Many industries have turned to automation to drive efficiency, improve transparency, and facilitate streamlined workflows.
In today’s business world, automation is quickly becoming commonplace. From marketing to customer service, automation is creating organizational transformation, allowing businesses to focus on more important strategic work.
Recruitment is no exception to this transformation. As recruitment consultants in the UAE, New York, London and Hong Kong (to name a few) strive to become more time- and cost-effective, automation can have significant implications in optimizing outcomes and leads to considerable time savings.
If your organization is looking to elicit the power of technology to enhance the recruitment process, then it’s important to look at all the possibilities and implications associated with automating HR processes.
Below, we highlight some key opportunities and limitations of automated recruitment.
Creating a business case for good assessment: The opportunities
There is nothing theoretical about genuinely excellent outcomes as a result of good selection. The ability to critically evaluate and assess a candidate’s aptitude for the position in question can be substantially profitable.
The following best practices highlight how automation can enhance your recruitment processes.
Automating the assessment process
The right candidate can bring about improvements in business performance levels and productivity. Employees well-equipped to succeed in their respective roles create more value for their company.
Similarly, a poor selection can be a costly mistake, resulting in additional costs stemming from wasted salary, severance pay, recruitment and training fees, and hiring time.
When automation is integrated across the selection process, qualified candidates increase, hiring becomes more efficient, and costs and resources become a non-factor.
In addition, when used wisely across assessment methods (structured interviews, work sample tests, mental ability tests, reference checks, etc.), automation can provide valuable (albeit with slight imperfections) insight into a candidate’s ability to perform.
Expediting candidate selection
A central aspect of managing modern recruitment processes is having a careers website. A careers website is a structured tool to attract potential candidates and assess which candidates are fit for an open position.
Merging automation with your careers website affords your business a competitive edge in sourcing the most qualified candidates available in the marketplace. Quality of hire and optimum fit are further refined, positively impacting value creation.
Taking the recruitment process online through a careers website can filter your vast candidate pool to screen for only highly qualified individuals. Automation offers a cost-effective solution to the candidate selection process. Certain recruitment activities benefit directly from automation.
These include:
- Building a talent pool
- Pre-screening tools
- Management of online applications
- Tracking candidate information
- Background screening
Automation expedites the candidate selection process, eliminating non-value, labor-intensive steps, maintaining only the essential pre-screening tools, optimizing the recruitment process and quality of potential hire.
Improve the candidate experience
Automation enables recruitment to source hundreds of applicants for an open position in a single session. This increasing volume of applicants can become a stumbling block for many candidates, particularly for recruiters and HR staff who are limited to financial and employee resources.
Even with such an increase of applicants, it’s important that recruiters and HR staff maintain ongoing communication and relationships with highly qualified candidates. The ability to deliver better customer experience to a short list of candidates is crucial to candidate management.
Losing suitable candidates to the recruitment process due to an inability to sustain effective communication can derail the recruitment process, turning the right candidates away. Automation establishes an effective and streamlined process for candidate communication.
Automation systems can enhance the candidate experience, ensuring top applicants have access to essential information, keeping them appraised of their application status.
Automation technology: Understanding its limitations
On the flip side of all the opportunities automation affords recruiters and HR staff, there are undeniable disadvantages to automated recruitment that must be overcome.
Automated recruitment is not a flawless process and at times, will fail.
- As a large segment of automated recruitment is dependent on critical keywords, candidates without the right keywords may be overlooked, eliminating them from the recruitment process.
This means that highly qualified potential talent could be eliminated before they even reach the assessment step. Automation may discard applicants who are exceedingly capable of increasing business performance and productivity but fail to have the necessary qualifications to be considered a candidate for automation.
When considering how many C-suite executives are college dropouts or do not have a university degree, particularly in industries like tech, this can highlight the fallibilities of automation.
- Further, automation can be manipulated, presenting recruiters with a candidate pool disqualified for the position in question.
- Several developing countries are still experiencing low internet penetration which can further disqualify candidates, limiting a company’s ability to source the most qualified applicants.
Automation’s share of shortcomings can further debilitate the recruitment process, creating issues that make strong candidates lose interest.
Finding the middle ground
Rather than be fully dependent on automation algorithms, despite their current advancements, recruiters will do well to deploy a process that allows automation to work for them while still allowing “humanization” to dictate the outcomes.
Automation technology is far from infallible, but at the same time, can be employed to produce a talent pool that is tailored to the open position’s specific needs and qualifications.
Author-Bio
David Mackenzie
A recruitment professional with over twenty years’ experience in the field and a record of entrepreneurial accomplishment, David is Managing Director and Head of HR at Mackenzie Jones.
In 2003, David set up Mackenzie Jones in the UK, growing the business across two offices in London and Birmingham. In 2005 David established Mackenzie Jones in Dubai to serve the Gulf region and neighboring countries. As the Group MD, David is responsible for the overall direction of the Mackenzie Jones Group including Mackenzie Jones, MumsAtWork, MENA Solutions, Simply Digital and ThinkTech.
