Over the past few years, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) have made their presence known in the recruiting industry, and it’s important for recruiting professionals to understand how integrating both automation and AI into their recruiting process can increase efficiencies across the board.

These digital tools can be used in candidate sourcing, assessment, and selection as well as interview scheduling and onboarding. 

However, the beauty of automation and AI is that they not only can be used throughout the recruiting process, but they create more efficient processes while delivering higher quality results. 

So, how can automation and AI increase efficiency and effectiveness in the recruiting industry while delivering improved results?

Let’s look specifically at how automation and AI can boost your recruiter efficiencies.

How Automation Can Boost Your Recruiter Efficiencies

What is automation? Automation is a digital tool that performs repetitive tasks with little to no human interaction. Of course, you’ve already encountered automation in your day-to-day life. From programmable thermostats to bill pay to confirmation texts for doctor appointments, automation helps us more efficiently conquer our day.

So, how can automation benefit recruiting professionals? Automation can improve manual tasks, such as advertising jobs, screening resumes, conducting pre-employment assessments, or scheduling interviews. Essentially, automation can make recruiting more efficient, giving you a much-needed edge in today’s competitive job market.

Let’s look at three ways that automation can improve recruiter efficiencies.

1. Minimize or Eliminate Errors

Human brains are better than computers at specific tasks, such as creativity and expressing empathy. When processing large amounts of data, computers beat humans hands down.

Where humans previously had to process large amounts of data line by line or page by page, automated functions can now perform mundane, repetitive tasks in seconds, instead of hours, days, or weeks – leaving humans to perform higher-value tasks, such as creating relationships with job applicants.

Not only can computers process large amounts of data more quickly, they can also process data more accurately – free of human error. For example, through automation, background checking tools can reduce incorrect hits on similar or misspelled names, dramatically improving your hiring speeds. 

Additionally, automation can run 24-7-365, never taking a day off or calling in sick. As a result, these digital tools boost both efficiency and accuracy for numerous recruiting tasks, such as applicant tracking, social recruiting, background checks, or candidate ranking.

2. Reduce Time to Hire

Time to hire is an essential metric for recruiting professionals. And reducing time to hire through automation can give employers an edge for recruiting top talent in today’s employee-driven job market. 

LinkedIn recently compared time to hire in numerous industries. They found that engineering took the longest, coming in at 49 days as the median time to hire, compared to administrative jobs at 33 days as the median time to hire. 

With more jobs than job candidates, employers must focus on reducing time to hire to take advantage of top talent actively or passively searching for new roles, higher compensation, or better benefits, including WFH. 

By automating certain repetitive tasks in the recruiting process, such as applicant pre-screening or entering information into an applicant tracking system, recruiters can quickly find the right candidate to join the organization while focusing on improving candidate strategies and experience.

3. Increase Productivity

Automated recruiting tools can increase productivity, from reducing errors to reducing time to hire. However, let’s do a deeper dig into how automation improves overall productivity in recruitment.

For instance, automated scheduling tools can reduce the back-and-forth of phone tag or email replies. Through self-scheduling tools, candidates can more quickly get interviews on the books while being reminded through automated appointment notifications.

Additionally, through automation, recruiters can encourage employee referrals by instantaneously sharing job openings with workers. Not only can automation notify workers of open positions, but it can gather information from employees, such as names and LinkedIn profiles of potential candidates, all while notifying the recruiter about the referral. Through automating the employee referral process, recruiters can cast a wider net for qualified talent while filling positions faster – increasing productivity and efficiency.

By automating even a couple parts of the hiring process, recruiters can immediately optimize workflows, allowing them to boost productivity while focusing on more quality candidates.

How AI Can Boost Your Recruiter Efficiencies

Now, let’s take a look at how artificial intelligence (AI) can boost your recruiter efficiency. But first, let’s see how AI differs from automation. 

AI, unlike automation, is designed to mimic the human brain, learning from past experiences, self-correcting along the way as it makes conclusions. As a result, AI is always learning, much like the human brain.

However, like automation, AI can process larger amounts of data faster and more accurately than the human brain.

Here are three ways that AI can specifically boost your recruiter efficiencies.

1. Identify Quality Candidates More Quickly

While screening for resume skills and experience is a benefit of both AI and automation, AI takes these abilities a step further, helping you to identify qualified candidates faster with higher objectivity. 

For example, AI can improve your hiring process faster through standardized job matching. How do the candidates’ skills, knowledge, and experience fit the advertised role? Additionally, AI can give you a more dynamic view of job candidates through analyzing pre-job assessment data along with skills and experience. This way, recruiting professionals can better identify job candidates who fit the role as well as the organization’s brand and culture, improving recruiters’ time to hire – since you won’t have to sift through applications and resumes to find top talent, AI will find the talent for you. 

Not only can you speed up your hiring processes with AI, matching the right candidate to the right job (and company) improves employee engagement, satisfaction, and happiness, reducing turnover and increasing productivity.

2. Fill Positions Faster

As an extension of identifying quality candidates more quickly, recruiters can speed up the entire hiring process with AI, allowing them to fill positions faster.

With 60% of job seekers stating that the recruiting process takes too long, recruiters need to streamline the process – from job advertising to hiring – so they don’t lose out on top talent to another employer. 

For example, AI can speed up the applicant screening process – identifying candidates with both hard and soft skills that are a fit for the position. AI-enabled recruiting tools can also handle a significant part of the early recruiting process, such as asking candidates a series of preliminary questions after a job application or resume is submitted, helping recruiters to qualify talent faster – getting the right candidates into the right positions faster as well. 

Additionally, after you make the hire, AI can help accelerate employee onboarding, getting employees up and running with computers, passwords, and email addresses. 

With AI, recruiters can save essential time attracting, hiring, and onboarding candidates, letting the AI do much of the heavy lifting while recruiters spend valuable time creating relationships with candidates while placing the right people in the right job faster and more efficiently.

3. Improve Communication with Job Candidates, Reducing Delays 

One critical place to integrate AI is with your communication with job candidates throughout the recruiting process. While you may communicate personally with candidates at certain times, it can get overwhelming or near impossible to keep up with each candidate every step of the way – especially when you’re hiring for many roles at once.

For example, when candidates are exploring your career page, they may have initial questions. You can attend to these questions quickly, not only providing answers but also improving the candidate’s experience with chatbots and natural language processing tools, both powered by AI.

Currently, only 18.7% of job candidates are receiving help online through chat bots or feedback tools. And with 94.9 percent of applicants seeking information on how to follow up on a job application, providing accessible, in-time communication tools can boost your efficiency immediately. 

Communicating with candidates throughout the process not only provides necessary information during the recruitment process but it also makes job candidates feel valued, directly impacting candidate and employee engagement.