Month: September 2022

In this post, we explore ways that forward-thinking recruiters use automations to drive efficiency in their recruitment workflows. We’ll see how the right applicant tracking system (ATS) can help you hire faster. 

What is recruitment automation?

Recruitment automation is the use of technology to automate specific tasks within the recruitment process. It helps minimize the time to fill open roles, and reduces costs. This delivers a better overall experience for candidates, employers, and recruiters.

Automation covers both external and internal tasks. These can include things like notifications sent at specific stages of the hiring process or emails to candidates. Ultimately, the less time a recruiter spends logging information, the more time they have to spend working with clients and candidates. 

Recruitment automation can also include more strategic tasks, such as email campaigns, which help keep clients and candidates informed and engaged. Examples of time-saving automations include:

• Form letters to candidates 
• Notification prompts to administrators 
• Emails to clients regarding scheduled interviews

PCRecruiter’s own system for recruitment automation is essentially an open box. Wherever a communication is both repeated and repeatable, the opportunities for automations are endless. As recruiters spot more opportunities to refine workflows, there is less need for them to manually create and send correspondence. 

The great thing about automating via the ATS is that recruiters don’t need to spend time jumping between multiple tools. Doing more things from a single hub reduces friction, speeding up the placement and hiring processes.

How to use automation in recruitment 

Think more strategically about your own recruiting workflows. You’ll see almost any recruitment process presents potential for automation. Everything from the initial job posting to interview scheduling to following up post-hire is an opportunity to streamline.

For most recruiters, their bane is technology that interferes with their work or slows them down. That being so, the best approach to implementing automations is to identify opportunities in existing processes. Look for points where automation might help recruiters to be more efficient and productive. By automating repetitive and repeatable tasks, recruiters free-up more time to focus on their core activities.

Here are five ways to use automation in recruitment: 

Applicant Tracking 

Applicant tracking is the backbone of any recruiter’s day-to-day. A whiteboard or spreadsheet solution might cut it in the early days. However, when you start handling multiple placements and hundreds of candidates these tools become inefficient and unwieldy.

No matter how many candidates in your database, or how many employers you’re dealing with, an applicant tracking system (ATS) like PCRecruiter scales with you. Because the software tracks candidates from end to end, you’ll never lose track of potential hires along the way. Candidates you couldn’t place remain ready for next time a suitable role opens up.

PCRecruiter users can modify fields and forms to suit existing workflows — this includes adding custom automations. For example, triggering behaviors when records containing specific information, such as a location or industry, are entered. 

Job Postings

When it comes to job postings, there’s an administrative burden on recruiters to make the information visible. Whether on recruitment websites or your own company’s careers page, it can become complicated to track and manage multiple postings. Automation can help you create once and publish anywhere.

The great thing about PCRecruiter’s integrated job board is that it can be implemented into practically any website. This saves duplication of effort and potential errors that come from managing a website’s job board separately. In addition, leveraging job feeds and integrations helps to advertise the opening on other sites, saving time and effort.

Social Recruiting 

In a world where 70% of the workforce consists of passive talent and 82% of Americans have a social media profile, it makes sense to reach potential candidates via their favorite social hangouts. Recruiters can leverage the potential reach of both personal and professional networks via social recruiting. This is accomplished through a combination of posting links to new job postings, and strategic employer branding.

What if every time you published a new position, your marketing team received a notification with all the relevant details? What if the job could be posted to social networks automatically? This could then be easily incorporated in and around other content promoting your employer brand and its values. PCRecruiter’s built-in automation features as well as integrations with services like Paiger and Zapier make these workflows easy to implement.

Process Sequencing 

Process sequencing plays a vital role in helping support reps respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently. It provides standardized workflows and even scripting. 

The same approach can be applied to recruitment. Sequences provide the recruiter with a clear and standardized series of tasks. These can be customized to suit different roles or industries. This creates the potential to create and apply automations at specific stages of the process. 

PCRecruiter’s own sequencing tool enables recruiters to create their own workflows, with manual or automatic tasks. Tasks can include phone calls, prompts to connect on LinkedIn, or an automatic email confirming review of a resume. More quickly completing tasks and leveraging automating steps means recruiters can make more placements with less effort.

When it comes to onboarding new recruiters (or helping to keep current ones more effective), sequencing simplifies training. Making every step a clear and straightforward task guides users and informs them what the result of each action will be.

For example, after marking a completing a call, a contact is moved to the next step. The prebuilt sequence defines what that step is. For instance, if you have to leave a voicemail, the next step could be an automatic SMS confirming the message. If the call was connected, the next step may be a follow-up email with a form to complete.

Personalized Communication 

In most competitive industries, there’s an increasing customer expectation of regular, relevant, and anticipated communication. People want more personalized and hassle-free experiences, and they expect regular notifications and updates as a matter of course. Just think of all the notifications you received the last time you placed an online order; you’re told when it’s been received, when it’s shipped, that it’s with the carrier, and so on.  

Automations don’t just streamline existing processes. They can also help recruiters to do more than they would have been able to otherwise. Leveraging relevant data makes communication with candidates and clients can more personal. You’ll improve engagement by using their name, roles applied for, and even other roles they might be interested in. This creates a closer relationship, even if the placement is unsuccessful, that can return value in future placement efforts. This kind of personalized communication could take many forms. PCRecruiter can handle a variety of notifications:

• Text messages (SMS) 
• Email notifications
• Pop-up notifications within PCR
• Push notifications (via the mobile app)

Making strategic use of recruitment automations

Any attempt to save time and cost through automation works best when it adds value and efficiency to existing processes. Look to automate aspects of your recruitment process with that in mind.

At the end of the day, most recruiters are people people, not tech people. That’s why it’s important to make workflows as streamlined and intuitive as possible. The software solution needs to fit their way of working and not the other way around.

PCRecruiter’s training team on-boards users by taking time to understand their daily flow. They get to know what your process looks like and how it works. By mapping out the process, they can identify where the software can solve pain points. Recruiting is already a challenging role — why add another layer of unnecessary complexity? 

Once set up, automations in PCRecruiter enable you to do what you would do without it, only much faster. To learn how you can make placements with less administrative hassle, book a free consultation today. 

As we move into the latter part of 2022, what are some of the key hiring recruitment trends for the staffing industry, permanent placement recruiters, and HR professionals?

Working Remotely Is Here To Stay

We live in a world where flexible working – greater freedom in when and where we work – is now an integral part of the employment landscape, particularly in knowledge-based industries. In fact, 80% of people are likely to recommend remote working to a friend. To that end, potential hires expect absolute clarity around remote and hybrid practices within companies. And for recruiters, remote working has advantages on both sides of the hiring process. 

On one hand, candidates now expect remote or hybrid working models as the norm. With proven benefits in terms of employee job satisfaction and morale, the best candidates can demand their ideal working conditions. Many people prefer remote working to cut travel costs, reduce their carbon footprint, and the time they spend commuting. For that reason, putting together a personalized package of flexible working arrangements can help to differentiate your offer – and even become a deal-closer – when the right candidate has multiple offers on the table. 

On the other side of the coin, remote recruitment practices are enabling recruiters to make the right hire faster. From access to a deeper and wider talent pool to streamlining the early stages of the recruitment process, through to things like online interviews or screening, remote hiring offers recruiters a competitive advantage in terms of time-saved and reduced costs. Find more strategies for reducing your time to hire, by reading our blog post on 10 tips to help you hire faster. 

It’s Still A Jobseekers Market

Never mind artificial intelligence (AI) and robots taking human jobs, according to a recent study by Korn Ferry, the biggest threat facing recruiters will actually be a shortage of suitably skilled humans. In fact, it’s predicted that by 2030 there will be a global talent shortage of around 85 million people. The competition for recruiting and retaining top talent is heating up.

With more open positions than candidates, the best talent has the most power in the current job market. As the demand for talent continues to outstrip supply, companies are adopting evermore proactive hiring strategies in an effort to optimize their talent pipelines. Developing an appealing employer brand, deploying proven marketing tactics, and engaging with potential candidates via social media are fast-becoming a necessity in many sectors. 

For instance, being present on the right social media platform for your target audience is a way to build relationships with potential candidates, especially as a growing number of digital natives begin filling up the talent pool. Learn more about social recruiting, and how to implement it, with our blog post on how to use social media in recruiting.

Employer Branding Is A Key Differentiator 

Whether you choose to leverage it or not, the second an employer makes a hire, they have an employer brand. Like a company’s “traditional” brand, it embodies your mission, vision, and core values. For many organizations, an effective employer brand helps them to connect with the right candidates, attract the best talent, and retain that talent once they’re inside the organization. 

As with a company brand, you need consistency across every touchpoint, creating a candidate experience which leads to positive word of mouth, and clearly sets out your value proposition as an employer or recruiter. In addition, the right employer brand and candidate experience will continue to make your company an attractive proposition to potential candidates who didn’t quite make it this time around. The other benefit of employer branding is its impact on retention, with one study indicating that it could lead to a 28% reduction in staff turnover. Take a more in-depth look at employer branding with our blog post on the topic. 

Hard-To-Fill Roles In Tech And Marketing

In part, the talent shortage is due to demographics, with the majority of the boomer generation expected to exit the global workforce by 2030. As work becomes increasingly tech-based, many businesses are facing up to the reality of a deficit of the right talent. According to a study by Korn Ferry, without an influx of skilled, high-tech workers, the US could potentially miss out on $162 billion worth of annual revenues. 

Contrary to what you might think, despite the global reach of digital recruitment channels, from job posting sites and careers pages to social media, filling roles in tech and digital marketing is becoming increasingly challenging. This is largely due to the uptake of digital technologies in the wake of the global pandemic, and the trend for digital transformation – the adoption of new technologies to drive efficiencies. Put simply, technology is moving at such a fast pace, when it comes to front-end developers and software architects, there just isn’t enough expertise to go around.

This shortage of talent is especially true of digital marketing and the expert use of ‘martech’ (marketing technology). Comparing Scott Brinker’s MarTech Map from 2011 and 2022 shows an increase from 150 solutions to over 9,000 in 2022. That’s 6,521% growth in just 11 years. No one can be expert in every digital marketing tool, and this illustrates the challenge facing recruiters looking to hire the finest and most up-to-date marketing minds. Whether they’re looking for a marketing automation specialist or a search engine optimization (SEO) strategist, it can be difficult to find the right talent because the technology is so new. Smart recruiters are even employing SEO techniques to improve the online visibility of their job postings.

Recruitment Trends Round-Up

Whether you’re competing for the best candidate in a shallow talent pool, exploring new channels for networking with potential hires, improving your overall candidate experience, or trying to fill open roles in a highly-specialized market, the right applicant tracking software (ATS) can help. 

PCRecruiter has been helping people hire since 1998. The technology might have changed, but our dedication to providing intuitive and time-saving solutions for sourcing, tracking, and recruiting candidates remains the same. 

Find out how PCRecruiter can help streamline your recruitment efforts, by booking a demo.