Automated Recruiting: 8 Ways to Automate Your Recruiting Process

Recruiting candidates is a difficult job with a lot of changing parts. You need to post your job ads on the right job boards, filter dozens (or hundreds) of applications and CVs, narrow down the right candidates, go through a series of interviews; not to mention all the paperwork in the process.

Wow, that's a lot. For this reason, automation is becoming increasingly popular among recruiters and human resources departments. The right tools can manage publications and marketing, evaluate and filter candidates, and provide you with a candidate relationship management system that keeps your talent pool dynamic. 👌

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

Why is automated recruitment increasingly important?

To put it simply, recruitment is difficult.

Let's start by looking at a recent Glassdoor survey that says that the 86% of HR professionals think recruitment is looking like marketing. When you examine the statistics, you will see how recruitment is becoming more complex with the amount of information that needs to be analyzed to find the right people for a job.

Just consider the skills that modern businesses require to thrive. As technology continues to advance, companies need more skills to complete daily tasks. Therefore, recruitment teams have to search through CVs and applications to find precisely those skills.

Today, recruiters also have to consider factors such as diversity, alignment with company culture, and more.

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 are not automatable.

What are the benefits of automated recruitment?

The main benefit of automated recruitment is to improve work dynamics to make it easier for recruiters to find qualified candidates in an organized and fast way. But let's get specific so you can see which parts of the process bring the best benefits for you. 💪

Save time by eliminating manual processes

The recruitment process is full of manual tasks that 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.

Attract consistent, 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 based on traits that have been historically successful in the positions you're looking for. You can also rule out candidates with potentially problematic indicators.

The result is more consistent, 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 over, the hiring part begins and your automated recruitment tools can be useful as well. 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 of the process: send tax forms and documents for the new employee to complete, notify your HR team that they will have to verify their background, pay salaries, set up benefits, etc.

Increase the reach of your open positions

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

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

Softwares make it possible to collect information about 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

If you use it well, automation can work wonders to accelerate daily tasks while attracting a good number of quality candidates. So how do you have to do it? Below, we have some tips, tricks and best practices for you!

1) Use AI to automate your communication with candidates

Artificial intelligence is growing, with a projection of a 38.1% annual growth rate over the past decade. It's not just for analyzing data, but also for sending answers and updates. Communication can be one of the most time-consuming tasks for recruiters. You can eliminate a lot of work with AI and automation designed to answer frequently asked questions or send follow-up emails.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use chatbots to create a panel where candidates can ask questions about how to submit their application or CV for your ads
• 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 date reminders

2) Distribute your job advertisements and reach candidates faster

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

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use technology to automate your recruitment and post vacancies on relevant job boards, social networks and search engines
• Use your employee network to recommend open searches
• Take advantage of automation to reach candidates in your talent pool

3) Automatically monitor and measure networking opportunities

Social platforms are another good place to recruit, especially for operational talent. In 2021, the 86% of people looking for a job they used social networks, 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 the application.

Why not automate this as well? There are more opportunities on social media than just 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 the app to publish later.
• Use your recruitment platform to generate links and automatically measure where your best candidates come from.
• Create content designed to attract candidates and tailor 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 the most valuable platforms and content.

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 you can automate a large part of your talent pool. Doing so reduces your team's workload so everyone can focus on what they do best: looking for candidates.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Use software designed with the best talent pool in mind. This will give you more tools to automate steps throughout your process.
• Use software to automate your schedule as much as possible, such as sending notifications about when vacancies open and close, dates for submitting applications, etc.
• Automation tools should be able to help you schedule throughout the interview process. Configure your recruitment software to send notifications to candidates who have been selected for interviews. 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 and repetitive daily, weekly or monthly tasks to make the process work. Depending on your company, these tasks vary. Some may be specific to attracting talent and others specific to human resources or day-to-day management. Either way, there are a lot of opportunities for automation.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Think about team meetings, can you automate email reminders for those that happen every week?
• Human resources departments can find many aspects, such as payment of salaries, renewal of benefits, etc., to automate or configure 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 short list.

6) Identify the best candidates by automating the filtering process

If your marketing works, you will see the interest of the candidates and, if everything goes well, a large volume of requests and CVs will arrive. This is one of the most important areas in which automation can help you: instead of reviewing all the CVs by hand, use recruitment software that does a pre-selection for you.

In addition to reducing the workload, automating pre-selection has another advantage: it reduces the chances of accidentally filtering good candidates by unconscious biases: biases in relation to traits, people or groups.

You may not be aware that you have biases, which is why they are “unconscious”. Either way, such 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 interview rates per hire and long-term success rates of hired candidates. It then uses that information to redefine the pre-selection process.
• Filter by traits or characteristics that your data have proven to be predictive of 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 so that you can easily find the best talent.

7) Send event reminders to candidates automatically to reduce absence

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 do the same.

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. It doesn't have to be more than one or two sentences of greeting, and the day and time of the interview. If you have video call interviews, send the link.
• 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 should include an applicant tracking system (ATS), and the ATS should provide functionality to optimize background checks. Ideally, once you filter candidates and interview them, the ATS triggers background checks as part of the workflow.

Tips, tricks and good practices

• Automate the search for candidates so that your ATS produces an easy-to-read report.
• Make sure that the ATS can send you notifications of issues that you need to investigate later.
• A smart ATS will also eliminate most false or invalid candidates (such as people who have the same name as the applicant but are not suitable for the job).

Reinforce your recruitment efforts with Emi

Making the right hiring decisions is simpler with the right recruitment tools. If you want to automate significant parts of your process using the methods mentioned above, try Emi. 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, it's best to try. Request a demo to learn how we can help your business hire better workers faster.

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