Your job as a recruit is to evaluate and hire candidates. It is your business to vet, interview and hire the most suited candidate. It is your responsibility to onboard and trains the new employees to ensure that they are ready for their new position.

There is a lot of work that goes into bringing a new employee to your organization. It involves a lot of paperwork, management, and processes that suck off a lot of time and energy from both the employees and the hiring department

Why automation is necessary?

Thanks to technological evolutions, you can now automate a large chunk of these processes. Automation makes it easier for organizations to transform HR departments and all the repetitive process that goes along with it.

There are a lot of processes and activities that can be automated, including searching for top talent, onboarding them, getting the employee’s data into the payroll system handling shifts, granting leaves, etc. Thanks to automation, it becomes easier to assist employees with any information or documents they might need. These include a host of other functional and operational activities that come under the purview of the HR department. Technology allows us to offload some of these mundane tasks and thus free up the HR personnel to focus on other value-added activities.

Recruitment in the ‘paper age’

Recruitment is one of the HR department’s most crucial functions. This is the area that demands a considerable chunk of the HR department’s efforts and time resources.

Initially, employers would post job adverts in newspapers’ classified sections. Once interested applicants found a job that interested them, they would send out neatly done resumes to the respective organizations. Sometimes, they would go deliver them by hand.

Once HR received the application, they would go through several hundreds of applications to find the most suited persons for the interview. While the picture would look simple to you, manually going through all that paperwork is tough.

But thanks to technology, the scene is changing every day. Candidates no longer have to hunch over daily newspapers but are constantly checking notifications about their job applications on their laptops or phones.

Tech-powered recruitment

This is where technology and recruitment meet. Using an applicant tracking system, recruiters can now sift through qualified candidate resumes to discover the most suited candidates for interviews. Thanks to the software, they can also sift through resumes in most of the many networking sites.

Although the internet has made it easy for candidates to find and apply for different tasks, it has also caused another headache for recruiters. The avalanches of applications that come through can be daunting. And that is where technology comes in.

What are some of the specific areas of recruitment where automation helps assist the HR department and make the entire HR process to be easier, faster, and smoother?

● Resume screening

Today, every job posting attracts a sea of applications. If you chose to manually filter through the scores of resumes to find the ideal candidate for your open position will give you a migraine-inducing experience. Sometimes, recruiters might spend over 25 hours screening resumes for a single hire.

Today, most talent acquisition leaders regard resume screening as one of the time-consuming parts of the recruitment process. That is why HR departments are turning to technology – an applicant tracking system – to alleviate the burden.

The good thing is that the data-driven recruiting software and applicant tracking systems can function well, even when they are faced with a barrage of resumes.

The software helps the recruitment team to screen a select few candidates for interviews. But, there are still those industry experts that don’t believe in the software.

While it is touted as an intelligent software solution that empowers the HR team, Lou Adler, CEO of Search ad Training firm, The Adler Group, feels that it is all “about weeding out the weak rather than getting you the best candidate.”

● Pre-qualification

After selecting the interviewees, the next arduous task has to do with keeping an applicant updated through the process of recruitment. Since you are competing for the same top talent as your competitors, you can’t afford to make a bad impression of yourself to your interviewees. According to data from CareerBuilder, about 67% of interviews reported a positive impression of the company that sent them consistent updates.

And, one of the best ways of keeping your candidates updated is through engaging them with important pre-qualification information that pertains to their location, intent, special skills, and compensation.

That way, you would not only understand your candidates better but you will also keep the candidate engaged throughout the recruitment process. Besides, by using an intelligent chatbox you can handle all repetitive questions that candidates are asking. That way, it will become easy for the recruiter to focus on other tasks.

 Interview process

Interviewing your candidates to get the best person for the job requires tact, skill, and intuition among other qualities. These are not some of the qualities interviewers have. Some would need a barrage of handkerchiefs to wipe sticky sweat across their brows. They form incoherent sentences that would make their weaknesses amplified. Although not all interviews are a disaster, plenty of human biases exist.

Thanks to HR automation, conducting interviews becomes easier. Conducting your interviews in collaboration with digitized interview technology will help recruiters assess factors such as speech patterns, word choices, and even facial expressions will help you decide how well the candidate with fits in the role.

Summing it up

Traditionally, the process of recruitment was an arduous task. But, today, thanks to the technological revolution, it is easier for the HR department to compress the recruitment and onboarding processes. That way, you will carve out more time to focus on what’s important for your organization: Growth.