Recruitment Automation and the Future of Hiring
Today’s recruitment trends have shifted to a consumer-centric digital era. Emerging tools in recruitment automation are allowing companies to quickly find qualified candidates and provide applicants a convenient, consumer-like online experience. This experience is being dubbed the consumerization of recruiting and describes providing self-service options to give job seekers mobility and control when looking for new career opportunities. Looking to consumerize your own hiring process to stand out as an employer? These top three modern recruitment automation trends will maximize your company’s consumerization success.
1. Adopting Consumerization
Consumerization is all about the experience. Both job seekers and employees want to do everything in one place at the same time and at their own convenience. Retail companies such as Amazon have perfected the customer experience by providing searchability, production education, ordering options, and payment management all in one convenient place. As a result, job seekers expect to have the same experience and convenience in the recruitment process just like they would have in their shopping experience.
Adapting your recruitment tools to follow this type of customer experience will attract job seekers to your business. Simply put, this means offering an easy online application process and way of scheduling interviews through your website. Another popular tool that successfully creates a friendly consumer experience is a mobile app where all the information can be accessed remotely, conveniently, and quickly.
Hand-in-hand with simplifying your application process is offering flexible schedules and dynamic pay to appeal to job seekers’ expectations. These two convenient factors will help candidates keep commitments and show up to work. Offering dynamic pay such as bonuses or same day pay is an expectation set in large part through gig work, where job seekers typically cash out after providing their services for the day. Same day pay is also especially important to workers who rely on public transportation which allows them to more easily afford their bus fares or ride share services.
2. Using Automated Messaging
Automated messaging is a recruitment communication tool that companies are using to stay in touch with their candidates. Chatbots, for example, are computer programs that use natural language to automate the process of reaching out to qualified applicants. This human-like interaction is critical to the success of maximizing consumer satisfaction. According to Recode, chatbots such as Mya can reach out over text, email, and through messaging applications like Facebook and WhatsApp that is almost indistinguishable from a real person. This tool decreases the number of outgoing phone calls and helps recruiters contact more applicants.
Automated messaging can be taken a step further by connecting to a recruiter’s calendar, which eliminates any involvement from the recruiter’s side. Integrated Human Capital, for example, utilizes tools through Sense. With Sense’s tools, our recruiters can automatically reach out to candidates with available times to schedule an interview without personally needing to send out a message. After the applicant schedules their interview, the specific time and date will be added to the recruiter’s calendar, saving time for both parties.
Target and McDonalds’s also use automated messaging through text-based technology called “short codes” to land the best candidates. Short codes are unique five-to-six-digit numbers that make text-messaging campaigns possible. It grows the list of potential candidates which is useful for job recruitment in industries that experience a high turnover rate such as seasonal and customer service positions.
3. Working with Artificial Intelligence
Using artificial intelligence to recruit job seekers and to check in with current workers is a game-changer. Even states like California have introduced a bill urging policymakers to explore the use of artificial intelligence and algorithm-based technologies to reduce bias and discrimination in hiring. Companies are using expert systems as a tool to create better recruiting experiences for job seekers.
These algorithms can match candidates for a specific job in seconds rather than having recruiters spending hours searching for the same talent. The time saved looking for qualified talent allows recruiters to spend time focusing on the candidate experience, enhancing the necessary human interactions involved in recruiting.
What to Remember…
In a competitive talent market, meeting job seeker expectations is incredibly important to stand out as an employer of choice. While the trends presented here are not a complete list of tools to enable recruitment automation, they are great starting points to begin offering an end-to-end, one-stop job seeker experience. Making candidate experience your top operational priority and targeting the right audience will drive your success in the consumerization of your recruiting and give you a huge advantage as an employer!
