It’s unavoidable these days: stories about how artificial intelligence and automation are poised to transform the economy dominate the news.
While AI and automation have been slowly penetrating the recruitment industry during the past decade, they’re set to break through in 2018.
The most important recruiting innovations this year are designed to simplify your job by turning your most repetitive tasks over to algorithms that can do them automatically.
While these innovations may appear daunting to technophobes, anyone who is willing to invest the time to learn can take advantage of the latest recruiting tech to turbocharge their business in the new year.
Here are the 3 best recruiting automation tools for 2018.
1. Candidate chatbots
The growth of easy-to-use recruitment software over the past decade has been epic.
The advances made in applicant tracking systems, CRMs and recruitment marketing platforms are unprecedented. But now, the industry is primed to move even further along the tech spectrum and discover candidate chatbots.
What’s a candidate chatbot, you ask? Simply put, it’s a customizable bit of artificial intelligence that lets you automate the candidate sourcing, screening and scheduling process.
Imagine a candidate discovers a job on your job board.
She submits a resume and the resume is reviewed algorithmically to see if it meets the qualifications for the job. At this point, we’re still using old tech.
But here is where it gets interesting.
The screening system can’t figure out if she meets a few of the job criteria so it automatically reaches out to the candidate via chatbot with a text message to find out more about her qualifications.
The chatbot can ask questions and understand answers. It can even answer follow up questions from the candidate and engage in a full-scale conversation about the role.
If the candidate meets the qualifications, it will automatically ask to schedule an interview and book it in your calendar, notifying you via email.
Just think about all the time you saved.
2. Marketing automation for candidate sourcing
I recently spoke to a recruiter who had set up a candidate sourcing automation platform that blew my mind and showed me the power of marketing automation in 2018.
Here’s how it worked.
Through traditional sourcing methods, he had acquired an email list of candidates. As it frequently happens, most of these candidates were passive and so he didn’t know the precise jobs that might interest them.
He would send each person an email with a position that could potentially work and included a survey at the bottom of the email that asked them if it was a good fit.
If it was, they would be shown a standard application page.
If it wasn’t, he would ask a series of questions to learn more about their interests so he could target them with more personalized job offers in the future.
He would also ask for their cell number so that his system could text them with new job offers and ensure a far higher response rate than email.
Furthermore, if a targeted job offer was sent and it still didn’t meet the candidate’s interests, he had a series of quick follow up questions he could ask to refine their interests and ensure better targeting in the future.
Now imagine combining this system with a candidate chatbot.
Using marketing automation, any time you have a new position to fill, you can have qualified and screened candidates pouring into your inbox without doing a second of work.
3. Lead generation through social media advertising
We’ve focused our attention so far on the candidate side of the equation but we can’t forget that recruiters need clients too.
While there are many lead generation methods for recruiters, the one that I am most excited about this year is social media advertising.
Virtually every recruiter reading this post uses social media on a daily basis and most are aware that their news feed or timeline is filled with ads. Nonetheless, recruiters are still hesitant to advertise on social platforms. This hesitancy has created a massive opportunity for recruiters who want to get ahead of the curve.
Why is social media advertising so powerful?
Social media advertising allows you to target people using demographics, which means that new clients are as easier than ever to find. If you advertise on LinkedIn, for example, you’ll be able to target people based on their job titles.
When you’re trying to find the decision-makers in a company, it’s so much easier these days because you’re able to target “all directors and SVPs with an engineering degree in Texas” or “all CEOs, CFOs and CTOs in California”.
Even if you use a more popular social media platform like Facebook that tends to lack details about people’s employment, you still have a wide variety of demographic tools to find people who might be interested in the service you’re offering (e.g., gender, age, location).
The best part about social media advertising is that once you’ve figured out a targeting system and marketing funnel that works, you can simply increase your budget and watch the leads pour in on autopilot.
Zack Gallinger is the founder of Talent Hero Media, a recruitment website design and marketing company that helps recruiters find clients and source candidates. They build world-class websites that are optimized to generate new business.