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Recruitment automation uses technology to empower your recruiters to add more value.
Recruiters add most value when they apply their unique perspective, expertise and judgement. Like, deciding an unconventional candidate’s worth a chance, or persuading an on-the-fence candidate to choose you despite a higher offer elsewhere.
Recruiters add least value on the mechanics of the recruitment process. Like, sifting through hundreds of irrelevant applicants, scheduling interviews and reformatting job adverts for twenty different boards.
That’s where recruitment automation makes sense, working with your recruiters to amplify their impact.
Using recruitment technology to automate some of your recruiting processes increases efficiency, so your recruiters can get more done faster, with fewer resources (and have a better time doing it, too!)
Let’s look at the different recruitment touchpoints that lend themselves well to automation.
Here are 15 ways to embed recruitment automation in your processes
1. Pre-pre-screening
There’s pre-screening, and then there’s pre-pre-screening. Pre-pre-screening means you include pre-defined ‘killer questions’ at the very start of your application journey. They’re questions that result in automatic rejection if candidates give the wrong yes/no answer.
For example, ‘are you eligible to work in the UK?’. Or ‘do you hold a UK driving license?’
Automating pre-pre-screening means recruiters don’t waste time reviewing CVs that are definitely unsuitable, and jobseekers don’t waste their time with a pointless recruitment process.
2. Pre-screening questions with automated ranking
Pre-screening questions add another layer of recruitment automation early in your process. Depending on your ATS, you should be able to add whichever questions you want into your application then have answers automatically scored and ranked according to your pre-set criteria.
That way, your recruiters can review the best applicants first – to zero-in on great people faster. That accelerates time-to-hire and makes securing the best hires more likely. And it’s a much nicer experience for recruiters, who don’t get snow-blind reading CV after CV (good for retaining your recruitment team!)
3. Automated shortlisting and rejection
The best recruitment technology (yes, we mean Tribepad ATS…) can take automation even further, by automatically shortlisting or rejecting candidates depending on their pre-screening questionnaire scores.
Say 65% of applicants score between 20 and 40 on your pre-screening questionnaire, for example. But 20% score under 20 and 15% over 40.
Instead of recruiters manually having to uncover those 20% – who need ruling out immediately – or those 15% – who need interviewing as fast as possible – you can automate that process.
So your best candidates get an interview immediately and you don’t risk losing them to a competitor. And the worst-fit applicants get fast closure – all any unsuccessful candidate really wants. And your recruiters spend their time having positive, proactive conversations, not doing manual recruitment tasks you could easily automate.
4. One or two-way video interviewing
Telephone interviews really suck. They’re time-consuming, repetitive, and only give a basic impression of candidate quality.
Plus they’re inherently inconsistent (wouldn’t you be less chirpy on your 1000th call of the week?!). That’s not great because it risks damaging the candidate experience, which could push your quality-of-hire down as the best candidates sign elsewhere. And inconsistency creates space for bias, which is the enemy of diversity.
One-way video interviewing automates the process, so your recruiters only have to write questions once, no matter how many candidates you’re handling. Despite being less effort, that means you also get a more vibrant picture of candidates – so you’re bringing better-quality people through a more consistent recruitment process.
Two-way video interviewing speeds up the process. Conduct panel interviews and share private comments on individual candidates with the chat functionality. Share additional information with candidates during the interview, including maps and company documents. Remove the need for additional communication and emails following the interview.
5. Video interview profiling
The best recruitment technology can automatically analyse video interview answers using AI, facial recognition, NLP and speech analytics, to build a candidate profile. That supplements and complements recruiters’ judgement, so they can make better decisions, faster.
Listen to our Founder and CEO’s recent podcast on AI in Recruitment
For example, you could learn that Caroline is more ambitious than other candidates for this role, while Jake’s more dedicated but less ambitious. Now say you’re recruiting for entry-level call centre positions. You’ve had a problem with people leaving because the promotion trajectory isn’t there, and your retraining costs are sky-high. Maybe Jake’s exactly the sort of robust, solid worker you want.
6. Automated translations for international recruitment
If you recruit internationally, you likely spend hours localising your process into other languages.
And unless you have native-speaking recruiters for every geography, either recruiters or candidates are forced to interview in a language they’re less comfortable with. That creates space for misjudgements which impact the candidate experience and quality-of-hire.
If that’s you, look for recruitment technology that automates localisation so candidates interact with you (every screen; every email; every button) in their language, without you hiring translators or manually translating.
And if you video interview, look for software (*cough*, Tribepad Video Interviewing) that automatically translates candidates’ answers using AI-enabled speed-to-text transcription.
Automation ensures international recruitment mirrors the same great candidate experience and delivers the same quality-of-hire as local recruitment, without delays.
7. Candidate-led interview scheduling
One of the most time-consuming parts of recruitment is interview scheduling, especially if you recruit at high-volume. Scheduling back-and-forth is a terrible use of recruiters’ time.
Automation-rich recruitment technology should include automatic scheduling functionality instead. So recruiters and hiring managers can pre-set their availability and candidates self-book as suits.
