What Is Recruiting Automation?

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The post-pandemic era is bringing about new changes in every industry, including recruiting. Roughly half of US employers expect to increase their workforce in 2021, placing an enormous load on recruiters, who often operate on small teams. Rather than relying on expensive recruiting firms to fill that gap, many companies turn to recruiting automation.

While there’s a common misconception that automation eliminates the need for recruiters, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, automation complements recruiters’ efforts and allows them to spend time on more valuable and fulfilling activities rather than tedious manual tasks like researching candidates, manually updating spreadsheets, emailing back-and-forth to set up interview times, and so on. With an automation-forward approach, recruiters have the time and energy to do what they do best—talking to candidates and closing the ideal match.

Recruiting automation improves recruiter retention rates, decreases time to hire, and ultimately saves you money. In this article, we’ll explain recruiting automation, discuss its benefits, and help you identify clues that your organization needs automation to level up.

Definition of Recruiting Automation

Recruiting automation is a technology that establishes automatic workflows for what would normally be manual recruiting or HR activities. Recruiting automation can streamline candidate sourcing, communication, scheduling, and assessments, which often take up a great deal of recruiters’ time.

By automating these repetitive tasks, recruiters can focus on being on the phone with and closing candidates who are a great fit for the company and role. Typically, recruiting automation falls under the software-as-a-service (SaaS) category, supporting HR operations by saving time and boosting productivity.

Recruiting automation is particularly helpful for companies that need to quickly scale their team or have limited resources. It also offers a powerful competitive edge—recruiters can start moving pre-vetted candidates through the hiring cycle before less nimble companies can act.

Driving factors of recruiting automation

First-rate talent is hard to find, and it’s getting harder. Economy shifts, a widening skills gap, and the need for similar roles across enterprises and small businesses alike have made recruiting extremely competitive. This challenge leaves recruiters stressed-out and unsatisfied, leading to a high turnover in the HR industry itself—57% of HR professionals say their recruiting team has shrunk over the past year while hiring needs have surged. When you don’t have the recruiting talent to hire other employees for your company, the odds of you finding excellent talent diminish even further.

To make matters worse, US job openings surged to a record high of over 8 million in May 2021. Sifting through hundreds of resumes and online profiles, ensuring the right fit through phone screenings or assessments, and making informed hiring decisions take time and attention that recruiters simply don’t have. By leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, recruiting automation can identify and contact the highest quality talent faster.

Benefits of recruiting automation

Clearly, recruiting automation makes recruiters’ lives easier. But what are some other tangible benefits? Here are just a few advantages of incorporating recruiting automation into your HR strategy:

Identify quality candidates—Rather than wading through LinkedIn for acceptable candidates, recruiting automation does the scouring and hands you lists of pre-qualified candidates based on the skills and experiences you’re looking for. Using AI-driven, attribute-based sourcing, you can narrow your search with distinctions like “builds diverse teams”, ‘’seen a successful exit’’, ‘’fast career growth’’, ‘’startup experience’’, or “past founder”—a capability unique to Findem.
Boost people intelligence—Recruiting automation indexes a lot of data on your potential workforce: their skills, expertise, previous work history, aptitude tests and more for a more holistic understanding of candidates’ strengths and weaknesses. This information helps build your people intelligence, which in turn, aids in building a talent roadmap because you can clearly see your talent gaps and opportunities.
Increase visibility with analytics—Recruiting automation consolidates the tools in your stack and pulls together data to give a complete, at-a-glance view of the talent funnel. This helps you to uncover inefficiencies in your recruiting process, what’s working and not working across different recruiting channels (even by recruiter or recruitment team).
Decrease time to hire—Automating recruiting grunt work can save recruiters hours of work every week. Bringing the best candidates to light, auto-scheduling interviews, and conducting skills tests speed up the front-end of the hiring process so job offers get into the right candidate hands the first time, and quicker, to fill job openings faster.
Scale up—Manually emailing and messaging hundreds of potential candidates per day is impossible. That’s where recruiting automation shines, reaching out to as many people as you need to meet your hiring goals, whether it’s contacting 50 or 5,000 candidates each day, with personalization built into the messages.
Improve cost and efficiency—Outsourcing to recruiting agencies may seem like a good idea at first, but it can backfire. Third-party firms are neither intimately familiar with your company culture nor necessarily skilled at converting candidates to hires. Plus, outside agencies aren’t cheap. But recruiting automation can free up at least a day of each recruiter’s week and reduce sourcing costs by up to 90%.
Reallocate resources—Recruiters have full plates. They’re constantly reading applications, scheduling meetings, building engagement across job-related platforms, updating talent software, researching and nurturing the candidate pipeline, writing job descriptions, and more. Automating these duties can empower recruiters to spend more time on high-value work: interacting with qualified candidates, focusing on the hiring experience, and building the company brand.
Eliminate hiring bias—Diversity hiring is a concern for many companies, but unfortunately, bias is inherent to manual recruiting processes. It’s tough to eliminate bias when there is human interaction at every step of the recruiting cycle. However, recruiting automation can anonymize profiles, build a more diverse applicant pool, and alert recruiters to unconscious beliefs to limit bias as much as possible.

Real life examples for AI recruiting

Recruiting automation benefits are great in theory, but what about in practice?

Surge the volume of quality candidates in half the time

Recruiting more high-quality candidates is challenging. Recruiters can use up most of their day hunting for talent on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed, and other platforms, hunting for personal email addresses and tailoring messages to each person. Not only does all of this manual work leave recruiters with little time for anything else, most of the candidates that recruiters source don’t end up being worth even a phone screen. Recruiting automation enables recruiters to develop ideal candidate profiles to pinpoint people who have the right industry expertise and skills to be worth everyone’s time.

Cut recruiting costs

Recruiting automation reduces costs, even for hard-to-fill roles in tech or other STEM fields. Rather than hiring costly technical recruitment firms, automation tools can quickly sift through online profiles, patents, publications, company information, and more to find experienced candidates. Attribute-based filtering can refine these searches even further, leaving you with only the most qualified people to contact. Then, recruiters can simply shortlist their favorites, add them to a personalized drip campaign, and resume other tasks while recruiting automation continues to work. Recruiting automation platforms consolidate tools and workflows, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing costs.

Shorten recruitment time

Lastly, automation speeds up recruitment time. Believe it or not, recruiters still manually copy and paste Boolean search strings into individual search engines without much top-tier talent in return. Whatever talent does surface is usually added to yet another spreadsheet and finally loaded into an ATS. Sometimes recruiters have to do further sleuthing at this point to find email addresses. Despite being entirely inefficient, this process is all too common. Recruiting automation solutions draw from the broadest range of public information and deliver a multi-dimensional collection of candidates near-instantly.

Signs that your organization needs recruiting automation

Virtually every organization can benefit from recruiting automation, but there are some obvious signs your HR team is in dire need of support.

Overwhelmed recruiters—Recruiters gain energy from talking to other people, not from updating excel sheets or sending dozens of emails. Without the help of automation, you risk your recruiters burning out, and potentially losing, some of your most essential employees.

Long recruiting cycles or unfilled roles—Either lengthy recruiting cycles or roles sitting unfilled for long stretches of time suggest a need for recruiting automation. As recruiters struggle to keep up with each candidate in the pipeline, they miss out on reaching other excellent candidates who get snatched up by other companies.

Limited recruiting time or budget—Although hiring outside agencies may help speed up the recruiting process, it also significantly increases your cost to hire. Recruiting automation can cut down on your cycle time.

Un-centralized metrics—When recruiting metrics are dispersed across multiple tools, it affects recruiting efficiency and even the ability to find quality candidates. Recruiting automation tools optimize your recruiting metrics by centralizing them in a single hub, giving you better insights into process improvements and into your potential candidates.

Recruiting inefficiencies—Having too many manual solutions involved in generating leads, finding candidates’ email addresses, scheduling interviews, conducting assessments, and so on segments the data. This leads to a plethora of inefficiencies in your recruitment processes, costing you time and potentially ideal candidates.

Implement recruiting automation today

Recruiting automation software uses AI to sift through various candidate pools, schedule interviews, and much more along the way. Overall, recruiting automation is proven to detect top-notch candidates, lower costs, and expedite recruitment time. Perhaps most importantly, it gives companies a competitive edge to identify and approach ideal candidates who are still early in their job search. It’s important to find a high-quality recruiting automation solution to meet your needs.

Findem’s platform provides a comprehensive view of global talent by sifting through all publicly available data (plus any internal data or systems you choose to connect, such as ATS). By enriching your typical searches with an entirely new collection of attributes, Findem enhances your candidate pool, saving time and money. Findem puts a heavy emphasis on data-driven decisions, empowering your talent team to integrate data from other HR tools to create a 360-degree view of people inside and outside your organization. It helps you understand what makes your top talent successful, reveal areas for process improvement, and benchmark against business goals.