Recruiting Automation
Recruiting Automation
Robotic Process Automation Making Recruiters More Efficient
On boarding new hires is one of those tedious tasks that is important but time consuming. It involves having new hires fill out multiple HR forms covering everything from work eligibility to a parking pass. In a large organization with many new hires joining at the same time, the process can take all day. Suppose there was a way to automate it all. Instead of requiring HR to walk each new person through each step of the process, what if a robot could handle it all? That’s the promise of robotic process automation (RPA). In many large companies robots are taking over the most tedious tasks, freeing up HR professionals to handle more high value work that is best handled my humans. Defining Robotic Process Automation RPA isn’t artificial intelligence, though it may resemble it. RPA can weave together multiple complicated, but repetitive tasks, performing each in the identical fashion efficiently and flawlessly. While AI does many of the same things, it employs a more sophisticated system of analysis that uses unstructured data. In that way, RPA and AI are complimentary technologies to improve recruiting and make it more efficient. The use of RPA to streamline repetitive processes has been growing rapidly. According to Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey, the use of RPA in HR increase by more than 50% in 2020. Automating repetitive work is a significant benefit for recruiters who frequently juggle multiple tasks. “Tasks go away with RPA,” says Mike Pino, partner and workforce learning strategies leader with PwC. “HR tasks present a lot of automation possibilities. I think as use of RPA and other automated technologies grows, HR professionals will find what they do each day on the job will be very different than in the past,” he told the Society for Human Resource Management He said that by eliminating having recruiters do such routine tasks as data entry, it frees up time for them to have more personal and valuable conversations with candidates. PwC says 40% of the HR functions internationally have adopted recruitment process automation. In one use case, L’Oreal Group recruiters say RPA algorithms have helped them achieve an 84% job offer ratio for interviewed candidates. RPA Is Still Evolving In most companies, RPA is still in its infancy. Recruiters still not entirely comfortable working with AI processes, now are wondering what robotic process automation is and how it can help them. A primer compiled by Talkpush provides an easy way for recruiters to learn the fundamentals while taking small steps toward automating the most time consuming of processes. The company recommends beginning by deploying a chatbot to take over some of the more routine questions candidates have and keeping them informed of their status. The next step is to set up a simple set of screening questions that the automation program can handle without requiring help from the recruiter staff. What’s Next for Robotic Process Automation As recruiter comfort with automation grows, more sophisticated steps can be introduced. One valuable use of RPA, Talkpush points out, is to automate the logging in to multiple databases by recruiters. Another good use is to automate the scheduling of interviews. As writer Ivanha Paz points out interview scheduling is one of the more time consuming and frustrating of the tasks recruiters handle. Automating the steps allows recruiters and candidates to stay in sync. “This eliminates human error and facilitates notifications of cancellations, changes, and reminders of when the interview is coming up,” Pas writes. Recruiters are just beginning to learn what robotic process automation is and how it can help them become more effective. Just as applicant tracking systems replaced paper and spread sheets, and artificial intelligence is now making candidate selection more sophisticated, robotic process automation will relieve recruiters of routine tasks allowing them to get back to doing what they do best which is to find and hire the best candidates. Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting Automation
10 Reasons Why You Need a Recruiting Chatbot
If you shop online you have probably come across a chatbot. You see them on most e-commerce websites because they’re hoping to sell you a product. If you have a question about that item, they want to get the answer in front of you ASAP, so that you don’t leave their site to buy a competitor’s product. In recruiting, the goal is the same. We are essentially selling a role within a company to a candidate. Treating candidates like consumers is the new way to attract and acquire talent. Thats why it’s time to adopt the e-commerce mentality of putting information in front of candidates to provide a better candidate experience. A recruiting chatbot is the perfect tool to do that. Here are 10 reasons why you should implement a recruiting chatbot on your career website. It’s 2021 (finally). These days, we find information we want within seconds from our phones, laptops, etc. Instead of making candidates search your career site for information hidden by countless mouse clicks, use a Chatbot to put the information they want right in front of them, on-demand. Chatbots turn passive candidates into applicants. Chatbots offer text applications. If you are hiring a large number of employees for entry-level positions, in your job postings, ask candidate’s to text “JOBS” to 555-555-5555. Your chatbot will reply asking for their name, email, phone number, anything you want. Whether the candidate applies at that point or not, you have their contact information for future positions. Because we always have our phones, candidates are more likely to send a text to inquire about a position than they are to apply online. Your team will thank you. Chatbots are able to automate your team’s least favorite tasks – including resume review, interview scheduling, and application updates. Chatbots encourage candidates to apply, pre-screen resumes, and allow your team to send a text or email blast to candidates that were pre-screened as a possible fit. The recruiter can simply click a button, triggering a text link to pre-screened candidates asking them to select a time for a phone interview. You’ll save so much time! Chatbots are incapable of showing bias towards candidates. When a chatbot is automating tasks from the top of a recruiting funnel (i.e. resume screening), they will not pass on a candidate because of their name, the year they graduated high school, or the college they attended. Instead, chatbots process responses to questions based on qualifications, time in roles, etc. Chatbots alleviate the risk of biases towards candidates. Chatbots provide data. It is easy to determine if your chatbot is working for you. Some examples of metrics you can pull include user metrics (total users, engaged users, user sentiment), message metrics (total/new conversations, miss messages, which are messages the bot can’t respond to), and so many more. You are always available. Chatbots are available to candidates any time, day or night. A candidate browsing your site at 3:00am can ask questions in real-time. If that candidate is awake at 3:00am because they feel stressed about work, they might ask your Chatbot about work/life balance. Your chatbot lets the candidate know that work/life balance is important to your organization, and now you have an applicant. You’re always on! Chatbots are the future of work. HR functions are starting to rely on chatbots to complete simple tasks. Think self-service benefit requests, employee-facing HR intranet bots, and reminders and follow-ups for onboarding new hires. Teams are getting creative and automating as much as possible – you can get ahead of the game. Chatbots are agile. Chatbots let you know what you don’t know. When a question is submitted and the chatbot doesn’t know how to respond, it alerts the system admin, who should either create a new response for the bot, or, edit an existing response so the bot knows to use it should the question be asked another time. It lets you know what candidates want to know. Branding. Giving your chatbot a personality and setting a friendly tone will make your organization and the candidate experience warmer. By customizing chatbot responses, you give candidates a look into how your company treats employees. If it is fun to work at your company, let a candidate feel that by making your chatbot transparent and fun to engage with. Chatbots integrate with your existing software. You spent a lot of time and money making your ATS work for you; make it better by implementing a chatbot that integrates easily with your suite of software. You’ll get the most out of your chatbot by linking it to your ATS to send candidate info, and with your email calendar for scheduling purposes.
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Recruiting Automation
Will AI replace recruiters?
When it comes to AI in recruiting, there are those who define it as ‘assisted intelligence’. They may be correct in that definition. Automation is taking the boring stuff out of the recruiting process so recruiters and hiring managers can spend more time with people. So if you adopt the technology in the right way it can make your organization more transparent, and build a better candidate experience. Where Recruiting AI Fits Best AI features work best for two types of recruiting scenarios. First there’s the high volume hiring organizations, where a manager does most of the hiring. Secondly, there’s the high value corporate side, where a recruiter is driving the process. Both scenarios have different problems that yesterday’s technology is trying to solve in the same way. Technology is trying to help the candidate through the engagement process…help the hiring manager automate pieces that allow for the human decision making to come through, in a faster way. Implications of AI in Recruiting One of the easiest ways AI can help is in the answering of questions from candidates. A lot of recruiting tech is able to speed up the interview process from doing the chase process where recruiting coordinators, trying to coordinate with their managers, can take care of that in minutes, rather than hours or days. The end result is shortening the time to hire. Which part of the recruiting process can’t be automated? The interview process is the biggest one that is really weird to automate. It’s hard for a machine to shortlist and choose the three best people for a job. It’s so much more complicated than dating which is an often used analogy. The nuance of the interview is so complicated you wouldn’t want to automate that aspect. But everything else is fair game. How should employers think about AI? Some mistakes we’ve seen before are employers who think automation is the ultimate goal. The reality is you should probably start with why you’re doing what you’re doing. Are you trying to hire great people to have your company be more competitive? Are you trying to build a better recruitment process? For example it’s maddening if you go to a career site and as an executive candidate or sales exec or other type of role and be presented with the same experience. We should be able to work out who these people are. We should put them through different types of processes because a different job is going to require a different type of AI based automation. What Recruiters Say About AI Here’s what some recruiters told us on a recent Facebook thread about AI’s future in recruiting. Their responses are enlightening. “Yes, a company eHarmony-type algorithm will be more effective than a recruiter’s opinion, by far. You just need to collect the right data points and feed the system.” – Andy Riabokin “Automation, intelligent matching, scheduling, and other non-relationship activities that can be done by “AI” will allow employers and staffing companies to do more with fewer recruiting staff. Recruiters are not going to be programming decision trees in chatbots. So, eventually, yes, that is the promise and the hope that the software vendors are selling. We’ll see.” – Craig Fisher “Having observed the practical implementation of conversation and conversational AI coupled with HR Ontology, the NLP Applied Scientist is continuously informing the engine about new use cases and definitions so it can comprehend the complexities of the human language to the best of its ability. The complexity of understanding linguistics informs me that AI will never replace the entire hiring cycle managed by the recruiter.” – Bennet Sung “AI can automate processes better but it may not replace it anytime soon.”. – Sagar Kommula “Don’t think so as there still are recruiters headhunting for cold candidates. Maybe it will help with some mass recruitment as a part of filling a pipeline, sending messages and feedback, but for high level recruiting people will still want to be ‘hunted’” -Lena K. “Recruiting is a people business. When you are affecting the life and future of a human being, as well as all the people at your clients’ business, it requires empathy, compassion, intuition, caring, and emotional intelligence to do well—-something no machine or algorithm will ever replace adequately.” – Eric Wentworth “As much as AI tries to replace recruiters by matching key words and years of experience, they can not match a good human recruiters ability to read between the lines and find a diamond in the rough. That’s a human job. And many recruiters do that very well.” – Melanie Erler “Maybe for some IT engineering jobs where just looking for cookie cutter type people that are closer to robots anyway but will never replace sales recruiters as 90% or more of sales is personality and things AI just can’t duplicate.” – Andrew Chase “AI will improve and extend its hands towards better sourcing, identifying and selecting candidates for recruitment and recruitment is again done by a recruiter.” – Syed Azaz “Yes, all those who were only taught to keep calling until they could get the bell to ring are already disappearing. Those who have upskilled to develop broader workforce planning strategies, who can debate ‘buy’ versus ‘build’ options with business leaders and who can audit the bots as well as their hiring managers with the same ruthless resolve to ensure candidates perceive the recruiting process as ‘fair’ will own TA and might even be called ‘recruiter’…although I doubt it.” – Gerry Crispin Can AI replace Recruiters? There’s an interesting line being drawn between automation and actually providing true engagement and care for the candidate. Recruiting vendors are trying to balance that line. If their technology can take out 80% of the busy work and actually free up hours, a better, more respectful recruiting process is in reach. That reality is closer than it appears. Ai will certainly replace recruiter tasks but the job of recruiting will evolve over time.
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Recruiting Automation
Candidate Experience in Recruitment Automation
We’ve written a lot about AI and recruitment automation here on this blog. But recruiting automation without empathy for the candidate could have disastrous implications for their experience and how they’ll view your brand in a post Covid-19 world. In an unsettled world where many jobs have been upended, some employers are really putting empathy to work for them. Take Truss for example. The software consulting firm has recently placed the following statement at the top of all their job postings; A note from Truss: We know you’re likely experiencing a lot of disruption as our nation (and our world) responds to COVID-19 – we’re experiencing it, too. There are two things we want you to know when it comes to hiring. First, we’re financially stable. We have a variety of well-established government contracts that we expect to continue over the next few years. Also, we’re winning new work, and we have a robust rainy day fund. Second, during video interviews, you’ll likely see more of our human side. Family members, partners, kids and pets are home with some of us! We promise to be present and engaged, but we may be a little…harried. It’s OK if you are, too – we understand that everyone is experiencing extra stress right now. If you have any questions along the way, please let us know, and stay healthy and safe. There is so much empathy in this paragraph it’s hard to understate. Their words help reassure the candidate that the company is stable and secure and most importantly humanizes the company in ways that most don’t. Automating a recruiting message like this to candidates can be done so easily with most recruiting software that I wonder why most employers haven’t done this yet. You can simply add it in the thank you email or text message that gets sent upon applying in addition to placing in your job description templates. If your company is still using the same language in your automated recruitment communications with applicants, perhaps you should change it to reflect the times we are in just like Truss has done. Setting Expectations Most candidates want the same thing when applying for a job. They want clear communications as to the status of their candidacy. They want to know what will happen next along with some form of timely resolution should they be disqualified. If you don’t think your current recruiting workflow and messaging provides those answers, now is the time to re-read that candidate content and ask yourself if it’s still relevant for the world in which we now find ourselves? Automation in recruiting can save valuable time for talent acquisition teams, but it can also add to the empathy factor for the candidate when it comes to what they want and need to have a good experience. That has a major impact on employer brand perception and candidate experience. There may not be an easier way to increase good will with candidates in this environment. The key factor is then striking the balance between in-person and automated recruiting touch-points so that talent doesn’t feel like they were hired by a machine instead of a recruiter. If job seekers take the time to invest in your recruiting process, then your recruiter (and your recruiting automation software) needs to return that respect by valuing the seeker as a person, not just a resume. A great candidate experience can only happen with the right mix of thoughtful recruitment automation put in place by a human with the job seekers journey in mind. Not only will you get higher acceptance rates from those that apply but your reputation for treating them with empathy will skyrocket your employment brand to new heights. 5 Ways to Use Texting for a Better Candidate Experience Send them a text message to confirm their application was received. Text them directions to your office before the interview. Update them via text as their application status changes in your ATS. Remind them via text that they have an upcoming interview. Send a welcome message by the hiring manager upon them accepting your offer. In the end, recruitment automation is the perfect way to set candidate expectations, provide assurances about your company and the hiring process, as well as letting them know if they are moving to the next step. Those organizations who embrace this new mantra will be the ones who become the employers of choice for the next generation of talent.
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Recruiting Automation
14 Recruiting Automation Ideas
From applicant to candidate to new hire, there are a myriad of ways to automate the recruiting process. As recruiters, you are already strapped for time, so streaming or automating mundane tasks in hiring can be a major win for the organization. Taking a thoughtful approach to recruiting process automation helps you maximize your ROI. Let your recruiting software take care of communications, marketing and other tasks wherever possible to give your recruiters more time to do what’s important, namely building relationships with candidates and allowing them to source top talent. Ultimately, recruiting automation assists recruiting teams to create a more structured and efficient candidate experience, while also freeing up time to enable more meaningful conversations. What follows below are simple, tactical ways to make recruiting automation work for you. Thank You for Applying Email This is probably the most famous piece of automation in place with most employers. Sadly many companies fail to optimize its use. I recommend letting candidates know what to expect next and ask them to follow you on your social media channels. You’re trying to build a relationship, so start with basic courtesy and say thank you. The Rejection Email Just about every ATS comes with an automated way to reject candidates en masse or individually. Employers need to get better about closing the loop on applicants they are never going to hire. One company I know of actually makes it part of every recruiters job to make sure they accept or reject every applicant assigned to the reqs they own. Interview Reminders Candidate, hiring manager and recruiter should all automatically get an interview reminder email or text message about the upcoming interview. If in person, it should contain instructions on where to go and who they’ll be meeting with. A text interview reminder is the perfect use case because it can incorporate a link to Google Maps and other key details in a streamlined format. Good text recruiting software will integrate with your ATS and help you do it automatically. General Status Updates As a general practice it would be great for candidates to get a notification each time their status in the ATS is changed to help them understand where they are in the process, either by email or SMS. Leaving them in the dark is part of the resume black hole that is all too prevalent in today’s hiring process. By being proactive like this you can also cut down on the number of inbound inquiries from candidates themselves. 1st Day on the Job Send a text message to your new employee via your text recruiting platform the day before they start in order to welcome them and give any last minute instructions for where to go. Candidate Experience Use recruiting process automation to regularly conduct feedback surveys among your candidates by asking them about how they perceived your application/recruiting process. Send candidates an email within a few days of their rejection email asking them what they thought about your process. You can gain valuable insight into what’s working and what’s not. Onboarding Information Requests With most of us working remotely, digital onboarding has become more important than ever to get right as part of a comprehensive recruiting automation strategy. Many ATS providers have onboarding components that allow you to send the proper paperwork to be signed electronically. These docs can be sent as part of a change in status in your ATS for example. Vendors like Smart Recruiters let you extend an offer letter right from their ATS for example. Notify Recruiter When Candidate Clicks Link in Email Wouldn’t it be great if you could be notified when one of your sought after candidates clicked something in an email you sent them? Some CRMs like Candidate ID offer this type of functionality already and I expect more ATS providers to incorporate this kind of alert in the near future. Ask for Referrals Setup an email to ask your top candidates who they know that might fill another role at your organization. A players tend to know other A players so it won’t hurt to ask. Programmatic Job Advertising Employers have been able to automate their recruiting spend by partnering with programmatic job vendors that take your job feed and automatically distribute those jobs to multiple job boards. Costs are incurred on a per click basis. Companies like Appcast, JobAdX and Joveo are some examples of these companies. Social Media Automation If you have a feed of jobs and/or blog content you can automate the publishing of that content through a tool like Dlvr.it or Buffer. Each time you post a job or blog that item can automatically be shared across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn thus eliminating the hassle of posting to each channel one by one. Pre-screening Candidates Having candidates self assess can save you valuable time by automatically rejecting them before they apply. Recruiting chatbots are great for performing this task. The chatbot can sit on your website or work as a text chat with the candidate by asking them screening questions and either rejecting them or pushing them into the funnel. This is an easy way to tap the power of AI in your recruiting efforts. Interview Scheduling A number of interview scheduling tools now exist and ATS providers like Smart Recruiters are also building in functionality to allow candidates to self schedule their interview based on your team’s calendar. You can also tap your text recruiting platform to trigger automated scheduling texts based on activity in your ATS if they have an integration. Candidate Nurturing Maintaining relationships with candidates who indicate interest in your company is an important part of a modern hiring process. CRMs (aka Candidate Relationship Management) are adept at this type of functionality mainly through email automation. These emails can keep the candidate engaged throughout the pipeline so they don’t lose interest. Including texting at job fairs with them. Learn more about how Emissary can automate your recruiting with features like our AI recruiting chatbot.
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Recruiting Automation
How Recruitment Automation Software Improves Hiring
Automation is coming to recruitment. As we enter this new age, it’s important for recruiting teams to embrace these new tools in order to keep up with the times. Those that don’t embrace automation will fall behind and candidates will notice. Thankfully, most recruiters have seen the light. According to one 2019 study, over 80% of recruiters agree that recruitment automation software can help increase their productivity. And the most successful talent organizations see automation as a core component of their recruitment strategy. Though some may think that it may be hard to see how automation and candidate engagement can coexist, there is a way to ensure the right balance. It starts by looking for aspects of your workflow where a machine can replace a human. Then its a matter of finding and selecting the right platforms to make that automation a reality. The question surrounding recruiting automation is no longer “should we?” but rather “how do we?” With 75% of recruiters indicating that technology will play a larger role in their companies hiring process in 2019 and 22% increasing their spend on recruiting automation, it’s absolutely critical that these talent teams get the “how” piece right. ~Entelo With that in mind, here are five ways to better engage candidates with automation. Set their expectations. More information about your company’s recruiting process is needed for your website and on the ‘Thank You for Applying‘ autoresponder. Tell candidates what they can expect to happen next. Spell out your entire hiring process for them so they can be at ease after applying. Doing so will also prevent questions later down the funnel. Insurance giant GEICO does this well (example). There’s no reason you couldn’t replicate something similar and deliver it to job seekers in an automated message. Talk to them through chatbots. Having a chatbot that can answer basic FAQs about your company, culture and process is a no brainer these days. It acts as a virtual recruiter saving your humans valuable time instead of having to respond to individual emails. Keep them updated. Most modern ATS (applicant tracking systems) allow for automated emails to be sent as recruiters change the candidate status. Be sure your workflow is set up to trigger these alerts so you can keep candidates in the loop about their application. Nothing frustrates a job seeker more than NOT knowing where they stand. Automated alerts can aleve some of that pain. If your ATS doesn’t have automatic triggers give our friends at Greenhouse or SmartRecruiters a call. Let them self-schedule. The scheduling of phone screens and interviews is ripe for automation especially on the high volume side of recruiting. Home Depot allows candidates to self-schedule interviews with their store hiring teams once they pass the online screening. Tools like Calendly can be used on an individual basis to let candidates pick a time slot that works for them. Stay on their radar. Lastly use automation to stay in touch with candidates with important company news, job alerts and more. For instance in the email tool Mailchimp, you can create automated newsletters using RSS feeds. If you blog, you can automatically send out a newsletter at a scheduled day/time each time you post a piece of content. Just set it and forget it once its in place. What is recruitment automation? Recruiting automation is where the candidate experience is headed. It is going to free up immense amounts of time for your recruiters so they can return to the more valuable parts of their day—connecting 1 on 1 with candidates and holding meaningful conversations with them. Automation is already part of today’s workflow via tools like the ATS and HRIS system that provide self guided funnels into the apply process or employee experience. So get them involved to help you map out your automation strategy. Ask your vendors how they specifically automate certain functions. Devise a rollout plan with milestones, and work closely with your team to identify specific needs by walking through your hiring process step by step. If you lay the groundwork upfront your recruiters will see firsthand the benefits of recruitment automation software for getting candidates in the door faster.
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Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.
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