What are recruitment automation tools?
In the past decade, the field of talent acquisition has dramatically changed and recruiters do not get enough credit for it. From recruitment marketing to employer branding, to job boards, to social recruiting, professional recruiters have innovated and transformed various types of technologies to say above their competitors.
Nowadays, recruiters have been put on their toes to climb a new learning curve by a new set of technologies powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. These technologies are referred to as recruiting automation tools and they are used to automate some aspects of recruitment that are more tedious.
Recruitment automation helps organisations automate their recruitment tasks and efficiency so that they can reduce the cost of recruitment, improve their organisation’s talent profile, increase productivity, and accelerate the time used to hire new talents. Recruitment automation tools enable HR teams to automate processes that were previously done manually. These tools are powered by machine learning, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence and they can be used in all stages of a recruiting process.
Recruiting automation tools uses the jobs posting algorithm to source for top talents for vacant positions within an organisation. They simplify your entire search for candidates and facilitate your hiring and on-boarding process.
Importance of recruitment automation tools
As an HR professional or a recruiter, you always have more that could be done and areas that could be improved, no matter how hard you have worked. Unfortunately, HR professionals are asked to do more with shrinking resources and growing expectations. This is where recruitment automation comes in. recruiters can make a major improvement in their daily tasks by automating some time consuming and redundant tasks.
Recruitment automation helps in keeping the quality of your potential employees high by performing more mundane tasks. It can also help in providing data on current and previous candidates so that you can reproduce your previous success in finding quality hires. Some of the benefits of recruitment automation tools include.
Accuracy
HR automation tools provide more accurate data to help HR teams make a better hiring decision.
No matter how well managed your organisation is, you cannot avoid human errors without a proper cutting edge technology. It is impossible to anticipate or eliminate mistakes. They cause an enormous amount of rework; consume a lot of money and time to set it right which affects the efficiency and morale of employees.
Manual efforts and the complex natures of your workflow is a major reason why there are inaccuracies in HR processes. With HR automation tools, your entire workflow will be streamlined by breaking the complexities of your workflow. It reduces human errors and manual dependencies.
It saves time
There are lots of tedious tasks such as filling out forms and filling out paper works, to be performed by recruiters during recruiting processes. The time-saving capability of recruitment automation tools is very important. These tools perform tedious manual tasks with an unmatched time and accuracy. The time used by recruiters to perform basic tasks or push papers is directly saved. With recruitment automation tools, Recruiters and HR professionals can become more productive and devote their time to top priority tasks. Recruitment automation tools save time by removing manual intervention, bridging the gaps in recruitment process, and automating monotonous tasks. With recruitment automation tools, the whole process can be hastened and the time required to complete tedious and time-consuming tasks will be reduced.
It’s Cost-Effective
The huge cost factor associated with recruitment automation tools is reduced when human errors are eliminated and menial tasks are automated. With these automation tools, you will be able to selectively automate your recruiting process and you will avoid investing large sums to get software which includes unnecessary features. Unlike other recruitment software, automation tools don’t require lots of investment and maintenance fee. Most recruitment automation tools available today provide the pay-as-you-use model; making it the best choice for small-medium businesses who needs their recruitment process to be ramped up and within a stipulated budget.
It is efficient
Quick response time and effective communication with potential candidates are essential during recruitment process. Recruitment automation tools provide effective communication and allow you to automate basic things such as response emails. With these tools, your channels of communication will be improved and candidates will be kept in the loop. Recruiters can place more focus on activities that add more value with fewer errors. Some recruitment automation tools reduce finger-pointing which results in recruiters being more productive. Recruitment automation tools make the entire hiring process transparent by removing the process tailbacks. Also, they make organisation collaboration an easy task with their simple interface. Recruitment automation tools help HR teams make decisions that are better informed with their actionable insights feature.
It improves Consistency
There are needs for more consistency in the recruitment space due to increased complexity. However, manual recruitment works are rarely consistent. Every recruiter does things differently. A process set up by an individual from scratch will be unique depending on the individual who sets it up.
Although recruiters can remain consistent through checklists and post, inconsistency tends to occur due to manual intervention and obsolete recruitment software. Recruitment automation tools maintain consistency by finding and removing variable outputs and identical processes. Recruitment automation tools ensure that all tasks are carried out uniformly, regardless of complexities. You can avoid result variations and process irregularities when you stick to the predefined workflow.
It allows streamlined data collection
Recruitment automation tools can be used to receive an application from different sources such as job boards and your website career’s page. Also, you can improve your recruitment process by using these tools to collect useful data on applicants and using them to analyze them. Likewise, you can collect other useful data such as the number of people who viewed your Job Ads, numbers of applicants for a particular role, and the response of applicants. The best recruitment automation tools will ensure that your data flow is streamlined and you’re presented with useful information.
Allows recruiters to find top talents
Finding top talents is obviously one of the major benefits of recruitment automation tools. Recruiters do not have to waste their time with non-starters and basically find candidates that are better suited for the job. You can tailor your recruitment searches and find the exact type of talent you want with fewer efforts due to the advanced set of features provided by recruitment automation tools.
Tasks to Automate Using Recruiting Automation Tools
Candidate Sourcing
Recruiters can automate the process of identifying passive talents that have the skills and background you require. It is widely known that recruiter spends an average of 13 hours weekly to source candidates for a single role, with recruitment automation tools, this task has been streamlined to increase productivity or reduce hiring downtime.
Candidate Engagement
Recruiters have the capabilities to engage and automate candidate reach. Using recruitment automation tools, you can increase your engagement with applicants and spend more time selling the job to the candidate once they have been hooked.
Candidate Experience
There are recruitment automation tools that use chatbot technology to automate tasks such as the screening of candidates and status updates of applicants to help organisations streamline and scale great applicants experience without overworking their HR teams. These automation tools can also give potential applicants the same attention standard by standardising candidates experience.
Candidate Nurturing
There are top talents around, but they may not be ready to work for your organisation. To keep them warm, recruiters rely on recruitment automation tools to automate emails and other communication features to teach applicants about a particular company and why they should work there.
Gather Feedback from Hiring Managers
Gathering feedback from each and everyone that are involved in the process of recruiting is very tiring. When you have a system that allows you to automate the collections of feedbacks in place, then your work can be made easier. With recruitment automation tools, you can follow up on every interview and you can automatically send emails to interviewers asking them to submit their interview feedbacks. These tools also have reminder features so that you can remember all tasks on your busy schedules and you won’t forget to follow up with candidates. When you use these recruitment automation tools, you can reduce the time spent trying to remember the tasks to be carried out and spend more time focusing on the tasks that will bring you top talents.
AI Video Interviews
Video interviews have been available for a very long time. However, with an artificial intelligence powered recruitment automation tools, video interviews have been transformed. These tools can recognise and access facial expressions, speech patterns, and word choice. The video interview feature in AI-powered recruitment automation tools will give recruiters greater insight into the overall fit of an applicant. You can use such recruitment automation tools to supplement your current hiring practices instead of making it the main determinant for your hiring decision-making process. also, these tools can detect nuances that you might not notice right off the bat– however, you should also give rooms for errors because AI tools do not have the ability to read minds and lack the ability to adequately determine a candidate’s quality. Human will always be required during recruitment processes, so do not view recruitment automation tools as a replacement for recruiters.
Can AI-powered recruitment automation tools be biased?
AI-powered recruitment automation tools can be biased if the tool is given a prejudiced data, it will then base its decision on the data provided.
The fact that biased decision does not help anyone is the reason why these recruitment tools should be used to supplement human decision making when trying to identify the right candidate. The predictive model feature of such tools should be used for traditional practices such as validity studies and job analysis. Any inconsistencies and biases need to be identified, flagged, addressed, and rectified by Recruiters during recruitment process be for they can be used. Fortunately, the latest recruitment automation tools are helping recruiters recognize their unconscious bias.
We know that a telephone interview or a face to face interview may not actually help recruiters in knowing if a candidate is a right fit. Even recent research results have shown that interview do not do justice in predicting whether an individual is a right fit for a role and it, in fact, makes matters worse by buttressing the hiring biases of a recruiter. To make recruitment processes more efficient and consistent, we need to make changes, and AI-powered recruitment automation tools are integral to this.
Conclusion
It is easy to assume that the roles of human in recruitment process will be reduced due to heavy reliance on recruitment automation tools. The fact that there are AI-powered recruitment tools that enhance decision making in recruitment processes does not mean they can replace humans
The amount of time and effort spent during the process of hiring talents makes it necessary for you not to hire a bad fit or miss out on the perfect candidate. Recruitment automation tools are eliminating this problem. Surely, this will make the process smoother and efficient and gives the confidence that a consistent and unbiased decision has been made.
