Recruiting with Software Robots: How to Streamline Recruitment through Intelligent Automation
The hiring process, crucial for any business, involves many repetitive, dull tasks. These are necessary to obtain the information about applicants’ engagement and previous work experience. All of these are needed in order to make a well-informed decision.
When performed manually, the tasks are not only laborious and hence more prone to error, but also costly, unproductive, and may result in downgrading the compliance level. Therefore, deployment of new emerging technology might be the ace in the hole for managing these structural challenges.
For instance, use of robotic process automation for recruitment to replace human action in the performance of administrative tasks is an opportunity to be considered by companies aiming to progress and thus stay on top of the business game. In fact, recruitment processes are a central component of HR, and a typical use case of RPA in HR. In what follows, we will emphasize how intelligent automation specifically may facilitate recruitment.
In short, RPA streamlines recruitment by increasing work duration and accuracy, hence the reliability and productivity of the decision making process. It is a significant means to regulate expenditure on talent acquisition, thus leading to an improvement of the company’s saving potentials and overall profitability. These aspects provide the rationale for the claim that recruitment automation represents a strategic direction for the future of the industry.
Such a claim is consistent with the findings reported in a recent paper by Lecaillon, Halpin and Hennebert (2018), according to which 47% of HR leaders already deploy RPA for recruitment, while 35% of hiring managers expect that by 2020 it will already be perceived as a top measure to advance the industry.
How can recruitment automation help humans be more human at work?
We have argued time and again for the apparently paradoxical idea that automation technology has humanist outcomes in that it makes people really matter. The same idea emerges when using RPA for recruitment.
For one, robotic process automation can collect real-time data on the candidate experience during the hiring process, and then obtain a more fine-grained analysis for different stages of recruitment. Automated emails can be sent to candidates when their status changes, inquiring about their perception of the recruitment procedures. Such data can be very valuable for improving candidates’ experience and thus for making them more motivated to obtain an advertised position.
Moreover, intelligent automation can be used in the form of chatbots that can deliver fitting responses to candidates based on the interpretation of the way they communicate. These are significant upgrades when it comes to talent acquisition by your business. And this is no little thing, given that 79% of Australian employers believe that talent is the number one priority in their organisation.
Secondly, companies can automate sourcing efficiency by proactively sourcing really relevant candidates. The way to go is to send candidates drip automated emails according to their actions, thereby only following up with the most interested candidates. All that recruiters need to do is to set up skilfully constructed email templates, and then allow software robots to take over and deliver relevant updates to those candidates.
Thirdly, automation can provide reliable assistance when it comes to data entry, the kind of activity that everybody dreads yet no business can do without. In order to make appropriate choices, recruiters must accurately track the data of relevant candidates.
Passing on this task to software robots allows them to fully focus on the development of strong relationships with those candidates that are really worth considering. Those can be shortlisted with the help of software robots, which can easily gather all the files and compare the information with the list of job requirements.
The bottom line is that, ultimately, it is humans that make a difference in the process of candidate engagement for talent acquisition. What RPA does is to facilitate the process by providing what may be called an efficient ‘talent pipeline’.
