An antiquated recruitment process can never build teams with quality hires. In order to keep the foundation of your organization strong with a high-impact workforce, it is time to move on from manual recruitment and job posting to social recruiting and recruitment automation.
Hiring processes take an average of 23 days, but it can feel like months of misery when bogged down with mounds of resumes and tedious tasks. Over half of HR managers spend more than three hours a day performing administrative duties, leaving them pressed for time and pressured to make a hiring decision they may later regret.
In the new age of automation, recruiters can take a breath of fresh air. Recruitment automation streamlines each step along the hiring process, empowering recruiters with increased control and tracking capabilities while impressing candidates with timely communication and up-to-date technology. If you're ready to simultaneously lighten the load of paperwork and raise the prospects of finding top talent who will stick around, it's time to consider automation for HR hiring processes.
Here are several ways you can bake automation into your current processes.
New hire requests
If important details are left out of a job posting, candidates and job duties end up misaligned, and top candidates slip through the cracks.
A standardized template in a new hire request app ensures no information is omitted in the job description. Line managers and HR staff collaborate in the workflow, rather than through strings of emails, to consolidate mandatory qualifications, desired skills, and preferred experience for the job. Notifications on laptops or mobile devices drive prompt feedback and approvals to get job advertisements out ASAP.
Sourcing candidates
Providing applicants with an attractive, professional hiring experience from day one keeps candidates on board rather than turning them off with a slow, unappealing process.
Utilizing social media HR tools is imperative to connect with a large pool of highly skilled workers. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 84 percent of companies use social media for recruiting, usually to find passive job candidates. An applicant tracking app can post a job description on multiple sites from one location to simplify publication.
Screening applicants
Manually keeping up with all the applicants in spreadsheets is painstaking, but an applicant tracking system can immediately process applications, rapidly sorting through copious amounts of data thanks to the integration between workflow software and spreadsheet/database apps. Industry-specific qualifiers can also be added to check credential and qualification compatibility.
Automated recruitment apps shortlist candidates via keyword management to weed out those not meeting minimum requirements. Applicant info is updated in real-time, allowing managers to follow the most recent data. App notifications make it possible for line managers to ask questions about applicants and make approvals or rejections instantly.
Interviews
If creating interview appointment slots involves multiple email exchanges between HR and department heads, it's time for a new process. A scheduling module can align the managers' calendars to automatically place candidates in open slots for interview times, setting interviews closer together for a more accurate comparison while eliminating the need for annoying email strings.
Writing and sending the same email for every interview invitation further prolongs the process. But with a simple click, emails can automatically be sent to top candidates with an interview invitation and proposed time, including information such as details regarding building or parking access. After the interviews, the automated workflow can initiate background checks and reference checks to chosen candidates, ensuring no follow-up steps are missed.
Offer letters
When a candidate is selected, the documents continue to rack up. Instead of accumulating paper file folders or manually scanning and saving forms, an automated recruitment workflow can generate and save digitally signed offer letters, contracts, and other hiring documents securely on the cloud. It gets even better—all the turndown letters also can be automatically generated and sent out to the remaining candidates. Out with the antiquated, manual ways, in with the new!
Onboarding
With a consistent, streamlined onboarding process, employees can get right to work and begin feeling like a valuable team member from week one. Welcome emails, technology access, pertinent contact info, orientation programs, and training can all be set up and scheduled through automated workflows. Instead of sitting around waiting for information, new hires get everything they need to jump into their new role.
Both managers and new hires might be nervous about sensitive information landing in the wrong hands on a centralized workflow system, but documents with personal data and passwords can be marked as hidden or read-only for top security.
Evaluate the hiring process
More than three in four employees who walk out the door quit for preventable reasons. Smoothly getting off the ground is imperative to retain talent and grow a flourishing business. Regularly evaluating HR processes like recruitment is essential to keep a company moving forward.
Automated recruitment workflows give HR managers the ability to create reports through an interactive dashboard that display how far most candidates make it in the hiring process, how long the hiring process usually takes, and the ratio of successful to unsuccessful applications.
Enter the age of automation
If your hiring process suffers from manual legwork and email overload, it’s time to consider HR process automation. Utilizing tech solutions not only reduces decision regret (by 75 percent), turnover rates (by 59 percent), and hiring costs but adds intrinsic value to a company by establishing a committed, talented workforce. It's worth just fifteen minutes to try your first recruitment automation app for peace of mind and a top-notch, competitive hiring process.