Recruiting Automation: What You Need To Know To Save Time and Hire Smarter (+Software)

What is Recruiting Automation?

Recruiting automation is like having a super-efficient assistant who never sleeps, rarely makes mistakes, and handles all the repetitive tasks you wish you didn’t have to deal with. Because your team should focus on what matters more: finding and engaging top talent, the tedious recruiting and hiring tasks like resume screening, interview scheduling, and follow-ups can be taken care of automatically.

At its core, recruiting automation involves using tools to streamline workflows, expedite the process, and make it less manual. Instead of sifting through hundreds of resumes manually, the system does it for you, highlighting the best candidates based on your criteria. Or it can handle the back-and-forth of scheduling interviews, send out timely updates to candidates, and even manage follow-up communications. 

All these tasks that usually take hours can be done in seconds, giving your team more time to strategize and connect with the right people.

Automation in recruitment is not something new. But it needs more attention with the explosion of AI and machine learning technology just in recent years.

“So, there's one approach towards full automation, like building full platforms from scratch that take an entire workflow and automate it. That existed before AI. AI has unlocked a lot of technology to scale that up, and there's a lot of companies building in that space.” - David Paffenholz, founder & CEO of Juicebox (PeopleGPT)

Benefits of Recruiting Automation

An automated recruitment process offers numerous benefits, from the immediate relief of no longer dealing with dull, low-value-but-important tasks that drain the joy at work to bigger advantages like faster time to hire, higher quality, and better candidate experience. 

Here are some key reasons why recruiting automation matters:

1. Time-Saving Efficiency

One of the biggest perks of recruiting automation is how much time it saves for you and your recruitment team. 

For example, the average recruiter spends 23 hours screening resumes for a single hire. Because you apply a set of criteria to filter them out, it can be done faster and smarter. 

Scheduling interviews, updating candidates, and collecting their information also take a lot of time back and forth while only being in between tasks to process the next step.

Automated systems can follow your rules and take over these routine tasks more quickly and accurately. 

And with the heavy lifting of administrative tasks taken care of, your team can focus on strategic initiatives. This includes improving employer branding, building talent pipelines, and creating more proactive recruitment strategies. 

2. Faster Time-to-Hire

Recruiting automation speeds up every stage of the hiring process, from posting job ads to sending out offer letters.

In today’s fast-paced job market, speed is of the essence. Cutting down on downtime, having the next steps scheduled, and moving candidates through the pipeline quickly means faster hires and a lower chance of losing top talents to someone else.

3. Improved Candidate Experience

A smooth and timely hiring process leaves a great impression on candidates. Recruiting automation ensures that candidates receive timely updates and personalized communications. 

With recruiting software, you can easily prepare follow-up messages in advance and trigger an automated sequence for candidates in different stages. They won’t be left wondering about their application status or feel neglected. 

This keeps them engaged and positive about your company, even if they don’t get the job.

4. Enhanced Decision-Making with Data

Recruiting automation tools come packed with analytics features that provide valuable insights into your hiring process. 

You can track what’s working and what’s not, optimize your sourcing strategies, and make more informed decisions. 

Instead of relying on gut feeling, you’re backed by data that shows you the bigger picture.

5. Consistency in Hiring

Automation ensures that every candidate is assessed using the same criteria at scale, hence, reducing unconscious bias or overlooking mistakes when you’re trying to scan resumes in just seven to nine seconds each. 

The same goes for AI-enabled recruiting automation at screening interviews or assessments.

When everyone is evaluated on an equal footing, you can trust that the best candidates rise to the top and expect a fairer, more consistent hiring process.

6. Scalability

As your company grows, your hiring needs will expand. Recruiting automation scales with you, efficiently handling increased volumes of applications and maintaining a consistent hiring process. 

Whether you’re hiring ten people or a hundred, automation ensures you can manage the load without compromising on quality.

7. Compliance and Documentation

And let’s not forget compliance practices in hiring. Recruiting automation enhances compliance by ensuring consistent application of hiring policies, maintaining detailed records, and streamlining background checks. 

Automated record-keeping at every step aids in audits and legal adherence and also makes it easier for collaborative hiring.

Recruiting Automation Software and Tools

Applicant Tracking System

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are essential for modern recruitment. They streamline the entire hiring process from job posting to onboarding and automate many of them, making it easier for recruiters to manage large volumes of applications efficiently and for managers to review. 

If you want to get started on recruiting automation, the first place to look is at your current applicant tracking system. Do you have one? If so, is your current system capable of integrating the latest AI and automation technologies?

Modern ATS software will come with helpful features to speed up your recruiting workflows, for example, by: 

• Automatically distributing job openings to multiple job boards and social media platforms.
• Leveraging machine learning and even natural language processing (NLP) to screen resumes based on predefined criteria, ranking candidates by their suitability for the role.
• Tracking candidate progress through the hiring pipeline, notifying those involved, and pushing toward the next steps once the previous tasks are marked complete. 
• Coordinating interview scheduling and sending automated reminders to candidates and hiring managers.
• Generating reports and analytics in real-time to measure recruitment metrics and identify areas for improvement.

Popular ATS tools like Workable, Greenhouse, and Lever offer robust features, including customizable workflows, analytics, and integration with HRIS software and other HR tools. 

By centralizing candidate data, ATS helps recruiters maintain a clear overview of the hiring pipeline, moving them quickly through stages and ensuring no candidate slips through the cracks.

Check out our curated list of the Best ATS Software in 2024

Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)

Recruitment isn't just about managing active applicants but also building and maintaining a rich talent pipeline, which is far more effective with a recruitment CRM. 

These specialized recruitment tools are designed to streamline and automate candidate engagement processes, keeping the connection with potential talents warm and encouraging them to apply for relevant roles when they open. 

Additionally, they facilitate various recruitment marketing activities to enrich the talent pool, ensure a steady flow of qualified candidates, and centralize candidate data from different sources (internal search, ATS, LinkedIn, social networks, etc.). 

Take a look at their helpful recruiting automation abilities:

• Automated outreach and engagement through multi-stage email sequences for both active and passive candidates.
• Auto-suggest matching candidates from the pool whose profiles match the job requirements when a new role opens. In a conventional way, recruiters have to manually review each profile, compare it to the job requirements, and assess the fit to have such a shortlist.
• Centralize candidate data from various sources and score their engagement metrics.
• Handle the logistic and admin tasks of referral programs, such as notifying employees, updating referral results, and implementing reward incentives.
• Manage recruitment marketing activities (like job fairs) and sync candidate information with your database.

Some great choices of recruitment CRM with rich recruiting automation features, based on my analysis, include Gem (for centralized candidate engagement and automated outreach sequences), Phenom (for rediscovering passive candidates and boosting internal mobility), and Beamery (for skill- and competency-based internal and external sourcing).

More options? Check out my guide on 23 Best Recruitment CRM in 2024

AI Recruiting Automation Tools

AI recruiting software leverages machine learning, LNP, and generative AI to enhance and automate various aspects of the recruitment process. 

They can analyze candidate data, predict job fit, and even conduct initial interview screenings in unconventional formats like chatbot screening, text-based interviews, and asynchronous interviews.

Given the no one-size-fits-all approach for different roles we hire and the many steps involved in recruitment processes, sometimes you might need to incorporate one or more tools to effectively carry out the necessary evaluations. For example, some positions require meticulous background checks, complex job assessments are necessary for technical or developer roles, or your team just needs to improve their outbound recruiting strategy.

Choosing add-ons for your recruiting tech stack wisely can make all the difference, as some innovative providers now proactively incorporate AI powers to unlock automation and efficiency in their offerings, for example:

• Pro.5 AI-powered remote hiring platform can search work through 5,000 data points to find you a best-match candidate among the top 5% remote professionals and onboard them in less than a week.
• Juicebox has PeopleGPT, an AI people search engine that understands who you're looking for, to save recruiters up to 90% sourcing time.
• Sapia.ai offers automated conversational text-based interviews that reduce response time for candidates and save recruiters an average of 1,600 hours monthly, especially to fill frontline roles in retail, contact center, and consumer service fields.
• HireVue helps companies 4x faster time-to-hire with 24/7 hiring assistance, automated scheduling, and on-demand interview features.

For more, check out our recommendations for AI Recruiting Software, Recruiting Tech Stack, and Recruiting Software for Small Businesses.

Recruiting Automation, AI, and Data

It's 2024, and accept it or not, AI is now an integral part of the recruiting landscape. 

Speaking of recruiting automation, AI enhances various aspects of recruiting automation and enables tasks that were previously impossible to automate.

AI-powered and AI-enhanced tools can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and derive insights that human recruiters might miss. As David Paffenholz captures:

“The potential of AI is anywhere there's a lot of data available, be it structured or unstructured data. That's where AI can often have an outsized impact. And recruiting is a great example of that. There are huge amounts of talent data out there. A lot of it is unused. Some of it is structured. A lot of it is unstructured. And large language models provide us with the first real opportunity to use that data effectively.” - David Paffenholz

So, what human recruiters are left to do? As I wrote in the “5 Lessons for Modern Recruiters” article, enhance your supervisory and management skills to work with AI and automation.

You still need to set the conditions and prompts, monitor the results, make decisions that align with your company's cultures and nuances, and add the truly “human” touch to the process.

“You're trying to be creative in how you go about that. Convince the right candidate to join by selling to the candidate and bringing them into that process. And I think that's where I struggled to see AI taking on that human bit, and even if AI becomes three steps better, then it's human interaction, and unless something really drastically changes, I think the thing that gets humans most excited or that gets them to buy into something is hearing from them, hearing their story, understanding why they want to join, and being able to act on that.”

10 Ways to Apply Recruiting Automation Through Your Hiring Process

Take a look at your current hiring routine. Are there tasks that eat up a lot of your valuable time but do not bring you to the desired outcomes? 

If they’re among these cases, consider automating them and spending that time evaluating relevant recruitment metrics and brainstorming improvement solutions:

1. Job Distribution

Are you still copying content and opening each channel to paste the job postings? If so, it’s a significant warning sign. 

One-click job distribution is a basic feature in recruiting platforms. And many ATS/CRM offer access across popular job boards, niche job boards, social media, and search engines. 

2. Resume Screening

Screening resumes manually is a tedious process, especially when dealing with a high volume of applicants. It involves reading through each resume to identify relevant qualifications and experience.

Let tools like Skillate or resume screening features in ATS software scan through resumes following your predefined requirements and give you a shortlist of qualified candidates. This will save you hours and lots of energy from manual screening.

3. Finding Matching Candidates Within the Database

It’s great to have a ready list of potential candidates, but you still need to review their qualifications and interests for different opening roles.

That’s why managing your talent pool with a cutting-edge recruitment CRM is important. Having a system that reads new adding profiles, stores candidate data, and automatically suggests potential candidates that fit the opportunity will ultimately contribute to lower time-to-fill results.

This also applies to the internal talent marketplace, or called “The Inside Gig” by WSJ Best-Selling Author Edie Goldberg, where you leverage existing team members for newly formed positions or ad hoc projects. 

4. Setting Up the Next Recruiting Steps

When a candidate passes the resume round, the next steps typically involve scheduling initial screening questions, assessments, and subsequent interview rounds. Coordinating these steps involves checking results, sending booking links, and sending reminders, which can be a lot of administrative work and may result in delays if not managed efficiently.

Instead of handling these steps manually, set up conditions on your recruiting software and let the tools do the work for you. An automated workflow looks like this: Once you mark the candidate for the next step, the system sends an email with a booking link or guidance for the next action. If the candidate or hiring manager hasn’t responded, the system automatically sends reminders. Each step is updated to you via notifications or Slack message integration, ensuring you stay in control and informed at every stage.

5. Conducting Initial Interviews

Conducting initial interviews can be repetitive and time-consuming, especially when interviewing a large number of candidates.

Try conversation text-based or pre-recorded video interviews instead for initial candidate screening. Companies like Starbucks, Unilever, FedEx, and Amazon also apply this method. 

Candidates can answer your questions at their convenience, and you can review their responses when it suits you with AI-assisted highlights, saving time and maintaining consistency.

6. Updating Candidates and Answering FAQs

Automated follow-up emails can keep candidates informed and engaged throughout the hiring process. 

Whether it's acknowledging receipt of an application, answering their questions, providing status updates, or sending interview reminders, automation ensures consistent and timely communication with candidates. This is to enhance your candidate experience and also to minimize the drop-out rates.

AI-powered chatbots can interact with candidates 24/7 on your website or career page, answering common questions, providing information about job openings, and guiding candidates through the application process. And it’s available with tools like Paradox, Phenom, Sense, Beamery, or Zoho Recruit.

7. Managing Referral Programs

It’s wise to leverage employees' networks to connect with potential candidates. But running effective referral programs requires promoting them among your team, collecting referrals, tracking referral status, and also sending rewards for successful hires.

Tools like Lever or Workable excel at managing employee referral programs, allowing you to automate the process and reduce the logistic workload when running such campaigns. 

8. Sourcing Passive Candidates

Reaching out to passive candidates is a best practice for many companies and is typically managed by the talent acquisition team.

“In any role where we feel like we haven't gotten the best inbound applicant pool or we're looking for something really specific, we have to go out and find the right candidate.” - shared David Paffenholz

How is your team doing that? Do they have to spend hours manually searching profiles on LinkedIn and/or juggling different resources to understand prospects' qualifications?

No doubt, it’s a very challenging task and can take a lot of time and effort before you find the right fit:

“By nature, it's an iterative cycle, so you might go through that cycle multiple times, depending on how many changes need to be made and whether the search is going in the right direction or if there's even the type of talent available that the hiring manager has in mind. And that last piece is actually a really interesting one, because that can often change the entire journey, even when you're quite far into it.” - David Paffenholz

The AI-assisted search feature on LinkedIn can help you search faster and more efficiently. Otherwise, automated candidate-sourcing tools like PeopleGPT can scour social media platforms, professional networks, and online databases to identify potential candidates.

These tools use AI algorithms to match candidates' profiles with job requirements, enabling TAs to find and engage passive candidates who may not have applied directly.

9. Sending Job Alerts

Job alerts keep candidates informed about new opportunities that match their skills and preferences, increasing their chances of finding the right job and your chances to fill roles quickly.

Job seekers usually sign up for email, SMS, or push notifications from job boards to receive updates on new opportunities.

If you frequently hire, consider enriching your own talent pool and taking a proactive approach to job alerts. Company job newsletters or, even better, personalized messages from the companies that job seekers have already shown interest in are likely to yield better results.

10. Onboarding New Hires

Automated onboarding tools can manage the entire onboarding process, from sending welcome emails and collecting necessary documents to assigning training modules and tracking completion. This ensures a smooth transition for new hires and helps them get up to speed quickly.

Onboarding is important, especially in remote work settings, as Employee Engagement expert Christie Hoffman said:  

"If your onboarding is terrible, your employees start in a disengagement hole because they bonded over your bad onboarding. And now you're trying to pull them out of that and demand performance. People will feel they made a terrible decision by joining this company." - Christie Hoffman

This means, besides handling contracts and admin works to integrate new hires into your team, you also need to ensure they know what to do during their first days.

With recruiting automation tools, you can automatically collect employee information through dedicated portals, give them tailored instructions, guide them through necessary training modules, and schedule onboarding sessions. 

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, recruiting automation means faster, more efficient, and more effective hiring processes. 

By leveraging advanced technologies like AI and specialized software, you and your team can save a lot of time and energy, letting you focus on building relationships and making strategic decisions while the machine handles the heavy lifting. 

This not only improves the quality of hires but also enhances the overall candidate experience. 

As the job market continues to evolve, adopting recruiting automation is crucial for staying competitive and attracting top talent.