Recruitment Automation – Uses and Recommendations [In-Depth Guide]

Automation technology has been transforming every industry we know. The same happens with recruiting.

Recruitment automation allows us to be more productive by automating recruiting tasks and workflows. Besides being more productive, with recruitment automation, we can also:

Reduce costs per hire
Reduce time to fill
Improve talent profile
Improve the quality of hire
Improve relationships with clients and candidates
Scale businesses more easily
And much more

In this guide, we will talk about:

Why you should start using recruitment automation
Uses of recruitment automation in your hiring process
ROI on recruitment automation
When is the right time to invest in it
Common misconceptions about recruitment automation
Best recruitment automation software

Why should you start using recruitment automation?

There is plenty of reasons why you should start using recruitment automation ASAP:

Increase in productivity

When you automate loads of repetitive, dull, and manual tasks, you end up with loads of free time. Take resume formatting as an example.

An average recruiter needs around 20 to 40 minutes per resume to reformat it, while a resume formatting tool does that in just a few seconds. And instead of spending several hours a week reformatting resumes, with recruitment automation, you spend zero.

You can automate many more things like interview scheduling, resume screening, bulk communications, etc.

With that many activities, automated recruiters get a lot of free time to focus on improving their workflows, candidate experience, and client relationships.

Unbiased (blind) hiring

Encouraging workspace diversity is easy in theory but hard in practice because recruiters are, just like any other person, prone to unconscious hiring biases.

Age, gender, racial and beauty biases can all be avoided entirely by hiding candidates’ personal information from recruiters. You can go as far as hiding the school they have attended and previous work experience.

If recruiters had to do this themselves, they would never make unbiased hiring decisions. However, the software can do this for you and present recruiters with resumes containing none of the information that may subconsciously influence the recruiter’s decision.

The idea is to hire and qualify candidates solely on their skills, not based on the university they went to or their race and age.

Improved quality of hire

With the help of AI and machine learning, recruitment tools can significantly help recruiters make better hiring decisions. And even if you don’t want to rely on artificial intelligence too much, you can still have a better quality of hire just thanks to the previous two points, more time and not being biased.

Automation allows recruiters to make consistent hiring decisions and track their performance and learn.

Reduced time to hire

By automating hiring processes, you can significantly reduce the average time to hire and improve candidate experience.

Automating phases like candidate screening, interviewing, and assessing lead to this. Companies have reported that they have reduced their time to hire by even 50% since starting to use recruitment automation.

Better candidate experience

By helping recruiters be more efficient and productive, recruitment automation creates a better candidate experience too.

Thanks to having more free time, recruiters can optimize and streamline their process and devote themselves to building better relationships with candidates by understanding them and offering the right jobs for their needs.

Uses of recruitment automation in your hiring process

Now that we have discussed why you should start using recruitment automation let’s see the actual uses in your hiring processes.

Candidate sourcing

Sourcing candidates means finding qualified candidates that haven’t applied to your job positions yet. With recruitment automation, this has become much easier since getting the names, skills, contact info, and qualifications are done by a machine or AI.

Many automation tools pull this information from candidate’s social profiles like LinkedIn, based on the job requirements.

If you are interested in some good candidate sourcing tips and tricks, take a peek at this article.

Candidate pre-screening

Recruitment technologies help a lot when it comes to automating candidate screening and pre-screening. They can rank candidates based on their skills and pre-qualify them.

Many tools powered by AI go over the resumes and evaluate applicants’ experience and skills. Some are advanced enough to combine that data with data pulled from the applicant’s social profiles and determine their qualification to do a certain job.

Besides using recruitment automation tools to handle this for you, here are some fun and creative candidate screening strategies you should try.

Candidate relationship management

To enhance the candidate experience, you must maintain relationships with candidates. That is why you need to have CRM features built into your recruitment automation software.

Maintaining and keeping track of communications used to be a massive setback for recruiters before, especially in large corporate HR teams or staffing agencies. However, with automation, all your communications are kept in one place and can be automated.

If you wish to find which recruitment tools are the best for this, take a look at this article on CRM for recruiting.

Candidate experience

Negative candidate experience can have a terrible effect on your recruitment processes and overall organization. That’s why every company’s and recruiter’s goal is to make a positive candidate experience.

Good candidate experience has several benefits:

Attracting more applicants.
Competing for top talent.
Improving the quality of hire.
Increasing brand awareness.

If you want to learn more and get an advantage over the competitors, check our article on how to create an excellent candidate experience.

Applicant tracking

When you say recruitment automation, chances are that most people will first think about ATS. Applicant tracking systems are indeed the most common types of recruitment automation that allows recruiters to track recruitment processes and candidates.

ATSs can automate and optimize most of the recruitment processes, from job sourcing to candidate onboarding.

We have written extensive guides and research on applicant tracking systems that you can check here.

Social recruiting

Social recruiting is definitely getting bigger and bigger nowadays. Thankfully, this is another aspect of recruiting in which automation can be helpful. Job sourcing to numerous social media platforms can be handled in a matter of just one click.

Moreover, you can easily track from which social media channel the applicant has come and measure which one is the most effective.

If you want to skyrocket your social recruiting, make sure to take a glance at these killer social media recruitment strategies.

Resume formatting

The time when recruiters had to format resumes manually is long gone. Thanks to recruitment automation, numerous tools and software can do this in just a few seconds.

In the recruitment automation software section, we will talk about the features and perks of using resume formatting tools and everything they can do for you.

ROI of recruitment automation

Most companies, when considering whether to get a recruitment automation tool, will consider its costs and the ROI.

To calculate the ROI of recruitment automation, you will need to consider the following factors:

Hiring costs
Time saved by ATS
Costs of a bad hire
Value of good hire
Labor hours
Recruitment agency costs
Estimate direct savings
Market research
Indirect or intangible benefits
Costs of marketing and