How Can Advancing Technology Improve Your Recruiting Process

Sadly, the current recruitment process at most organizations isn’t always optimal.

This makes sense, of course: speed is often an important factor in recruitment, which is why we have metrics such as time-to-hire or time-to-fill.

When a role is open, that implies increased workload for other members of that team. Managers try to avoid that, so they want a position filled quickly. The problem is that hiring processes focused on speed can be prone to a large amount of human error and miscommunication.

Statistics can vary, but somewhere between 25-33 percent of employees depart within six months of entering a new job.

Clearly, then, the recruitment process isn’t being optimized properly.

But how can we make sure it is?

A Better Recruitment Process Begins with Leveraging Technology

One of the major benefits of recruiting technology is the ability to automate repetitive tasks, such as screening or even initial outreach via a recruitment chatbot.

This type of automation frees up recruiters for more value-added tasks around network-building and candidate engagement.

Consider two of the major challenges of the recruitment process:

• Efficiency (and speed) of process
• Communication with candidates

How Could Recruitment Automation Improve the Speed of the Recruitment Process?

Recruitment automation software can help you speed up screening by using AI to learn the job requirements and automatically shortlist, and rank candidates for you.

By dramatically increasing the efficiency of the screening stage, recruiters can reach out to candidates that much faster, whether you want to move them to the next stage or reject them.

Here, you’re using human recruiters to do the network-building and context-seeking, and you’re using tech talent (AI) to drastically reduce screening time, up to 75 percent in some cases.

Screening is frequently one of the biggest complaints of talent acquisition professionals because of its time-consuming nature.

What About Better Communication with Candidates?

Software Advice’s research found the top complaints candidates have about the recruitment process are:

1. An extremely long application
2. No confirmation email
3. A long hiring process
4. Inability to contact a recruiter
5. No notice when the position is filled

3 of the 5 above are about communication.

From the same research, these were the top requests of job seekers:

1. More communication
2. Notification if passed over
3. Timeline of hiring process
4. Human contact after application
5. Timeliness of replies

4 of those 5 are about communication.

Candidate experience is clearly a huge issue here. You need to nail it if you want to achieve a good relationship with candidates.

Technology can help: whether it’s attaching some type of recruiting automation to your pre-existing ATS, using chatbots, or automating the process enough that humans can easily email back and forth with candidates.

If you just simply look at the above research and then examine your own processes, you’ll probably find some communication gaps.

Fixing those is going to be key to how your employer brand is perceived in the marketplace. Imagine a candidate tell their friends, “This company is so great at following up and just generally staying in the loop.”

To get that kind of praise, you don’t need to task dozens of recruiters with emailing all day. You just need the right tech.

A Final Note on Improving the Recruitment Process

If the rote, time-consuming tasks are automated out, recruiters can spend more time on actual planning.

Typically, recruiters currently spend a lot of time on tasks like scheduling. But that doesn’t need to be the case. With the right tools, a value-add recruitment process can be a reality and not a mirage.

The original version of this article was first published on Ideal.