your vacancies in the places where they are already looking. We also facilitate first contact with interested or even passive candidates.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use technology to automate your recruitment efforts and post vacancies on major job boards, social networks and search engines
• Use your employee networks to promote open searches
• Take advantage of automation to attract the attention of candidates in your talent pool

3) Automatically monitor and measure networking opportunities

Social media is also a good place to recruit, especially operational talent. In 2021, the 86% of people looking for a job they used social media, with Facebook being the most used. They use it to research job descriptions, evaluate the reputation and culture of employers, learn about employee stories and, finally, submit their application.

Why not automate this as well? There are many more and better opportunities on social media that go beyond advertising. You can create your talent pool and promote candidates through content on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even TikTok. Automation will help you keep up to date with posts and measure engagement.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use a social media management app that allows you to schedule posts within it to publish them later.
• Use your recruitment platform to generate links and automatically measure where your best candidates come from.
• Create content designed to attract candidates and adapt it to the platform on which you publish it.
• Feel free to mix “universal” content, such as images that work for all platforms, with longer format posts.
• Use your social media management app to collect information about your posts. This allows you to measure interest and engagement so you can identify which platforms and content are most valuable.

4) Automate your team's planning, coordination, and interview process

Recruiters work with massive talent pools. It's likely that your team has a talent pool to follow up on, but if you don't, you might consider establishing one to streamline your search and recruitment process. 🔍

The advantage is that a large part of monitoring your talent pool can be automated. This reduces your team's workload so everyone can focus on what they're experts at: finding the best candidates.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use software designed specifically for the best talent pool. This will give you more tools to automate the steps of your process.
• Use software to automate your schedule as much as possible, and perform tasks such as sending notifications about when vacancies open and close, dates for submitting applications, etc.
• Automation tools should be able to help you plan the entire interview process. Configure your recruitment software to send notifications to candidates who have been selected for them. Depending on the tools you use, you can even send question templates to the interviewees.

5) Automate manual and repetitive tasks

There are many small tasks that are repeated daily, weekly and monthly to make the process work. Depending on your company, these tasks may vary. Some may focus on attracting talent and others, on human resources or day-to-day management. In either case, there are plenty of opportunities for automation.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Think about team meetings, can you automate weekly email reminders?
• Human resources areas can automate many aspects, such as paying salaries, renewing benefits, etc., as well as setting reminders on a specific platform for HR tasks.
• Automated recruitment software should be able to do some of the heavy lifting for you, such as scanning your database of hundreds of candidate profiles to identify who to add to your shortlist.

6) How to identify the best candidates? Automating the filtering process

If your marketing works, you will increase the interest of candidates and, if everything goes well, a large volume of applications and CVs will arrive. This is one of the most important areas where automation can help you: instead of manually reviewing all your CVs, use recruitment software to do a pre-selection for you.

In addition to reducing workload, automating pre-selection has other benefits. It makes it less likely that good candidates will be accidentally excluded by unconscious biases, which refer to biases associated with a characteristic, person or group.

You may not be aware that you have biases, which is why they are “unconscious”. Either way, these biases can cause recruiters with good intentions to rule out a candidate who may be the right one for the position.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• It continuously analyzes key metrics, such as the number of hires in relation to the number of interviews and the long-term success rate of hired candidates. It then uses that information to redefine the pre-selection process.
• Filter by traits or characteristics that have been shown to predict poor performance.
• Instead, be sure to filter for the candidate's characteristics, positives, and experience that correlate with long-term success in the roles you're looking for.
• If you tend to work with multiple candidates at once, consider investing in filtering tools powered by machine learning. These tools use AI to optimize the pre-selection process and, as a result, you can easily find the best talent.

7) Automatically send event reminders to candidates to reduce absences

Candidates are busy people. Some have multiple interviews scheduled around their work schedule. Automatic reminders can help minimize absences by simply reminding the interviewee of an appointment they may have forgotten.

Reminders also serve as a sign that the company takes the interview process seriously and that potential candidates should too.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use a tool that allows you to send interview reminders through different means, such as email or SMS, and make sure you know which one the interviewee prefers.
• Send short, friendly, and professional messages that include a sentence or two of greeting, and the date and time of the interview. If you have video call interviews, send the link as well.
• Use integrations when possible to allow interviewees to easily add the date to their calendar. For example, an email may have a link or option to add the date to Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar.

8) Optimizes the recruitment process by automating background checks

Recruiting software must include an applicant tracking system (ATS), and the ATS must provide functionality to optimize background checks. Once candidates are selected and interviewed, the ATS should ideally initiate background checks as part of the workflow.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Automate the search for candidates so that your ATS generates an easy-to-read report.
• Make sure that the ATS can send you notifications about problems that you need to investigate later.
• An intelligent ATS will also eliminate most false or invalid candidates (for example, people who have the same name as the applicant but are not suitable for the position).

Strengthen your recruitment efforts with Emi

Having the right recruitment tools makes it easier to make hiring decisions. If you want to automate important parts of your process using the methods mentioned above, Emi is the tool you need. Our platform specializes in recruiting workers from operational roles and we can accompany you every step of the process, from CV filtering to onboarding.

If you want to learn more, don't hesitate to try the tool! Request a demo to learn how we can help your business hire better workers quickly.

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