HR managers who do not fully automate say they lose an average of 14 hours a week manually completing tasks that could be automated; more than a quarter waste 20 hours or more; and 1 in 10 spend 30 hours or more, according to a 2017 survey from CareerBuilder.
Here are just a few crucial activities you’re probably missing out on if you aren’t automating your recruitment process today.
You could be aligning expectations with hiring managers. While critically important for setting the right expectations, intake meetings oftentimes lack real-time candidate pool and labor market data – and this can lead to unrealistic expectations and lengthy searches.
As part of CareerBuilder’s Talent Discovery platform, a first-to-market intake tool can guide you through an intake meeting with a hiring manager to ensure you are capturing the right information and building a strong partnership from the beginning. The intake tool also provides the number of potential candidates available in a given market and offers insights on salary expectations or market cost of the position you’re hiring for.
You could be providing a better candidate experience. Your job is hard — but so is the candidate’s. Nearly 3 in 4 say that the job search process is one of the most stressful things in life. That’s why it’s crucial to understand how to improve your candidate experience — and technology can help you get there.
The No. 1 frustration during the overall job search is the lack of response from employers, cited by 52 percent of all job seekers in CareerBuilder’s 2017 Candidate Experience Study. Do you communicate regularly with job seekers to let them know where they’re at in the process? More than 4 in 5 job seekers say employers continuously communicating status updates to them would greatly improve the overall experience. Technology can help you automate such communications so that candidates don’t feel like their applications are trapped in a black hole.
In addition, smart technology — such as artificial intelligence and machine learning — can help reduce time spent on lower-value tasks so you can devote more time to speaking with prospective employees and building relationships.
You could be planning for the future. Leveraging automation can free up time so employers can focus on the more strategic aspects of their jobs.
“We always say, ‘I wish I had more time to plan, to think, to keep up on new trends, to strategize.’ To have 14 hours back in a week, the majority of that would be well spent planning for the future instead of reacting to the present,” says Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder’s chief human resources officer. “Time would also be spent connecting with the business, with employees. That may mean catchups with company leaders, educating yourself on the company's products [and] services, learning the industry, and networking outside the walls of your office.”
You could be finding candidates you never would have on your own. One of the powerful capabilities of modern HR technology is semantic search, which helps broaden the results of relevant talent regardless of recruiter knowledge on the position. Relevant synonyms are applied to each keyword with the ability for users to add in or remove related terms.
Recruiters can widen the scope of their search by leveraging semantic search to find talent they would not have found from traditional keyword searches.
John Turner, HR tech analyst at Trilogy Health Services, explained how semantic search technology has helped recruiters expand their searches: “For example, in Ohio, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) is known as a ‘state-tested nursing assistant;’ our recruiters in Ohio would typically search using the term ‘state-tested nursing assistant,’ which would only bring in those results. With semantic search, if someone in Ohio calls themselves a CNA or a nurse assistant, it would bring in those alternatives as well, making our search as comprehensive as possible.”
