4 Hiring Automation Hotspots

How automation leads to process improvement in hiring/recruiting

Few decisions can make or break business success like hiring. For every hire, there are hundreds of activities across a team of people that merge together to form your overall hiring process. Regardless of the process, most hiring routines involve hours or even days of duplicated and manual, time-consuming and repetitive tasks but most teams are unsure of where to start in the quest to eliminate them. As the volume of applicants increases the problem gets worse leading teams to execute a hack and slash approach to short-listing. This opens the door for serious mistakes which can lead to us filling the wrong person in an important role. It’s an area ripe for tools that enable greater scaling through automation.

Automation tools are not new to the hiring space. Applicant tracking systems, for example, have been in use now for years. What is new is that you can almost automate the process end-to-end. By connecting intelligent processes you can dramatically increase hiring speed while ensuring right-fit candidates.

Specifically, these processes include fancy terms like Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Process Automation, and Machine Learning. At the end of the day, they are effectively all out in place to save time while improving results. Let’s look past the technical mumbo jumbo and focus on four specific areas where automation is making a significant difference in hiring and recruitment.

Step 1: Automated job descriptions

Automated or not the hiring process still starts with a well-written, up-to-date job description. You cannot attract the right candidates if your job description is wrong. Any standard job description includes:

• Critical info (role, pay, reporting line, etc.)
• Work Summary (overview of what the job entails, etc.)
• Qualifications (education, experience, skills, etc.)
• Special demands (travel, physical skills, etc.)
• Duties and responsibilities (common tasks, etc.)

You can spend a lot of time developing a job description of your own from scratch, or, you can use Job description management software (OK, not the sexiest title, but very clear about results) from companies like Saba, HRSG, HRTMS and others. Here is a great list of providers on G2. Now that you have your job descriptions automated, it’s time to find the right place to put them. This software will take common skills, competencies, etc. for many known jobs and build a JD for you. You simply customize it.

According to Deloitte, by 2025 about 75% of the global workforce will be made up of Millennials. Here’s a great website, with tips and tricks for writing job descriptions that appeal to millennials. Automated tools can help because they take into account the segment that most roles fit into and use appropriate language that is appealing.

Step 2: AI and RPA in job boards and career sites

According to Jobvite about 43% of job searches happen on job boards and another 32% happen on career sites. What both places have in common is that they are searchable because of the job descriptions posted within them. One area of automation that is rapidly expanding is the AI built into these spaces

After the job descriptions are updated, expertly-written and approved by HR, the next step is to select the appropriate websites/channels for posting the shiny new job. There’s a dizzying array of choices. You can post on all-purpose hiring sites like Zip Recruiter, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, Workopolis, and many more. Or, you can go the specialty route. The more sites you choose will attract more candidates and increase the sheer volume of applications. But wait … posting across a bunch of sites sounds like a lot of work. Does anyone automate that?

Companies like www.gohire.io automate the process of posting across a bunch of job sites at one time. Post once across multiple platforms. The next step is to manage the screening process as the applications start to roll in.

Step 3: Screening and recruitment chatbots

According to ideal, 52% of talent acquisition leaders say the hardest part of recruitment is screening candidates from a large applicant pool.

Ultimately the job of screening candidates is critical. What you receive is a pile of digital records that you must assess before they turn into living breathing humans. For most teams, this is not a manageable process so they use tough filters like an ATS to help them cull the flock. According to Glassdoor, the average professional job posting gets 250 applications. Of those only 6 will be called in for an interview and 1 will be hired. Why the long odds? Is it because 97% of the applicants were bad candidates? Likely not. New tools are here to provide teams with better screening automation than what an ATS provides.

According to Scott Uhrig at Agile.Careers “The competition for posted jobs is insane. [Applicant Tracking Systems] do a horrendous job of selecting the best candidates, and–perhaps most important–the best jobs are almost never posted.”

Recruitment and screening bots have been specifically developed to help better screen candidates than an ATS algorithm. Forward-thinking companies like warmcall, therecruitbot, mya, and xor are earning kudos because of their ability to facilitate positive candidate experiences — while ensuring accurate and targeted matches for open positions. Recruitment chatbots and hiring screening bots are enabling HR professionals to deliver on their KPIs, with better screening and information-sharing, and faster hires. Traditional ATS algorithms use optical character recognition or OCR to scan a resume and make a determination on fit. They are notoriously easy to trick and as such many teams find themselves relying on front-line HR teams to then manually scan and assess applicants. This takes them away from a laser focus on ensuring the best experience candidates.

According to Tim Pröhm vice president and global practice strategy lead, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), Kelly Outsourcing and Consulting Group at Kelly Services:

“Chatbots and RPA help Kelly to increase the candidate experience by enabling our recruiters to focus more on the human interaction during the application and interview process, while intelligent automation reduces the non-strategic tasks.”

Bots can help accomplish important tasks including top-of-the-funnel (early) interviews to determine fit. They can also do live AI-based interviews. For example, a recruitment system with bots can do the 1st interview; then assess whether the candidate has the skills and experience to move forward. The built-in evaluation gives a company more control over the hiring process including the pace of hiring and volume of candidates.

Like anything, bots have their limits. Anthony Colella, SVP and CPO at Kory Ferry points out

“Where we don’t recommend using bots is where there is a need for human intimacy, such as helping convey the employer brand or helping convince a candidate why they are good for a particular role,”

So now you can automate how candidates get short-listed. What about the rest of the process?

Step 4: Gen 2 Applicant tracking system (ATS)

Regardless of whether you use a screening bot or not you will need tools to help automate and manage the application process. As a result, many hiring teams opt for an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Well-known companies like Beezy, Greenhouse, Zoho, Jobscan and many others provide ATS software. Most ATS systems use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan each resume and determine whether or not it looks like a match with a job description. According to JobScan, 98% of Fortune 500 companies use Applicant Tracking Systems. (Amazingly, in 2020, many companies still scan resumes manually!). Unfortunately, ATS systems are notoriously easy to trick or sabotage. As a result, many poor candidates leak through the system and get into the qualified candidate pool. Conversely, great candidates who don’t know how to ‘game’ the system, get caught by the filters and are removed from your hiring process. They’re deleted, gone, erased from your job screening history — without a really good way to build a positive relationship.

Is automation inevitable?

For many HR and recruitment teams, the only path forward is automation. If your competitors are using these tools they will be able to hire better employees faster than you can if you are dependent on manual processes. The key to understanding whether or not implementing automation makes sense is to properly track your overall process. Where are the bottlenecks? Where do you see the most time added to your process? How good are your results? Without diving into these questions first you will not be able to measure the impact of automating processes. One of the simplest measurement vehicles is time to hire. When you couple employee performance metrics against time-to-hire you can determine approximately how good your hiring process is in terms of its efficiency and its outcomes. Then you need to determine where automation will make the biggest impact.

I hope you enjoyed reading this!

Please leave your comments below and share stories about your experiences with automation. If you want to check out warmcall screening bots you can sign up for a free account at www.warmcall.com.