Recruitment today, even in its simplest avatar, is an extremely different process from what it was just 5 years ago! Technology is changing the way we interact with people all across our lives and hiring is definitely no exception. How does automated recruitment work?
Technology in recruitment has taken away the mundane and routine pain points of the process for recruiters and HR teams, and made it quicker, faster & easier. The role of a recruiter has drastically transformed and it is important to understand this. As always, technology is an enabler, not just in safeguarding rapidity, but also in reinventing the human intervention.
“Automation is transforming the way people drive and play a part in the hiring process. Humans are required in fewer ways for the operational areas of talent acquisition and are far more imperative in the intellectual and analytical aspects.”
It is well known that technology has pervaded recruitment completely.
Talent acquisition has to be “SMART”! This refers to an end to end process.
S –Sourcing & Screening
M – Meetings & Interviews
A–Appointment letters & offer letters
R - Remuneration management
T – Tracking & onboarding
Automating SMART is now the only way to search and onboard talent. Here are the areas that technology has changed the way we recruit:
- Sourcing & screening - Automation has created methods of planning and budgeting for a company’s recruitment plan. One can create flexible plans and make budgets for different positions to help control total recruitment cost. This ensures that you are in tune with a financial plan and are not running out of recruiting funds. It helps you focus and decide the type of talent to search at every level based on the budgets.
However, one of the biggest contributions of technology in recruitment is that of sourcing. In the days without the internet, sourcing was the hardest part. Then came public portals making sourcing easier from these open channels. However, sourcing from a multitude of websites became the pain point for recruiters.
“Multi-channel sourcing technology” helps to source resumes from several different channels and to consolidate them in one place. Automation in recruitment can seamlessly integrate with your Internal job postings or career sites, allowing you to collect profiles from all sources. Candidate database management has never been so easy.
AI can even do a total screening based on criteria, giving you shortlists of all the resumes within seconds. You can choose from the top 15 or 20 resumes for your search! This has made the entire sourcing and screening method faster, easier and more accurate.
- Meetings & interviews– Automation can help schedule multiple interview rounds, share online feedback and even assessment decisions making for an efficient interviewing process.
The latest technology can also let you do multi-panel interviews on your phone, save them in your database so that they are available for future reference. Nowadays, bots can even help ask interview questions and provide assessments that can be objective and minimize human biases.
- Appointment letters –System-generated offer letters are now commonplace. Hence, you don't need dedicated personnel to make offer letters. Technology can customize and configure multiple Offer letter formats based on your organization units like legal entity, SBU, grades, and departments etc. This reduces timelines, confusion and makes a complex process extremely simple. What’s even better is that you can even send these from a mobile phone!
- Remuneration management- This is another area in which automation has transformed in designing compensation. Softwares make candidate compensation uncomplicated where it can be configured to your organization and its different structures. New age software lets you define pay structure with CTC & gross details based on your organizational specifications so that calculating costs and salaries are no longer cumbersome, and are error free.
- Tracking & onboarding - Softwares now let you organize and keep a check on all the formalities that need to be completed before joining. You can verify and gain complete control on verification of all items that are on the Pre-Offer Checklist for your candidates. All certificates and other documents can be uploaded by a candidate digitally. This creates a paperless employee profile automatically. Intelligent processes create seamless operations. One can Confirm details of the selected candidates before they come onboard. This makes the onboarding not only easy and nuisance-free but also ensures all processes are adhered to.
While all of the above sounds great, I have one caution for the recruiter.
“Even the best of softwares needs a backend process to make automation successful. One needs to choose wisely depending on what the organisation can actually handle and deploy. Don't rush to buy because others are doing it.”
Most technology products & services need maturity in the process and reckless use of it may actually be counterproductive. It is important to understand what and how much to automate – slow and steady is the way to go.
Know more about such trends at the People Matters Talent Acquisition League Annual Conference 2018 on 30th May which will seek to address the most poignant talent acquisition challenges, what’s next in TA, and how AI and machines are becoming matchmakers for recruiters today.