Automation has been leveraged in many industries, and HR is no exception. It helps companies to automate recruiting tasks and workflows, increase recruiter productivity, accelerate time-to-hire, reduce cost-per-hire and improve the experience for the candidates. Just like with automation in many other fields, recruitment automation has become more popular in the past years, earning nothing but great feedback from companies. HRs all over the world wish to delegate their manual tasks to technology and focus on what’s really important in their profession: the human aspect of working with employees.
Already in 2018, 67% of recruiters surveyed by LinkedIn said AI was saving them time. Early adopters of AI-powered recruiting software reported that their cost-per-hire decreased by 75% and turnover reduced by 35%. AI also helps deliver a positive candidate experience, which has become the expected norm for the majority of candidates, according to the 2020 Job Seeker Nation Survey. There are also not-so-obvious benefits to automated recruiting. The process increases the company’s competitive edge in hiring. According to the 2021 AWS Global digital skills study, 93% of organizations and workers face barriers to accessing the digital skills they need to remain competitive. A company that uses recruiting automation will have a reputation as a digitally-savvy company. More importantly, recruiting automation means minimizing hiring bias through anonymization, which will open the opportunity for far more people and make the company more diverse.
Yet, as you might know, recruiting automation isn’t widely adopted. So will recruitment be partly or fully automated in the near future? What if HR specialists will be entirely removed from the hiring process? The answers to these questions will be discussed in this article. Keep reading to find out.
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Will Recruitment Be Automated?
The advances in technology mean that any repetitive process that requires coordination, accuracy, and speed can be automated. When it comes to the recruitment process, there are many manual and tedious tasks that would benefit from being automated. Some of them are:
- Writing new job descriptions and updating the old ones;
- Building engagement across job-related platforms, for instance, Linkedin, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.
- Researching candidates and reading applications;
- Emailing back and forth to schedule interview times with candidates;
- Conducting skill tests;
- Manually updating spreadsheets.
Although recruiting automation is still relatively new, the current technology has helped recruiters automate many time-consuming tasks. For example, many recruiting automation solutions in the medical market with attribute-based filtering can narrow the search with distinctions. As a result, these tools can shortlist and suggest the best-suited candidates who have the right clinical and healthcare industry expertise. Recruitment automation tools can also:
- Conduct pre-employment assessments
- Track applicants via applicant tracking systems (ATS)
- Automated interview scheduling
- Source candidates
- Nurture candidates by sending regular check-ins and reminders
Recruiters using recruiting automation tools found them to be most helpful with sourcing candidates (58%), screening candidates (56%) and nurturing candidates (55%).
Will Human Resources Will be Entirely Removed from the Hiring Process?
As mentioned early, recruiting automation helps to establish automatic workflows. The benefits of automating the recruitment process include:
- Increasing a company’s competitive edge in hiring;
- Speeding up time to fill available roles;
- Quickly scaling a company’s workforce;
- Reducing hiring costs;
- Reallocating resources;
- Minimizing hiring bias through anonymization;
- Boosting efficiency.
Although technology proves its place in the hiring process, it only complements human efforts and essentially works to decrease their workload. Technology only supports recruiters in automating compulsory but low-value tasks as described in the previous section. These tasks are boring and most recruiters don’t enjoy performing them.
Recruiters, of course, can not be entirely replaced in the hiring process. With the automation-forward approach, they will have more time and energy on what technology cannot do: interviewing candidates and making informed hiring decisions.
Final Words
In a people-centric industry like HR recruitment, the working process is deeply rooted in effective human interaction with machine. It is hard to imagine it happening without the control of humans. Recruiting automation does not aim to eliminate the human element. Otherwise, it strives to reshape and streamline the entire recruitment process.
At present, automation has been applied for simple tasks such as automated sourcing, background checks, candidate tracking and pre-screening, candidate nurturing, interview scheduling, etc.
It is expected that the future technology can not only select suitable candidates based on qualifications and work history they’ve listed on the Internet. But it also has the ability to judge candidate skills and predict success rates based on that information.
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