Top 10 Tips and Tricks to Get Started With Recruitment Automation

Attracting top talent is seen as the most challenging issue for recruitment teams, as it involves dealing with a huge volume of applicants. 

At the same time, research by XpertHR says that poor applicant quality was among the top recruitment challenges in 2021.  

Both challenges place an enormous load on recruiters who often operate in small teams. 

So rather than using expensive recruitment firms, many startups turn to recruitment automation. 

This doesn't mean that automation software makes recruiters redundant. 

Recruitment software actually compliments recruiters’ efforts, taking care of many repetitive tasks such as researching candidates, updating spreadsheets, emailing back and forth, etc. 

This way, recruiters have more time and energy to do what no machine can – talking to candidates and finding the ideal match.

Here we bring you 10 ways to implement recruitment automation in your process.

What is recruitment automation?

Recruitment automation combines tools and practices that improve traditional recruiting procedures by eliminating manual tasks such as writing and posting job ads, pre-screening, CV sourcing, interviewing, and hiring. 

Recruitment automation is especially helpful for companies that need to scale their teams quickly, but have limited resources. 

It also gives them a formidable competitive edge – your recruiters can start moving the best-qualified candidates through the hiring cycle before more sluggish companies can act.

Speed up pre-pre screening

There’s pre-screening and there’s pre-pre screening, which means culling candidates before they even get into the system. In pre-pre screening, you may include predefined questions at the very start of your applicants’ journey.

These questions trigger automatic rejection if a candidate provides a wrong "yes" or "no" answer. 

For example, “Are you willing to move to London?” or “Do you hold EU citizenship?”

When you automate zero screening, recruiters don’t waste time reviewing each CV to find suitable candidates. On the other hand, job seekers don’t waste their time with a fruitless recruitment process.

Pre-screen with automated ranking

Pre-screening questions bring another layer of recruitment automation in the early stages of the process. Based on your Applicants Tracking System (ATS), you can add questions to your application form and then have answers automatically scored and ranked according to your pre-set criteria.

This allows your recruiters to review the best-scoring applicant first. In return, they reduce time-to-hire and focus on the best talent quicker. 

Finally, it’s much less painstaking for recruiters who don’t have to read an inbox full of CVs to decide who qualifies and who doesn’t.

Automate rejection and shortlisting

Automated recruitment software can be set to automatically reject or shortlist candidates based on their pre-screening questionnaire scores. 

For example, let’s say that 55% of applicants score between 20 and 40 on your pre-screening questionnaire. And then 30% score under 20 and 10% over 40.

Instead of recruiters having to manually reveal that 20% who need rejecting immediately – or that 10% who need interviewing ASAP – you can automate the process: 

1. Your best candidates get an interview immediately
2. You don’t risk losing them to a competitor.
3. Worst-fit applicants get fast results – which is the best they get out of the deal
4. Your recruiters spend their time having positive proactive conversations

The last point is very important for your recruiters’ mental well-being. Trust me, no one enjoys rejecting eager candidates over and over again. Especially if they don’t know what happens if you fail a pre-employment drug test and they’ve failed one.

Automate video interviewing

You’d be hard-pressed to find a recruitment company that relies on phone calls in this day and age. 

Even back in the day, telephone interviews were time-consuming and repetitive. What's more, they often gave only a basic impression of a candidate. 

So what recruitment automation do we have in 2022?

One-way video interviews – automate the process so that your recruiters need to write questions only once. It doesn't matter how many candidates pass the pre-screening. Besides being less effort, one-way video calls allow you to have a more lively picture of candidates.

Better qualified people + more consistent process = recruitment success

Two-way video interviews – speed up the interviewing process. While video call apps have been around for some time, automation recruiting software allows you to conduct panel interviews and share private comments on individual candidates using the chat functionality. 

On top of that, you can share additional info with candidates during the interview including company documents and charts. 

This way you can do the entire job in a single app. No need for additional communication and follow-up emails.

Automate translations for international recruitment

If your company handles international recruiting, your team is likely to spend hours localizing your process into other languages. 

In an ideal scenario, you have native-speaking recruiters for every market. Otherwise, both recruiters and candidates are forced to use a language they may not be comfortable with. 

It’s clear that such a situation creates a lot of room for misjudgments which might impact both the candidate experience and quality of hire. 

Or, you can use recruitment technology that automates localization. This way candidates have every screen, question, email, and button in their language. 

Recruitment tools like Tribepad even automatically translate candidates’ answers using AI-enabled speech-to-text transcription. 

Thanks to automation, your international recruitment can have the same great candidate experience and deliver the same quality of hire as local recruitment.

Communicate with candidates 

If you’re recruiting bit time, your recruiters are probably sending the same messages thousands of times over. These include invitations to interview, reference requests, etc. 

If you automate that communication, you save your recruitment team hours and hours each week. 

Write messages once, or even better, customize those from pre-written templates, depending on your recruitment automation software. After that, you can schedule them for automated sending at the right time, to the right people. 

Add personalized tags, and it feels like one-to-one communication. 

Automating those messages makes communication much faster and more consistent. No piece of information is forgotten, there are no delays, weekends, national holidays, and no accidental miscommunication.

Automate CV sourcing

CV sourcing is a tedious and time-consuming job where recruiters need to browse through endless pages of CVs on external job boards like Indeed or Adzuna.

They make half a dozen phone calls only to discover what? That the best candidates are off the market or in the process with a thousand other recruiting agencies. 

But when your recruiters use recruitment automation, they can source ideal candidates faster.

The best ATS solutions have talent pooling functionality and can analyze your job requirements against your databases. This allows you to flag the best CVs automatically.

Write job adverts​

The copy of your job advert impacts applicant volume, quality, and diversity. But if you recruit with a large dragnet, you can lose control over the ads representing your business. 

Even in the best-case scenario, you may have inconsistencies that undermine your employer’s brand. 

A capable recruitment software automates that process, as well. Your recruiters can build a library of adverts upfront, and your recruitment tech automatically populates them into relevant jobs.  

This way you can invest time and energy to make awesome job adverts upfront and rest assured your online ad presence is under control. 

What is more, your recruiters don’t have to waste their time rummaging through their computers looking for the most recent version of an old ad or rewriting the same ad dozens of times over.

Ease up the hiring process

When you’ve found an ideal candidate, you need to send them a job offer letter.

If they agree to the negotiated compensation and terms, you’re going to send another MS Word document as a contract. Your hire then needs to print it out, sign it, and then scan it, and email it back…

But why would you do any of this?

The whole process takes much more steps than sending an automated digital proposal. 

That’s right, instead of impractical Word or PDF documents, you can use automated proposal software that has all the job details pre-written. 

Better Proposals provides web-based proposal templates that look amazing on any device. It allows recruiters to fully edit the content, including text, colors, images, and even videos.

Sure, that's awesome. But where’s automation in that?

Our digital proposals come with an electronic signature box, so your new hires can agree to the terms and sign by typing or drawing their signature. 

From that moment, the digital proposal becomes a contract that is legally binding just like a paper document. 

No scanning and mailing back – it’s done and done. 

Also, you can enable live chat so if the new hire has any questions, they can reach out and sort out every issue right there and then.  

For convenience, both parties can then save the proposal as a PDF if they wish.

Automate onboarding 

There’s often a delay between the applicant-to-hire and hire-to-employee journey because the steps from recruitment to HR, IT, and hiring managers aren’t codified. 

Recruiters, on the other hand, are busy chasing quotas and naturally switch their attention back to earlier-stage candidates once someone successfully signs a contract. 

Now that’s a problem because 30% of new hires who drop out before day one blame poor follow-up from signing a contract. 

With automated onboarding processes, the applicant-to-employee journey becomes a seamless experience. To be honest, onboarding is not in recruiters’ purview, but a better onboarding experience leads to a better quality of hire and fewer dropouts. Moreover, some recruiters or HR functions can be outsourced, including payroll and other processes. This outsourcing strategy enables efficient management of administrative tasks, freeing up internal resources to concentrate on core business objectives and innovation.

Recruitment automation benefits

• Single-out quality candidates

Instead of wading through LinkedIn shallows looking for acceptable candidates, recruiting automation does the scouring and provides a list of pre/qualified professionals based on the skills and experience that you need. Platforms that support AI/driven attribute/based sourcing allow you to narrow the dragnet for distinctions like “builds diverse teams”, “startup experience”, etc. 

• Cut time to hire

Automating recruiting work can save recruiters hours and hours of work every week. The front end of the hiring process speeds up with auto-scheduled interviews so job openings fill up faster.

• Eliminate paperchase

With ATS, you streamline data collection, recording, storage, and tracking. Most recruitment platforms allow you to integrate apps that share data, information, feedback, and more. 

• Improve cost-efficiency 

For many startups, outsourcing to recruiting agencies may seem like a good idea. But that’s not always the case. On top of not being cheap, third-party firms are rarely intimately familiar with your company culture. Then there’s a question if their recruiters are skilled enough to convert candidates to hires. Automating those functionalities can save you both time and money.

• Data collecting

Automation creates data that enables reporting, analytics, and data insight, which helps you constantly improve business and hiring processes. 

Wrapping up

Recruitment is a people industry and people are here to stay. Still, automating less-creative elements of your recruitment process brings consistency, efficiency, and speed to your recruitment workflow. 

Yet, recruitment has always been a people industry and people are here to stay. 

That’s why your recruitment team needs the best tools they can get. 
Start a trial and you’ll be amazed how quickly you can sign up new talent with Better Proposals job offers.