In this article, I will show you what recruitment automation is and how you can implement it in your recruitment agency to reap the benefits of the automation possibilities in recruitment!

Recruitment automation

Recruitment automation is technology recruitment agencies and other companies use to automate tasks in the recruitment process. Several results, when implemented well enough, could be:

• reduced time-to-hire
• reduced cost-per-hire
• higher fill-rate

You can probably imagine that if you automate some tasks, this will free up time because you don’t have to do them manually anymore!

What is recruitment automation?

Recruitment automation means automation in recruitment…

Simple as that. Usually, recruiters would perform many tasks manually. With automation, they don’t have to do some tasks anymore. And that is how you can free up time to get more done. Developers of recruitment automation software usually work with Machine Learning, predictive analysis, and AI (Artificial Intelligence).

With these methods, they develop software that can automate a very diverse set of recruitment tasks. But, when you start implementing recruitment automation, it requires a different working strategy. Because everyone who starts working with recruitment automation has to learn how to integrate it into their daily routine, adapt to the changes.

Who uses recruitment automation?

Many different companies use recruitment automation technology.

But usually, when I do some research on new technologies, I see that the client base of these software providers mostly consists of large corporates (like McDonald’s, Hunkemoller, Unilever). Big names, big resilient companies that know how to survive through centuries!

They know they have to improve to stay relevant!

And smaller companies, or small recruitment agencies?

They don’t always have the resources to implement automation, so they keep working like they always did. However, it does not always matter how large or small the company is. It depends on the people who work at the agencies.

If the management and the employees are interested in all the technological developments and believe they need to use (recruitment) automation to survive, they will invest in them.

How to automate recruitment?

There are many ways to automate your recruitment tasks. There are tons of software developers who have created many interesting recruitment automation tools. A couple of tasks you can automate are:

1. Automated Resume Matching

A recruiter needs to look through many resumes to find the perfect match. But what if the recruiter has to review hundreds of resumes?

And what if the recruiter works with an ATS (Applicant Tracking System), has found a huge candidate list, needs to click each resume, clicking back and forth from the list to resume repeatedly?

That is a tedious process. This is where recruitment automation software can help recruiters to find great candidates in a fraction of the time.

Developers are working continuously to create a matching algorithm that matches candidates to resumes in seconds. And sometimes you can even alter the matching algorithm yourself. And when recruiters can change the algorithm, they can increase the chances of finding great matches tailored to the clients’ needs.

Let’s say, a client believes working experience is the most important quality of a candidate; the recruiter can select that as a priority for the matching algorithm, and it generates a list with candidates who qualify best.

And if the vacancy is for a junior candidate, who just finished school, the recruiter can choose education as a priority inside the matching algorithm.

This is great because the recruiter doesn’t have to search manually inside the database to find a long list of candidates. The recruiter can start immediately with scheduling interviews, instead of sourcing for a long time.

You can find more in-depth information on how automated resume matching works on the following page, how automated resume matching software works!

2. Automated Lead Generator

A lot of salespeople need to address many different prospects and turn them into leads. Usually, salespeople go to network meetings, collect business cards, find contact details online and enter them in a list (or you apply social selling if they are lucky). But what if you could automate lead generation? That some recruitment automation software could find contact details online, import them into your recruitment software and salespeople could contact all these companies immediately with the help of the next feature? 

3. (Automated) Mass E-mailing

Automated mass e-mailing can help you save a lot of time!

If you have found a long list of candidates, and you would like to schedule an interview with all of them. What would you do?

• Would you send every candidate a separate message?
• Would you have to look in every resume, copy the e-mail address into an e-mail and send the whole list a message?

How much time would that cost your agency every year?

Precious time recruiters could spend interviewing candidates and taking enough time talking to company owners/HR managers what they need in a new hire? Creating real, valuable connections? 

What if you could easily send a message to the whole longlist with one click? And all the candidates instantly receive interesting job offers? And what if you could automate communication for vacancies, so any new matched candidate will receive a job offer, so you can start interviewing the candidates for the job so much faster and reduce the time-to-hire?

4. Sales Acquisition

Sales in recruitment is tough when you don’t have the right tools. Salespeople have to send many e-mails all the time to many prospects. First, they have to find contact details, create an e-mailing list, send a general message to this one mailing-list. And because of this, they will get little response.

There is software that can help salespeople with that. For example, it is possible to have a real-time overview of all the vacancies in your country inside an application, where salespeople can filter several types of vacancies, from different types of companies and in different areas.

Why is that interesting?
Well, this way, they can target precisely and send many highly targeted e-mails to different filters. Potential clients will feel that the e-mail is relevant to them and respond more.

And to help salespeople, we know another feature that might help a lot. Most salespeople don’t know what candidates there are in their own database. So they could spend a lot of time landing a new client who needs a Java Developer.

But what if you don’t have any resumes for this position?

All this salespersons’ effort is going to waste. Or, a recruiter has to work on this vacancy, which is way harder than in the situation I will explain to you now.

What if salespeople could see, for each vacancy if there were qualifying candidates. And what if they could focus their acquisition on companies with open vacancies, for which your agency has many candidates for in the database!

With an automated matching feature, salespeople can immediately see this and act on it. 

They can see, ‘hey, this potential client has a vacancy for Warehouseman, and we have hundreds of matching candidates for that position!’
The salesperson can send a message immediately, saying: ‘Hello … We have hundreds of candidates in our system for your vacancy, and we can start working for you immediately. Are you interested? Let’s have a meeting!’

More about recruitment automation especially for salespeople: this is how sales-driven recruitment software should work. 

5. Interview scheduling

Instead of going back and forth between you, the candidate, or client to plan a meeting, it is much easier to send a link where the candidate/client can choose a date to schedule an interview easily.

The interview would be saved directly into the recruiters’ agenda. It sounds straightforward, and you could think: why would I need that? It is easy to schedule an appointment with someone, right?

But remember, every click, every little manual task takes up time from all the other tasks you could do.

6. Candidate rediscovery

Sometimes you have received many resumes, but just one (or a couple) person(s) could get the job. But there are still many candidates who are available for a new job!

An automated matching feature could match all these candidates to many other vacancies, so the recruiter can help them by finding a job they love. And meanwhile, earn so much more money for the recruitment agency. 

7. Candidate relationship management

For some candidates, the recruiters could not find a job immediately. But, what if you have a functionality where the recruiter can automate communication with the candidate.

As soon as the recruiter has turned on the automation feature, the recruitment automation software will send, in the name of the recruiter, new job offers as soon as the matching algorithm has found a nice job for the candidate. The candidate will appreciate this tremendously.

Why companies use recruitment automation?

Fierce competition

The recruitment market is very saturated, so there is a lot of competition. Besides, many recruitment agencies offer little added value, so many companies/corporates want to recruit themselves and look for software that can help them replace recruitment agencies.

When recruitment agencies don’t improve themselves, and they don’t start using automation to benefit themselves to perform at a better and highly strategic level and learn to add more value. If you don’t do that, you will become outperformed by in-house recruiters who have access to recruitment automation technology. In that case, your recruitment agency might disappear, just like all companies that don’t keep up with the pace.

Online information

Candidates have a voice, and it is becoming louder every day. Recruiters who don’t keep up with technology can not provide an excellent experience for the candidates and will encounter it on any online platform.

Glassdoor, Google Reviews, and other platforms will display content and discontent about how you perform in the hiring process. And the better your hiring process is exposed online, the more candidates will like to apply and start working with you to find their dream job.

Technological developments

Recruitment automation is not around for a long time. But it is developing rapidly, and everyone is talking about it. You might feel that you are running behind the facts, and it might seem that everyone is into recruitment automation instead of you.

Still, 90% of all recruitment agencies are working with the most outdated software there exists, so there is still time for you to start adapting.

But do not wait too long! The longer you wait, the harder it will become. The recruitment technology market is already huge, and it is hard to find a great tool because of the vast amount of displayed information. There are so many recruitment automation developers who try to lure you in with all this ‘we are the next best thing’-talk.

Take it easy.

First, try to see what you could improve in your company, what tasks you are interested in automating, and what tasks all the other employees inside your company would like to automate. Then you have a clear view of what you want before entering the recruitment software-jungle.

What are the benefits of recruitment automation?

Recruitment automation has many benefits. However, not always the benefits you might think of immediately like savings in time. Some automation can cost some time but will help you give a better candidate experience and a better understanding of the market. Eventually, it could create some other tasks you never knew of.

Higher productivity

You might think that your work will be quieter or easier when you apply recruitment automation tools. This will not always be the case when you implement, for example, an automated calendar integration. Yes, that will save you time, but you might have more interviews, and you will be even busier. Or if you implement an automated e-mailing sequence, you might interest more candidates/clients and be even busier because your agenda is stacked with interviews and appointments!

Faster time to hire

This might be the case too. If you apply recruitment automation tools that help you make your whole recruitment process more efficient, you will reduce the time to hire.

Higher quality candidates

When you have freed up time with recruitment automation tools, you are able to interview more candidates, so you will be better able to find a great candidate that fits the requirements and the company culture!

Misunderstandings about recruitment automation

Recruitment automation software will replace recruiters

We can never know this. Because what if there is software that can better do all the tasks that a recruiter could do? In the car industry, they have automated assembly line workers. But they could not automate salespeople, designers, strategists, and many other jobs.

However, I believe that with automation, usually, recruiters will be able to perform better. So recruiters who work like recruiters used to do decades ago will be replaced by recruitment automation software.

And recruiters who adapt to the 21st century and learn how to incorporate automation in their recruitment process, who are creative, resilient, and able to provide added value, will reap the benefits of recruitment automation.

Next to that, most automated software solutions need a human touch. Because it is always important to feed and monitor recruitment automation systems. As automated programs can make mistakes or can become polluted with wrong information. So you have to take this into account.

And, some automation software solutions can create more work, or maintain the same workload. Because one task is replaced with another task (but the outcome will be better). There are many different outcomes.

Recruitment automation software could increase bias/racism.

This has happened, of course. I’m not here to paint a pretty picture. I want to show you a real one. 

There are situations that companies tried to analyze all their old hiring data to find a way to know what is a perfect employee so that they could search for these excellent employees upfront.

But think of old data, what kind of people will be found there?

Exactly, a less diverse group of people who have been around longer on several positions and those kinds of positions in the labor market. Recruitment automation systems that were fed with historical data became (hopefully unintentionally) racist and biased.

Therefore you need to make sure you get a system that learned through anonymized data. And that the developers made sure that irrelevant personal details like name, gender, origin, and other data that might influence the machine learning process negatively were removed!

So make sure your recruitment automation software, is not learning from biased historical data; and that the software only matches the vacancies with professional data from the candidates’ resumes. Like experience, education, job titles, and professional skills. So any job could be matched with any gender type and from any country.

Which is the very best way because you never want to limit people from achieving their dreams in becoming whatever they want!

Recruiters won’t use recruitment automation

Yes, this might be the case.

It all depends on how you are trying to improve your company. When you want your employees to start working with recruitment automation software, what do you think will happen? Usually, this requires change, and

Most people don’t like change..

They like to work the way they always did. So, it is vital that you implement recruitment automation carefully. Take a look at the following situation. If you have a large recruitment firm, and you want to start using an AI chatbot to interview candidates. How would you implement that?

Well, the best way might be to do a smaller project, recruit a small team in your organization that can work with the AI chatbot on recruitment projects that might fit this AI chatbot approach best. And as soon as other people get enthusiastic about it, you can say that they can start using it if they like.

This way, the number of users can grow organically with a minimum of investment in the software, and people will react more positively. Remember, it is hard to push people to use some technologies, so you have to find the right strategies to ensure recruiters will start using recruitment automation tools.

When to invest in recruitment automation?

You can always invest in automating your recruitment process, as long as you understand it will not solve all your problems. 

Some managers believe they will reach their goals when implementing this software or that tool. For example. There was a big company and they were expanding, buying other businesses, and the board decided they wanted the companies to communicate more with each other. And they immediately thought that a software system could solve that. That is not going to happen. You should only invest in recruitment automation software when you have a clear vision of what you want to automate precisely and if you have a clear idea of the changes required of you and your employees.

You can ask yourself these questions if you want to know that automating your recruitment tasks is a good idea for your company.

• Do you recruiters have to spend too much time on administrative tasks?
• How does your recruitment department sound? Is it a lot of talking, or only typing? (the best answer is, much talking, which means they are reaching more people personally). Typing is bad because that might indicate that people are swamped with data entry in outdated software systems.
• Are your recruiters able to keep everything under control, or do they often lose track of what they’re doing?
• Are you losing too many candidates in the recruitment process because your recruiters have no time to keep them invested?
• Do your recruiters encounter too many candidates who suddenly found another job in the middle of the recruitment process?

Where can I go to automate my recruitment efforts?

At STAA, we are busy helping recruiters and salespeople in recruitment, performing better at their jobs using our recruitment automation software. If you like to help your employees perform better at their job, contact us and schedule a demo, so we can show you what STAA can do!