Corporate organizations and other businesses are continuing to struggle with the economic uncertainty brought by the pandemic. However, with technological advancement, some of the world’s leading companies are optimistic about their future and undergoing a talent war to hire the prime candidates for their business. India’s hiring rate has recovered from 10 percent in April 2021 to 35 percent in May 2021.
With the improvements in the hiring landscape, the mounting piles of resumes and a plethora of online profiles are exceeding the recruiters’ ability to process. Considering this scenario, organizations and recruiters are experiencing the pressing need for technology to do the heavy lifting so they can focus on the critical areas of their job responsibility.
To drive recruiter’s productivity, technology is redefining the recruitment landscape and automation tops the list in revolutionizing the process of hiring. It is allowing organizations to automate human-oriented mundane tasks and workflows related to recruitment to increase productivity and make faster hiring decisions.
Reduces recruiters workload
Recruiters spend endless hours over resumes, trying to fill open positions by scouting and screening talent. Each day an open role goes unfilled, organizations lose productivity and profitability. By automating certain hiring processes such as sourcing talent, screening resumes and scheduling interviews, recruiters can reduce their workload and depart from these tedious and time-consuming tasks. Automation in hiring can significantly reduce the time-to-fill of each role and accelerate the hiring velocity of recruiters. As a result, bottlenecks in recruiting such as screening resumes and scheduling can be overcome, and the process can be streamlined.
Reduces cost per hire
By automating the time-consuming hiring tasks, the time to fill each role can be brought down and faster hiring decisions can be made. As a result, the productivity of recruiters increases as they have more time to do less of the work. When open roles are closed in days instead of months, the cost per hire comes down and savings in vacancy costs increase. The optimized hiring process can help boost the organization’s profitability by lowering its hiring costs.
Higher quality candidates
Nearly 88 percent of the resumes received for a role are considered unqualified. As a result, the recruiters are left with very few candidate options and have to settle with the available talent. Automation in the hiring process makes sure that only those candidates are sourced that match the job requirements and are engaged in the recruiting process. By automating the sourcing and resume screening process, the unqualified candidates are eliminated even before the hiring process starts and the recruiters begin with qualified candidates. This ensures a supply of higher-quality candidates and better hires.
Eliminates bias from hiring
The human element is indispensable to hiring, but human bias doesn’t have to be. By automating hiring tasks such as resume screening, candidate assessment and ranking, bias can be eliminated from hiring. Automation can help find candidates with ideal skills without any unconscious bias and ensure a diverse and qualified candidate pipeline. As a result, candidates so recruited are hired based on their merit and the hiring process remains absolutely objective and fair.
Enhances candidate experience
Hiring in a candidate-driven market can be challenging for an organization as it all boils down to the candidate’s decision. In such a case, candidate experience can be the key to attracting and hiring the top talent. One such technologically advanced tools are AI-based chatbots that allow recruiters to provide candidates an engaging experience with timely updates, better scheduling, feedbacks and faster hiring decisions. Moreover, automating hiring processes frees up the recruiter’s time so they can focus on building relationships, finetuning the key areas of the hiring process and improving candidate satisfaction.
Key takeaways
As the war for talent intensifies and the workload of recruiters increases, technologies such as automation and AI can simplify and expedite the hiring processes. By deploying automation tools in hiring, organizations and recruiters can strengthen their hiring efforts and accelerate their hiring velocity. Furthermore, automation can speed up tedious and mundane tasks such as candidate sourcing, resume screening, interview scheduling, thereby reducing the burden of recruiters and enhancing the candidate experience. Though it is not meant to replace recruiters, it empowers them by driving their productivity and streamlining the hiring process.
(Yogita Tulsiani is MD & Co-founder, iXceed Solutions)
