​The Role Of Automation: Unlocking employee potential, operational resiliency & long-term business success

Increasingly, automation, hyper-automation, and RPA are becoming vital components of organizations looking to realize long-term scalable and measurable success, especially within the recruitment industry.

According to a 2019 McKinsey study titled, “Driving impact at scale from automation and AI,” 57 percent of respondents stated their organizations are already piloting automated business processes. Another 18 percent indicated that they have not rolled out automation but plan to in the next year.

What is the significance of this data? As more and more organizations move to include automation and hyper-automation into their business processes, those that don’t will struggle to outperform their competitors. Global business leaders – particularly those with minimal internal recruitment resources or with high-volume hiring goals – should heavily consider adopting recruitment automation technologies.

What is recruitment automation?

Simply put, recruitment automation enables recruitment teams to streamline steps and workflows within the hiring process – from leveraging AI to match quality candidates with open roles, scheduling interviews, and collecting feedback to identifying bottlenecks in the recruitment process, implementing a multichannel recruitment marketing strategy, and much more.

In lieu of automation, teams must manually manage all steps within the recruitment process, which are time-consuming, repetitive, prone to errors, and limiting. It’s estimated that manually scheduling a single interview can take as much as two hours to coordinate. In a world where highly sought-after candidates are off the market within ten days, time is precious.

What are the benefits of recruitment automation?

When we examine the fundamental benefits of automation in general, often what we consider are the following:

• Cost Reduction

• Productivity

• Reliability

• Performance

Let us explore how the benefits above apply to recruitment automation technologies.

Cost Reduction:

When we consider how recruitment automation helps organizations save money, we’re discussing a reduction in cost-per-hire. Many expenses can be factored into overall hiring costs, such as job boards and sourcing tools, recruitment technologies, and labor. Sourcing candidates, as cited in a 2020 study conducted by Bullhorn, is considered the most challenging component of the recruitment lifecycle. Yet, only 39 percent surveyed currently automate any aspect of this lifecycle stage. Sourcing can also be one of the most expensive and time-consuming steps. Leveraging automation at the sourcing stage can include strategies such as:

• Using AI to match candidates to open roles

• Deploying robotic process automation (RPA) to screen candidates

• Reviewing resumes

Productivity:

According to a 2019 Deloitte report – surveying 523 global executives – business leaders expect automation to increase their workforce capacity by 27 percent. This is roughly equivalent to 2.4 million extra full-time employees. Automation in the recruitment process allows teams to do more with less. This is particularly useful for high-volume recruitment, such as what we see in the healthcare market.

The reality is that there are a vast number of administratively-heavy tasks in the hiring process that can be automated (or partially automated): scheduling interviews, personalizing communications, reaching out to passive candidates, collecting feedback, getting referrals, and much more. Minimizing these admin activities allows staff to re-focus their attention on building and nurturing relationships and long-lasting positive experiences rather than solely executing a series of tasks.

After the deployment of GQR’s AI-powered recruitment automation platform, one recruiter stated, “it helped open up a talent pool in our database that I didn’t know existed for a very niche role.” Using automation to revamp how people work can have a real impact on minimizing burnout, boosting retention, and overall workplace motivation.

Reliability:

Let’s face it – people are flawed. While this may play out dynamically through creative mediums, human error can be highly problematic in an increasingly digital world. Once again, this is where recruitment automation can be the real hero in the hiring process. With less reliance on manual inputs, organizations can experience more digital agility and create space to scale.

Performance:

The inclusion of automation in the recruitment process comes with enhanced data and analytics – optimizing many obvious steps in the hiring process such as quality-of-hire, time-to-fill, and cost-of-hire. Automation can also identify a wealth of new talent metrics such as real-time compensation data, employee engagement and motivation, and talent trends in supply and demand. Another emerging benefit of recruitment automation technologies that leverage AI and machine learning is eliminating hiring bias from the recruitment process.

In a world where people are an organization’s more precious asset, using recruitment automation to identify, hire, and retain staff is critical to building lasting experiences and long-term business success.