Recruiting in the Age of Automation
In today’s competitive job market, recruiting and retaining high-caliber employees is integral to an organization’s success. For HR and recruiting teams to excel at finding and hiring such talent, they need to move past antiquated systems and time-consuming manual processes. They need to embrace automation.
Automation is more than a technology buzzword, it’s a welcome solution for resource-strapped HR teams. Companies are investing in HR technology on a global scale in order to find and hire the most talented applicants to drive their businesses into the future. This post takes a closer look at some of the trending topics in HR automation and how each affects the recruiting and retention processes.
HR role specialization
Although it’s certainly true that many administrative and junior-level jobs, such as payroll clerks and HR assistants, have high “technical automation potential,” it doesn’t necessarily mean increased automation will result in widespread redundancy or job loss. In fact, sources suggest quite the opposite. When an HR team is freed up to work on increasingly higher-order job functions, the potential for role specialization emerges.
Over time, experts predict recruiting and HR roles will undergo a kind of “digital hybridization,” with core competencies emerging in advanced analytics, data visualization, employee experience, and IT. Companies should take the opportunity to begin developing HR roles that reflect a growing understanding of how closely the employee experience mirrors customer experience. Enriching the industry with a new set of skills and capabilities will, in turn, complement the hiring process.
Expedited time-to-hire
The hiring pipeline can present a challenge to recruiters. Being able to efficiently screen employees is an incredibly important strategy when trying to fill roles quickly. Mistakes that happen due to haste can cost a company thousands of dollars in future turnover costs. Automation offers recruiters a way to decrease time-to-hire without sacrificing applicant quality. Recruiters can automate the pre-screening and verification of resumes for various role-specific keywords, educational backgrounds, certifications, location, and other predetermined qualifiers. Taking the time-intensive administrative element out of the initial screening process means recruiters can focus their energy on the qualified applicant pool, a time when human discretion is more valuable.
Once the essential qualifications have been sorted through, recruiters can use a variety of platforms to conduct pre-employment assessments. These are vital to the core of the hiring process because they test for critical-thinking skills, industry knowledge, and even interpersonal interpersonal and cultural values — all things that don’t necessarily appear on a resume.
Finally, recruiters can leverage automated onboarding platforms to get inbound employees up to speed quickly. Popular platforms let teams complete and store forms digitally, access important company documents, and use a standardized orientation process. The time saved from manual filing documents and catering to compliance issues can be diverted into new hire meetings, mentoring, and other valuable engagement endeavors.
Centralized cloud software
The growing popularity of the cloud means that automation has become embedded into the core functions of many software solutions. In addition to offering automation of basic tasks, companies can use the cloud to minimize the number of logins and view aggregated employee data in a centralized dashboard, which were notoriously difficult tasks in the age of legacy, on-premises systems. Thus, HR professionals can perform day-to-day job functions more expediently and efficiently, as well as put more effort into their human capital management strategies, or HCM.
HR departments need to be able to deploy rewards programs, talent-management initiatives, and career-development options, as well as anticipate areas of concern before employee turnover happens. No matter how talented an HR professional is, they can’t read minds. Through data analysis and predictive analytics, unified software helps provide insights the human brain might miss.
Predictive analytics capabilities
Predictive analytics, or the ability to use historical data to predict future outcomes, has begun to emerge as a valuable capability for HR teams. Although still in relative infancy in terms of widespread adoption, predictive modeling in HR has the potential to identify and act upon workforce trends before they cost the company money in the form of voluntary turnover. It can also inform hiring decisions, leading to more qualified candidates over time.
Even if a company doesn’t have the technical resources of a Google or Facebook to create advanced algorithmic models, they can still keep an eye on metrics such as cost per hire, length of tenure, overall turnover, and revenue per employee. All of these factor into the efficacy of an HR’s hiring process.
Automation has the power to free up time for recruiters and HR professionals and provide an improved employee experience for job seekers. Ultimately, an organization’s ability to positively engage current and future employees plays a central role in its longevity, and it might just take some automation to succeed in that endeavor.