The adoption of automation is booming across all industries. The increasing use of automation combined with AI is transforming core company processes, with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the shift to digital. The rise of recruitment automation has hugely impacted the sector, and it's now becoming intrinsic to successful hiring, with increasing job vacancies and decreasing pools of candidates making the hiring landscape more competitive than ever.
Automation is proving to be the solution for time-strapped recruiters and HR teams looking to win top talent as quickly as possible, and looks set to continue into 2022. According to a LinkedIn survey on talent trends, 35% of talent professionals and hiring managers say that automation is the top trend impacting how they hire. Applicant Tracking Systems and Recruitment CRMs are becoming commonplace, helping hiring teams find the right candidates at a much faster rate, fill job roles quicker and improve company brand image. Recruiters are increasingly looking for ways to save time on manual work, leaving more time for valuable tasks like relationship-building.
Which recruitment processes are being automated?
Recruiters and hiring managers are often swamped by the sheer volume of candidate data and administrative tasks they have to deal with. Digital tools, software, and automated technology can now replace the steps of the recruitment process that hold no value to complete manually. Tasks including building and storing candidate files, emailing candidates, scheduling interviews, producing and uploading job ads, and reviewing CVs are managed seamlessly with automation.
Recruiters can gather candidate information, maintain and build talent pools, track candidates, and evaluate the overall recruitment process with automation. With the availability of data reports and analytics tracking, data-influenced decisions improve the quality of hires and speed up hiring decisions.
Automation isn't just a boon for recruiters. Automation also significantly speeds up the application process for candidates – which improves their hiring experience.
How will automation change recruiting in 2022?
With technology constantly advancing and proving to hold multiple benefits for the recruitment sector, the adoption of automation will only continue to accelerate. Here are four key areas that automation will change in the recruitment sector in 2022:
- Assessment of Candidates
Assessing candidates based on their applications and CVs can be insufficient, especially for highly skilled or senior-level positions. We'll see automated skill assessment tools rise in popularity throughout the year, which will enhance the assessment process. Automated skill-testing allows recruiters to evaluate and understand potential candidates more objectively and they can see their skills in action. As a result, it saves valuable time and resources while providing recruiters with more accurate and unbiased results than simply assessing a resume themselves. The best part is that recruiters have no manual work to go through – instead, the assessment tool prepares results automatically, and you can create preset questionnaires according to your requirements. - Automated interview scheduling
According to a recent poll by Yello, 41% of recruiters still schedule interviews over the phone. With rising job vacancies and decreased talent pools, recruiters will be looking for ways to boost efficiency in 2022, and automated interview scheduling is a top priority. By automating the interview scheduling process, recruiters can provide candidates with available time slots, allowing them to schedule interviews for their preferred time and instantly update the recruiter and candidate's calendars. This means no more time-wasting back-and-forth phone calls or emails trying to find a suitable time for everyone.
Recruiters can also automate confirmations and follow-up communication to ensure consistent communication with the candidate using minimal effort, keeping the candidate and recruiter happy. Automating these steps helps speed up the hiring process, retaining top talent and resulting in higher quality hires. Recruiters will increasingly look to automated scheduling to reduce admin tasks that provide little value so they can stay competitive. - Automated Sourcing
Sourcing and identifying top talent is probably one of the most time-consuming tasks for any recruiter. Making a poor hire costs time and money, so it's crucial to get this step right; according to the US Department of Labor's estimation, the average cost of a bad hire is around 30% of the employee's first-year earnings.
Automated sourcing has already changed the recruitment game and looks set to dominate in 2022. There are several methods for reaching candidates with automated tools used for sourcing; social media tools, candidate rediscovery software, sourcing chatbots, and even AI-powered candidate screenings are all ways to automate the sourcing process. According to Forbes, recruiters spend nearly a third of their workweek (about 13 hours) sourcing candidates for a single role – fortunately, automation offers efficient ways to modernize and streamline recruiting efforts. - Elimination of Unconscious Bias
Diversity and inclusion have consistently been hot topics for hiring businesses in recent years, regardless of industry. The way we assess and interview can be affected by unconscious bias, whether towards gender, age, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality. This results in reduced quality of hire, innovation, and creativity in the workforce. Many businesses have struggled to create a hiring process that is fair and without bias, and are realising automation could hold the key to support a fair and inclusive recruitment process in 2022. According to a recent report from HubSpot, 61% of talent acquisition professionals believe recruiting automation can help reduce unconscious bias. Tools such as resume parsers and text analyzers, and those that help form objective decision-making based on skills and traits, can help recruiters build diverse teams.
Key Takeaways
The recruiting and staffing industry is constantly evolving. Automation will continue to transform the recruitment field in 2022, and will soon dominate the administrative time-consuming processes that provide little value to both the recruiter and the candidate to be done manually.
It’s clear that adopting automation is crucial for recruiters to stay relevant to the modern candidate; a recent report from SurveyMonkey and Microsoft stated that 93% of the 1000+ millennial workers surveyed said that a business having up-to-date technology is an important factor when choosing a workplace. Recruiters need to prioritize automation to attract the best talent in today's world and speed up time-to-hire, leaving them with more time to build and nurture candidate relationships.
2022 will undoubtedly be the year that transforms hiring processes with automation and changes the recruitment game.
Eli is a Recruitment Specialist at Recruit CRM. She has worked in the technology sector for the past seven years, and has been within the recruitment technology space specifically for five of those years.