Did you know? On an average, it takes about 68 days to hire a candidate. Most companies often complain that it's their recruiter's inefficiency that has lead to increase in time-to-hire a candidate. Recruiters spend most of their time scheduling interviews back and forth in an effort to find best talent for the company.
Automating the process has been a solution most companies today are opting. The advantages of using automated process could be questionable if your current process is working quite fine. However, automating the process can change how the entire recruitment process works. We have collated a list of automated processes that should’ve been adopted by recruiters long ago but they haven’t.
- Job Posting — There are innumerous job portals where candidates can look for a job, recruiters must look for them accordingly. You find senior candidates on Monster or LinkedIn and freshers on Naukri or its equivalent. Manually sifting through these portals can be cumbersome. With one click, job posting portal technology automatically distributes employment ads to multiple career sites, the employer’s web site, and job posting portals. They also retrieve data when someone applies through a particular portal. All job boards handled in one single platform and no laborious task of handling too many username and passwords.
- Better Candidate Relationship — In our experience, we have often heard applicants joke about “black hole” in recruitment; where you apply for a job and never hear about it. Candidate experience is more important to the companies than candidates themselves. This article here shows how Heineken's strategy to improve candidate experience with their interview process helped them find better candidates. All they did here was make the candidate feel special. More candidates are going to apply to your company. There are so many articles on the best companies to apply to for an excellent interview experience. Studies show that 68% of the candidates rated the employers with 3 or more stars out of 5 on their overall candidate experience but 80% of those candidates weren’t hired, so it’s the experience that mattered to those candidates. Closure is another attribute that candidates look for and companies now must strive on notifying candidates if they are selected, rejected, or on-hold until further notice.
But without automating the process, recruiters will have a tough time mailing across details to every candidate, and that’s what is probably happening at your firm right now. It is astonishing to know that only 26% of employers use an applicant tracking system to manage their hiring process. With automation, recruiters can send reminders via emails, IVR and SMS to candidates; to invite them to interviews and to inform them about their status.
- Interview Process — To get a better read on the candidate, employers usually ask for multiple rounds. Each round will eliminate some candidates based on a cut-off. However, most of recruiters are held up scheduling various rounds and sorting through a pile of test results. When using an automated process, all candidates are screened against the same criteria consistently. Various tests like aptitude tests are employed to measure candidate's ability to complete a special skill or accomplish a task in a certain amount of time. Psychometric tests to gain insight into a person’s personality and psychological thinking. Code Tests to asses a developer’s skills and employing automated interviews in lateral hiring.
Platforms out there provide all this in one, which means recruiters don’t need to juggle between different platforms to find candidates for various processes. These platforms automatically push the candidate to the next level based on criteria set before the interview process. This helps centralize and improve the legal defensibility of your hiring process.
- Background Check — Your current process might include the candidate applying for a post and your recruiters run their background by a vendor. It is a labor-intensive task considering you are in a high volume-hiring situation. This could be one (or more) person’s full time job. Not to mention that during the background check process vendors find inaccuracies 43% of the times. Automating the process lets the system do the work for your recruiters; the recruiters don't have to manually send the details to the vendors. Candidate details can be uploaded through document scanner through the software, which is directly sent to vendors. Vendors will mark the resumes clean or not in the platform after the check. No mails sent back and forth.
This is only the tip of the iceberg - this list is exhaustive, each micro process in hiring can be automated. Not only can they be automated, they can be synced to the phone to provide a better experience to the candidates.
With automation in place, all the information is in one system; tracking candidates through the hiring process is much more efficient, automation allows anyone who has access to the system to log in and see this information without having to find the paper trail. An automated system will also allow you to track why a candidate is chosen or why not. It makes it that much easier on the governance front. Almost everyone owns a smartphone; it’s only wise to go mobile with hiring as well. Every phase that can be automated in the recruitment process can also be integrated on mobile.
While each organization’s needs are different and unique, an automated process is one that is sure to make everyone’s job easier regardless of the situation you are in.
To know more about Automation you can write to me at tom@talview.com, will be happy to share the details of products out there that can help.