These days we live in a world of instant gratification. We have the luxury of same-day arrival of online orders, and nearly everything a consumer could want can be gotten with the touch of a button. The reality is that the modern job seeker approaches employment in much the same way they approach consumerism. Candidates research employers, read reviews, and actively seek positions with top-rated companies. Furthermore, they expect to hear back on hiring decisions as soon as possible. Yet 75% of applicants never hear back from employers after applying for a job, and 60% never hear back from employers after an interview.
This lack of response can lead to a negative candidate experience creating a ripple effect as applicants vocalize their dissatisfaction with how they were treated and discourage others from applying. With so many tasks on the plate of the average recruiter, how can you ensure that every candidate receives the level of communication they are expecting? While technology can never take the “human” out of human resources, automation can help you to streamline the recruiting process and ensure better candidate experiences. Let’s take a look at how.
Increased Productivity
The purpose of automation is not to replace recruiters, but to give them the tools they need to work more efficiently and make better hiring decisions at a faster pace. Automation can be used to handle a multitude of the repetitive tasks a recruiter goes through with every candidate from job posting to resume parsing, interview scheduling, and follow-up emails or texts. All of which can help to streamline the flow of moving applicants through the candidate journey.
Applicant Tracking and Interview Scheduling
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) or talent management systems are among the most common forms of recruitment automation technology. An ATSes primary function is to standardize the hiring process across the board and fully automate many of the hiring process steps including job posting, candidate nurturing, interview scheduling, email marketing, and candidate tracking. Each feature of an ATS is designed to improve the hiring process for both recruiters and candidates.
Work4 integrates seamlessly with some of the top ATS systems including iCims, DriverReach, BullHorn, Avatar Fleet, Workday, and TenStreet to name a few.
Sourcing and Selecting Candidates
Modern recruitment technology can be used to improve the workflow of creating job postings from templates quickly and easily allowing vacant positions to be advertised as soon as possible. You can take it a step further by using keywords and other set parameters with natural language and artificial intelligence processing to automatically screen applicants to filter out those who do not meet the criteria. This reduces strain on recruiters who no longer have to spend countless hours manually filtering applications from unsuitable candidates.
Job Advertising and Recruitment Marketing
One area where companies use the biggest portion of their recruiting budget is in the placement of job advertisements. The fact of the matter is, that not all job boards and platforms are created equal. Each space has a specific demographic that it targets and posting a job in the wrong place is a good way to spend money you don’t need to.
Fortunately, high-quality solutions like Work4 can gather data on where the best candidates for your positions are coming from and adjust ad spend in order to take advantage of those arenas.
This type of automation can help to significantly reduce the cost per lead your company pays.
Social Recruiting
The average Facebook user has 338 friends on the platform and an additional 31,000 people in their extended network and 35% of the user’s audience see each post. The stats are similar for Linkedin with the average user having 400 first-degree connections and 9,000 second-degree connections, 100% of which see user content. For Twitter, the average user has 707 followers, and again, 100% of the audience can see user posts. Translation? If just one of your employees or recruiters shares your open job listing on their Facebook page, it could be seen by up to 10,850 people, if each job post was shared to all three platforms it totals out to an average of 20,557 people seeing your open job.
Automating your social recruiting can also improve your employer brand messaging. Using automation tools you can easily push out branded content that’s more appealing than your average job posting. Instead, job postings include content that highlights different employee experiences and paints a picture of the company’s culture. When you partner with Work4, we make it simple to turn your entire workforce into a recruiting force. Our technology helps you remove the common barriers to social job sharing allowing employees and recruiters alike to share your branded job posts with just a few clicks.
Reduced Time to Hire
Each day that an open role is unfilled represents a loss of profitability and productivity for your company. Automation tools can create a smoother overall recruiting system so that your company has fewer candidates fall out of the recruiting funnel. Not only that, but it can speed up certain phases of the hiring process like the ones we’ve covered above. The bottom line is that with streamlined systems in place, you can greatly reduce your overall time to hire. A reduction that benefits the company, improves the candidate experience, and increases the value of your employer’s brand.
Enhanced Candidate Experiences
Automation technology does more than benefit recruiters, it benefits candidates as well! When it comes to attracting and retaining top talent, the recruitment process is an important factor. Candidates who have a negative recruiting experience are more likely to share their experiences with others. Something best avoided when you consider that 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation – even for a pay increase. As you look at your candidate experience, one of the aspects that matters the most is your level of communication with applicants. By automating certain steps, recruiters can streamline the recruiting process, get faster responses and decrease time to hire.
Improved Candidate Nurturing
The modern job seeker is used to living in a world of instant gratification. This expectation extends into their job searching behavior. Furthermore, in a candidate-driven market, the difference between securing top talent and losing them to a competitor often comes down to the speed of communication. The longer it takes to respond to a candidate, the more likely it is that they will fall out of the recruitment funnel and find a position with a competing company. At Work4 our candidate nurturing system can help by ensuring immediate automated follow-up with candidate leads. This simple tool can go a long way to ensuring that a candidate doesn’t lose interest before they’ve even begun.
Better Candidate Management at Scale
Did you know that a staggering 49% of job seekers have turned down a job offer due to a poor candidate experience? The more applicants you receive for an open position, the more difficult it can be to manually manage each interaction and ensure a positive experience.
This is an area where automation excels – making it possible to engage with every single applicant. By implementing AI automation throughout the recruitment process, hiring managers can ensure that all applicants are being nurtured and driven down the pipeline – ending the “application black hole” once and for all.
Simplified Scheduling
You can also use automation to remove yourself from the scheduling matrix by allowing candidates to schedule – and reschedule- themselves without interrupting your team. Implement interview scheduling software to seamlessly provide candidates with available time slots, and allow them to schedule their preferred time slot, based on availability.
Automate Your Recruiting Process with Work4
The 10 ways we have listed are only a handful of ways that a strong automation solution can make sourcing and hiring easier. With Work4 automation, your company can reduce cost per lead, increase time to hire, and allow recruiters to focus on the most important part of their jobs, human connection.
Recruitment can involve many challenging and lengthy activities for recruiters. Customizable recruitment marketing solutions like those offered by Wor4 can help companies take the pain out of the hiring process. Contact us below to see how we can help your organization substitute manual, time-consuming tasks with an automated recruitment process.
