Forward thinking managers are increasingly using automation as a powerful recruitment tool. While many companies still hold a strong resistance to acceptance of automated recruitment as a concept and implementation of it as a powerful tool to foster recruitment process. Automated screening of candidates and decision making is generally viewed as generic, impersonal and cold.

However, this is a valuable tool for volume recruitment wherein multiple candidate resumes need to be scanned within less time, thus allowing more time for hiring managers to focus efforts on value addition and productive tasks. The future of recruitment is indeed automated.

Incorporating the right level of automation in recruitment processes can help deliver significant benefits, while reducing cost savings substantially. Enlisted below are some of the benefits offered by automated recruitment:

1. Automated recruitment provides structure, fairness and consistency to the old established processes of recruitment, rather than dehumanising the process as many critics of this system may like to believe.
2. Candidate experience should not be neglected due to demanding recruiting schedules. Automation helps improve candidate experience by boosting up the speed of recruitment and faster responsive rates, with effective communication protocols.
3. Response rate at which applications were reverted in past, used to take long hours, but with automated recruitment candidates expect interviews to be scheduled at the earliest, post application for the job. For instance, Marks & Spencer understood this need emerging from the Gen-Y candidates and hence made possible for candidates to book interviews within 35 minutes of starting their application.

See: Holistic Solutions for Streamlining Recruitment

4. Communication is the key to finding bright talent and successful recruitment. However with large volumes of applications coming in for an open vacancy, it becomes increasingly cumbersome and difficult for hiring mangers to communicate effectively with every candidate. Hence, many candidates feel ignored and go elsewhere.
5. Automated response tools provide employees a timeline within which they can expect responses to their candidature. This further helps bridge the communication divide existing between the manager and prospective employee.
6. Automated recruitment tools further facilitate for active human interaction for recruiters, while helping them stay in constant touch with the new hires. They can add value through CRM tools and create reminders to contact a particular candidate at key stages of an interview process during selection.
7. Automated screening of candidates is another important tool which is being increasingly used by hiring managers of today. A cleverly designed process offers realistic job previews, calibrated talent shifts, killer questions and asynchronous interviews that allow recruiters to engage actively with candidates matching their job profile. The data gathered from application, online interviews and assessments are filtered by automated systems into tiers. Qualified candidates for appropriate roles are then clearly identified; this saves recruitment managers the time and efforts to wade through piles of applications.
8. E-recruitment systems save money around the recruitment process, taking into consideration the applicant’s personal situation and acknowledging the fact that they may have commitments outside work. The next generation of online interview scheduling enables candidates to choose assessment centers, as opposed to one-to-one interviews initially.

Summary

Automation helps monitor the progression of each candidate, right from the application stage to finish. The whole recruitment process to get the candidate on board working for the company, can take just three days from posting the job online. This further removes the scope for human error and ethnicity bias by treating all candidates equal irrespective of where they come from.

Automated recruitment encourages human interaction when necessary, improves consistency, efficiency and reduces costs. With added functionalities such as video interviewing, online offer, on boarding and self scheduling of interviews online, it reduces time invested by hiring managers into the recruitment process, thus allowing them more time to focus on productive activities.

It also helps bridge communication divide between the employer and candidate by generating responses to application with a quicker response time. However, the level of automation deployed in the recruitment process is industry dependent and can vary according to specific industry requirements. But incorporation of an automated recruitment system should be a part of every recruiter’s desk.

Also read: Capitalising on the power of mobile recruitment