Recruiting automation is unlocking new efficiencies for staffing firms and helping the industry ‘level-up’. But what does it mean? How can it help you today?
We’re answering these questions and more with our latest guide – check it out below.
Time is your most precious resource. But, manual tasks such as sending emails, cleaning up data, and tracking communication touchpoints can spread your resources thin. How can you reduce time-consuming tasks while still growing your business?
Recruiting automation (RA) allows your team to focus on relationships and it helps key stakeholders better understand overall business KPIs by automating key processes throughout your recruitment workflow.
Here’s everything you need to know about evaluating and implementing recruiting automation.
Recruiting automation enables you to streamline repetitive workflows, processes, and communication throughout the entire recruiting cycle to ultimately improve bottom-line and top-line growth.
With recruiting automation, your team can:
Reduce Busywork
Automate repetitive, often-forgotten tasks and ensure the right processes happen at the right time.
Improve Data Accuracy
Identify inaccurate or incomplete records and automate various cleanup processes.
Engage Your Audiences
Create high-touch experiences with candidates, clients and contractors throughout the entire recruiting process.
Recruiting automation can assist your team in two distinct ways: via an automation platform or through products in your tech stack that automate key processes.
Platforms provide core functionality and provide an integration point for other applications. They ‘talk’ with complementary solutions and are foundational to a staffing firm’s technology stack. They also allow flexibility for staffing firms with different priorities or pain points.
Products integrate with platforms to help mutual customers solve their business problems. Products have a specialized focus that can limit their scopes, such as VMS or onboarding automation, but they are valuable stand-alone or connected with a platform.
Automating routine tasks like sending email, writing text messages, updating records, launching surveys, adding notes and tasks saves an average of 3.2 hours per day per employee.
Your entire business will benefit from recruiting automation, but a few key roles within the team will notice measurable gains in productivity.
Recruiters & Salespeople Improved productivity, less busywork, more effective outreach to candidates or clients
Message automation Send a welcome email to new applicants, a text message on a contractor's first day, an interview email reminder, or anything else you can think of. Automate touchpoints throughout the recruiting process.
Process automation Update records, add notes, create tasks, and notify record owners of key changes - all on autopilot. Improve productivity and ensure important tasks don’t slip through the cracks.
Intelligent job matching With the aid of machine learning, match candidates with job openings from your ATS for use in any outbound communication or automation.
Consistent engagement Candidates, clients, contractors, prospects and internal audiences all benefit from consistent engagement at relevant times. No missed opportunities and no forgotten text or emails to new hires.
Operations Enforce best practices at scale across an organization
Intelligent owner assignment Automatically assign records to the applicable recruiters and salespeople so each team can understand who they're working with.
Data cleanup Declutter your ATS by finding outdated records, people with no contact information, or records without activity and speed up searches in your system.
Marketing Better data quality and a consistent brand experience
Branded communications Every email, text and outbound message is on-brand and consistent throughout the entire organization. This leads to a more cohesive experience for candidates and clients.
Webpage tracking Track website activity from candidates or sales contacts and trigger automated actions. When a top candidate views a job, automatically send an email. If a sales lead downloads a whitepaper, set a task to call them right away.
How are staffing firms seeing the benefits of automation right now? The most common use cases for automation are to help businesses increase productivity, improve redeployment rates, and fill jobs faster.
Placements from existing candidates
Automation helps turn your inactive ATS candidates into an engaged talent pool through consistent, relevant communication.
Increase in redeployment rate
Capture more value from vetted, hard-working candidates by automatically engaging throughout the entire assignment.
Improvement in NPS
Keep a finger on the pulse of your business by automating frequent NPS surveys to contractors and clients and uncover issues before they spiral.
Job Adds
Submissions
Placements
We analyzed data from Bullhorn customers using automation and those that did not. The results? Automation helps firms create more competitive distance in job adds, submissions and placements vs. those firms that haven't automated processes and communications.
We have used the automation function in Herefish by Bullhorn to scale processes with candidate, client, and consultant outreach. The ability to build in multiple triggers for an automation allows us to send impactful messages at the right time.
Tim Glennie CEO @ Bridgeview IT
Leveraging automation capabilities, we have been able to improve recruiter productivity while simultaneously elevating our customers’ experience. This is a gamechanger.
Matt Milano President @ Motion Recruitment
Recruiters and salespeople can automate 16,560 email, texts, surveys, field updates, notes and tasks saving a whopping 763 hours per year!
Whether you are an experienced recruiting automation user or are just getting started, here are recruitment-specific automations that you can implement now
Improve data accuracy and create a more actionable talent pool by automating simple data cleanup tasks like copying, clearing, and setting field values.
Less friction and more interaction around interviews lead to faster placements and feedback.
Net Promoter Scores (NPS) help track your reputation and overall satisfaction over time. NPS scores are helpful to assess the overall experience for candidates and clients.
Shorten the time it takes to post candidates to new VMS jobs by automatically matching candidates to new VMS jobs and then automating messaging to those candidates to assess interest.
When a prospective customer or A-player visits certain pages, automation kicks in and alerts the assigned salesperson or recruiter, puts a task for them in Bullhorn, and can add a note to their record.
Gather interest or pre-screen candidates for open roles using automated surveys. For example, when a new role opens, you automatically match candidates and send a survey capturing job-specific criteria like lifting capacity or simple yes/no assessments.
In today’s fast-paced business world, standing still means you might as well be moving backward. If you do things the way you always have, your competitors will find ways to work smarter, faster (and not harder). With that said, here are three common concerns about implementing automation and how to overcome them:
The challenge: Can you trust technology? Today’s automation technology focuses not on replacing man with the machine but on alleviating the most laborious and monotonous aspects of a job, allowing workers to focus their efforts on higher-value tasks and let recruiting robots handle the busywork.
How you overcome it: By taking the time to understand exactly how automation works and what it could do for you, unknowns quickly become known and the fear evaporates.
The challenge: While our urge for comfort and consistency is strong, an attitude of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ simply doesn’t cut it in today’s business landscape.
How you overcome it: If you can overcome the fear of change, you’ll quickly realize that the risks of automation aren’t all that risky. Once you’ve incorporated automation, your team will be doing higher value, less laborious, and less monotonous work.
The challenge: What about the changes that can’t be foreseen? The fear of unintended consequences – of damaging systems and procedures that up until this point has run smoothly – is an entirely fair one to have.
How you overcome it: Start by planning, building, and then testing your automations. Allow employees to get used to the automation and roll out an internal overview before you make the switch. Use this time to identify best practices and create solid processes that workers can follow to the letter.
Here are a few questions to ask vendors during the evaluation process:
Can you build your own workflows? Are you locked-in to a specific vendor's workflow or do you have the freedom to build workflows based around your unique business processes.
How difficult is it to configure? Does it require a 3rd party integrator or can you start using it right away?
Can the tool adjust with my business needs? Ensure your future business needs are met by purchasing a recruiting automation tool that is flexible and configurable with clicks and not code.
How can I measure success? Look for dashboards and reports that display real-time information and the health of your automation activities.
Can the tool support my entire business? Purchase a tool that helps automate activities throughout the recruiting cycle and accommodates candidates, clients, submissions, placements, jobs, and other entities in your ATS.
We're standing by to help you understand how automation can transform your business. Learn more today!
There are hundreds of things that could be automated in a recruiting firm. Where do you start? To help, here are three things you should consider to determine where to implement automation:
Understanding where you are today will help you drive towards where you want to go. In other words, it’s important to figure out where the gaps live in your process and how automation can fill them. Below are some common areas where firms typically see gaps in their processes:
Why are new hires falling off? Why do we have candidates off contract with a current status of ‘Placed’? Why is our database full of inactive candidates? Once your team understands why the gaps in your process exist, determining how to address those gaps becomes clearer.
While automation can make a positive impact on many parts of the recruitment process, it’s important to differentiate between tasks that should be automated from those that should still be handled by each recruiter or team member.
Five Rules to Follow:
Two Cases Where You May NOT Want to Automate:
Download our free Recruiting Automation Workbook and start mapping and planning your process before you purchase a new automation tool.
What to look for while you're evaluating solutions:
Herefish by Bullhorn has created a single, streamlined and efficient way for us to run our business.
Chelsea Johnson Marketing @ Snelling
I just absolutely fell in love with Herefish. I thought to myself ‘this is exactly what I’ve been doing for 40 years, only now I can automate it.' To be frank, I couldn’t hire or train enough people to do what this could do.
Len Adams CEO @ ACG Resources
We're pushing innovation in the staffing industry and helping firms automate busywork.
Herefish by Bullhorn
Herefish makes it easy for modern staffing firms to automate workflows, create a pool of talent, and enhance experiences throughout the entire recruiting cycle.
Explore Herefish
Bullhorn VMS Sync with Submittals
The only closed-loop VMS integration available to staffing firms and is empowering firms to fill job openings at over 350 of the world’s largest companies.
Explore VMS Sync
Bullhorn Onboarding
Create electronic pre-hire and onboarding forms, populate fields on forms automatically with job and candidate data, and provide candidates with a secure portal to complete and sign documents easily, allowing them to start their new role sooner.
Explore Onboarding
So what could automation do for your firm? Just enter the number of users in your ATS and let's find out.
The Bullhorn Marketplace is home to over 100 pre-integrated solutions that can help you to innovate and differentiate from your competition. With the Marketplace partners focused on recruiting automation, you can build a customized tech stack to power your team’s unique workflows.
Mya
Mya Systems provides a conversational AI platform that helps transform the recruiting process by automating outreach and communications across the end-to-end candidate and employee lifecycle.
Learn More →
Daxtra
DaXtra automates the employment application process by helping you source the most relevant candidates quickly and easily through semantic search, powered by machine learning technologies.
Textkernel
Textkernel’s tools help you accelerate business development by finding the best candidates faster and matching your available candidates to all other jobs — both in-house and on the market.
SourceBreaker
SourceBreaker seamlessly integrates with your CRM, ATS, and other databases, improving candidate pools by over 200% and identifying vacancies that match candidate profiles at the click of a button.
Great Recruiters
Great Recruiters automatically captures candidate feedback in real-time, automates the review process, and makes it simple to act on real-time testimonials.
3DIQ
3DIQ makes it beyond easy for recruiters to edit, format, and get real-time feedback on resumes while gaining unique visibility into hiring decisions without ever leaving Bullhorn.
Recruiter Insider
Recruiter Insider collects candidate and client feedback throughout the hiring process to help recruiters identify and provide help to those who might need it during the recruitment process.
Xref
Xref delivers data-driven candidate insights, allowing organisations to make fast, smart and confident hiring decisions.
Automation is changing the recruitment and staffing landscape. Contact us today to learn how you can start automating busywork and take back more time.