Dear Recruiters, Let’s Automate Low-Value Added Tasks

Adrian Dixon

June 27, 2019

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Have you been curious about the different ways to make recruiting more efficient and effective? We have the answers you’ve been looking for.

Recruiting usually resides within HR in an organization. Here at Ideal, we love recruiters and HR professionals, because our tools are designed to help them be more effective. But is the broader “branding” of HR that good? Not always. And is the broader “branding” of how people think about recruiting that good? Not always. We probably wouldn’t need terms like “candidate experience” and strategies for that if recruiters were universally loved. 

These issues of how people perceive recruiters are often time management issues, though, and not “This person is bad at their job” issues. Time management is essential for recruiters, and often their biggest stumbling block. Consider this quote:

“Talent acquisition is an onslaught of a thousand seemingly important things competing for your attention,” said Christian De Pape, head of brand and operations at Recruiting Social, a recruiting services firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and in Los Angeles. “Many of the recruiters I know love it for this very reason—they love the rush of juggling so many moving parts, the multiple ongoing projects, the surprises that pop up and the tactical maneuvering needed just to keep pace.”

Ah, yes. The rush! That’s part of why recruiters love doing what they do. But how can they be better at prioritizing the value-add activities over the rote tasks?

What are the more important tasks?

Ideally, recruiters would spend over 60% of their time on:

  • Conversations with candidates
  • Building a pipeline of future candidates (attending events, etc.)
  • Working with hiring managers to build those relationships, discussing future needs, and helping the transition from hire to onboarding

In order for those human-to-human interactions to be the center of what a recruiter does, they need to spend correspondingly less time on:

  • Screening
  • Sourcing
  • FAQ-style or update-style conversations with candidates (not interviews but “Where does my application stand?” type discussions)
  • ATS stage progression
  • Meetings

The last bullet is probably the toughest. People seem to broadly dislike meetings, but they keep getting called in many organizations. Sorry. We cannot solve that one for you just now.

The rest of the second list, though, we can help solve. An ideal recruitment funnel flows like this:

  • Candidate applies
  • Resumes are screened
  • Initial touch base
  • Short list of candidates to hiring manager
  • Interviews
  • Offer
  • Hire

Now let’s go through that recruitment funnel and see where technology can logically help.

Candidate applies: Yes. Very few people these days are bringing paper resumes into a HQ, although that can happen at high-volume hiring events. Most people are applying through technology, and often through mobile tech. 

Screening: Yes. Technology does — and should — help with screening. If you are doing sourcing and screening manually, chances are that is the biggest time drain on your recruiters. 

Initial touch base: Yes. Information-gathering about candidates can be done with a chatbot, for example.

Short list of candidates: This can be organized within your ATS, and/or you can use matching programs to find previous well-qualified candidates, but having a conversation with the hiring manager at this stage is a good relationship-builder. With Ideal, for example, candidates can also be prioritized as A, B, C, and D tiers, which helps save time. 

Interviews: This is human-to-human.

Offer: This is a conversation between the hiring manager, his/her team, and the recruiter that leads to a discussion with the selected candidate. Elements of the paperwork sent to the offered candidate can be done with tech, but it’s mostly a human-to-human process.

Hire: At the bottom of the recruiting funnel, when you actually hire someone, it’s about conversations between the hiring manager, the team, and the recruiter. Technology can help with some of the paperwork that begins the offer letter stage, though. 

So how can recruiters be more value-add, time-wise?

Use technology in the logical pockets above. In fact, record everything you do for 1-2 weeks. Look at your calendar and record the non-blocked (meetings, calls) time. What are you spending time on? After two weeks, look at the results. Where did most of your time go?

Now ask yourself: can technology help with any of the things that were taking up your time? If the answer was “I had to pick up my children,” well, no, technology can and should not help there. But if the answer was around screening or sourcing or finding past ATS candidates who qualify, well, yes, technology can help in those situations — and that’s how you begin to get time back.

When you get time back, now you can build better relationships externally (with candidates) and internally (with hiring managers and other departments needed for onboarding), and you are much more of a value-add to your company. The whole TA function becomes a strategic component instead of a “putting out fires” or burning through their time function. The decision-makers will involve TA even more as a result.

And the “branding” of recruiters gets a little better every day!