12 Must-Have Features in Recruitment Automation Software
Recruitment Automation Software in Your Hiring Process
Automation is one of the most noteworthy 2021 recruiting trends. Harvard Business School reports, 75% of companies used recruitment management systems in their work — so it’s reasonable to expect more recruiters implementing automation to their workflow.
In 2021, prices for automated hiring software range from $48 to $950 a month, as estimated by Priceithere specialists. The number of candidates added into the system each month, the number of employees who’ve got access to the system, and the extensive functionality impact the cost.
To help you save money, we have prepared a list of features that must be in every recruitment automation software — so it’s easier for you to choose a solution that fits you.
Let’s move to it!
12 Essential Features of Every Recruitment Automation Software
Recruitment automation software is unlikely to replace people in human resources — but it can automate and simplify their work a great deal. Automation is applied to all recruitment stages. Automation tools can:
Identify candidates that meet job requirements and help match talent to the right position with zero or minimum recruiter intervention within sourcing.
Conduct a background check of a candidate, saving a great part of the recruiter’s time during screening.
Helps the recruiter set up their schedule quicker and helps analyze the interviews deeper.
Makes onboarding easy so recruiters face fewer headaches connected to paperwork.
So, investing in recruitment automation increases a business’ competitive advantage in hiring and onboarding. Recruiters have more time to focus on the candidate’s skills and personality and are less occupied with repetitive and often tedious work. There are also fewer mistakes within the recruitment workflow.
Automated Talent Management
Any talent manager knows how challenging it is to empower existing employees, bring in new people to the team and retain the workforce you have. A talent management system can help you do all these.
A talent management system is an integrated software solution that supports the process by providing tools for recruiting, employee learning and development, and performance management.
Talent management features help recruiters streamline the services a company needs to keep the best professionals.
Real-Life Example:
Loxo is a state-of-the-art backbone of the recruiting process: its applicant tracking system cuts nearly 80% of recruiter work. Their proprietary search engine processes terabytes of data from social networks, publicly available datasets, and premium data acquired by Loxo’s commercial partnerships to present recruiters with verified and accurate background info for more than 500 million candidates.
Recruiters using Loxo can increase the efficiency of their work by 500%. The system helps pre-build their SMS, LinkedIn, and phone-based recruitment marketing — along with email campaigns — in advance.
AI-Powered Chatbots
Chatbots can handle preliminary candidate screening, acting as recruiter assistants that do simple pre-screening communication between an employer and a candidate. If enhanced with deep search algorithms or datasets with applicants’ information, chatbots can gather comprehensive information about people who want to work with you, ask questions relevant to that information, and rank the applicants based on these metrics — all before the recruiter’s intervention.
Chatbots rely on ML (machine learning) and NLP (natural language processing) to speak as a person would. Note, though, that most chatbots work like online tests: you’re giving them branched scenarios for the conversation with an applicant. It’s a less complex, efficient solution that helps save recruiters’ time.
Real-Life Example
XOR is a game-changing solution for fast and efficient hiring. XOR guarantees 33% faster hiring, 50% more efficiency, and 90% candidate satisfaction.
Companies with a worldwide reputation — McDonald’s, IKEA, Mars, Novus, Lighthouse, and others — trust XOR’s hr software to skyrocket their talent acquisition.
XOR’s chatbot screens your candidates, asks them customizable questions about their expertise, scores them, and schedules interviews on your calendar. Acting as a recruiting coordinator, XOR saves the recruiter’s time by letting them focus on talking to people.
Automatic Interview Scheduling
If you operate in a highly competitive industry, your candidates will have many offers from other companies. It’s a recruiter’s job to schedule interviews as fast as possible — and it’s often challenging to do so.
Automated interview scheduling helps move from scouting to interviews quicker: software creates your team’s schedule and candidates pick among the times available. They book the time they’re comfortable with, and the slot appears in your calendar. Comfy!
Such solutions help recruiters hire talents who’ve just entered the job market and cut applicant drop-off rates by removing unnecessary phone calls and emails from the process.
Real-Life Example
Fetcher makes simple and flexible scheduling real. It offers recruiters multiple meeting types — 15-min talk for confirmation, a more extensive interview, etc. — and distributes them across the recruiter’s schedule.
Recruiters synchronize their calendar with Fetcher, select the meeting type, and add the link to their email templates. The system will illustrate the schedule so recruiters know when they’re busy and when they’re free and let applicants choose the time that works best for them.
With Fetcher, recruiters relax and focus on more important tasks — all emails from applicants go straight to a company’s inbox.
Applicant Tracking System & Customer Relationship Management (ATS/CRM Tools)
recruitment CRM if they implemented ATS. Top HR managers, though, rely on solutions that offer both CRM and ATS in one platform.
Let’s outline the main differences between the two solutions:
Implementation of ATS and CRM software helps HR teams of all sizes to streamline their recruitment process.
Choose a ready-to-use solution that’s already presented on the market or ask professionals to create custom software for your recruitment needs.
Real-Life Example
LeverTRM platform is the only solution that combines ATS and CRM functionality in one platform. It allows companies of all sizes to develop a data-driven hiring strategy and make their talent acquisition process proactive, not reactive. Lever does all the data work instead of recruiter teams.
With Lever, recruiters create personalized recruitment campaigns, compile candidate databases, analyze hiring analytics, interview and hire new people. Found the right person for the wrong role? Don’t worry about losing talent! Lever saves information on every candidate that goes through the system, reminding recruiters about them when the right position is available.
Video-Interview Feature
Video interviewing is a fast, convenient, and money-saving approach to interviewing all the applicants and finding the most qualified candidates for any position.
Recruiters use video interview software as a way to pre-assess candidates before an in-person meeting — or when interviewing remote candidates. Considering all the benefits of video interviews, it’s no wonder that phone-based format is left behind.
Real-Life Example
For over a decade, VidCruiter software has been empowering employers and applicants to hold productive interviews. The mission of the company is to give its clients the means to build a personalized recruitment process.
VidCruiter allows recruiters to choose from two types of video interview sessions: asynchronous interviews and live interviews.
As you can see, the biggest difference between the two is whether a recruiter and an applicant meet in real-time. Both can be a very good test for applicants’ skills and character.
Deep Analytics of Candidates’ Expertise
Many of the potential candidates start screening a potential employer even before applying for a job. Recruiters can also track candidates with the candidate’s expertise feature — a talent analytics-driven search engine. With it, recruiters gain access to data collected from background checks from the Internet and analyze each candidate’s performance before making any sort of inquiry. Companies use this feature to filter unqualified candidates early in the recruitment process and focus on qualified applicants as well.
Real-Life Example
Deep talent analytics of Seekout helps recruiters achieve their recruiting goals faster.
The platform’s database has more than 642 million public profiles of candidates including information about their experience, skills and education. The system gathers these data from open sources — and recruiters use it to study more than 29 million developers’ profiles and 96+ million profiles of other professionals to hire people who fit the position’s requirements and share business’ values.
E-Sign Feature
An electronic signature is a core feature for recruitment and HR. It reduces the hassle related to dealing with paperwork allowing both parties to sign legal papers online.
Switching to electronic signatures is beneficial to your business in general — and the recruitment process, in particular. For instance, it makes the workflow smoother by allowing recruiters to get faster approvals in employee-related processes (e.g. getting offers ready, preparing payrolls, etc.)
Real-Life Example
An electronic signature is one of Legalesign’s main services. There are two big benefits it carries to businesses:
adds a competitive advantage by letting applicants sign documents instantly, from everywhere;
improves recruitment productivity and cuts costs of operations.
E-signed contracts are legally verified within just 2 hours.
Integrated Email Automation
Communication is an integral part of the recruitment process, and emails are still quite a popular way to talk to people.
Email automation is not only a marketers’ weapon. The recruitment process benefits from it as well. For recruiters, emails are an indispensable way to ping cold candidates. Recruiters also write emails to inform talents about new jobs, send follow-ups, etc.
With email automation, recruiters can reach more people and write faster and better (if automation software makes suggestions that improve a recruiter’s writing style). That saves recruiters a lot of time and resources.
Real-Life Example
One of the most well-known software suites for integrated email automation is Amazing Hiring. This is a 360-degree email solution for recruiters. Among the features it provides, there are:
- Mass newsletters;
- Recruiting email analytics;
- Recruiting email sequence;
- Integration with Gmail and Outlook365.
Textio, though, is a messaging tool that helps recruiters focus on making their writing inclusive and deliver the text just right. Its algorithms check the recruiter’s letters and messaging style for personal bias and help ensure effective business communication. Textio also gives suggestions on how to formulate the offer better and how to positively reflect the company culture.
Textio’s recommendations are based on the analysis of the hiring messages of more than 50 thousand global employers.
Online (Real-Time) Team Collaboration
Real-time collaboration software empowers teams to recruit together — even if the workforce is distributed and working remotely.
Engage the entire team in the recruitment process to accelerate it and achieve better outcomes, let employees contribute to the recruitment process. Your team can help you via writing to their followers on social media about open jobs, assisting in resume screening and sorting, helping with candidate assessment on interviews, encouraging the candidate to accept the offer, and so on. Within team collaboration software, all participants of the recruitment can chat, discuss candidates, pin notes to specific profiles and pinpoint things other people haven’t noticed about potential new hires.
Real-Life Example
Hiretual software is aimed at recruiters, hiring managers, and employees. It’s created to foster collaboration in the recruiting process. Assign your employees to different roles to let them view and screen candidates that are already in recruiter’s databases — and suggest potential future colleagues.
Cloud-Based Hostingle
Cloud-based hosting means that the system is housed externally, on different virtual and physical servers across the world. With cloud-based recruitment features, even the smallest firms can implement affordable recruiting solutions. You can pay a monthly or annual subscription fee and use cloud-based recruitment tools with the vendor’s company support team, automatic upgrades, etc. — no need to allocate your resources on servers’ maintenance.
The point of cloud-based hosting for recruitment software is to let recruiters integrate all their systems and get centralized access to all of them.
Real-Life Example
Fresh Works is the cloud-based recruitment software for businesses of any size and budget. 5000+ businesses trust FreshWorks team to reduce their recruiters’ workload by 75%.
The system securely stores all employee data and files, tracks and reports time-offs and absences, cuts down costs of the onboarding process and boosts it. With Fresh Team, recruiters monitor a new hire’s progress with onboarding tasks, can quickly assemble and send welcome kits and e-sign documents.
Companies pay exclusively for features they use in this software. Apart from secure storage, Fresh Team’s clients get an opportunity to easily integrate their recruitment solution with CRMs, sales management systems, software for accounting, etc. via APIs of a cloud platform.
QR Codes that Direct Talent to Your Jobs
If your recruiting campaign focuses on hiring college students, QR codes can be a good addition to it.
Implementation of QR codes into your recruiting strategy increases the effectiveness of print ads, billboards, posters, and brochures. Provide young talents with easy access to job details to show off your firm’s innovative spirit and boost your recruitment KPIs.
Real-Life Example
With QR codes and text-to-apply by XOR, people will instantly apply for your jobs from anywhere. The system lets job seekers send a text in response to open jobs, automates the responses from recruiters and quickly creates candidates’ profiles, based on the previous interaction.
XOR’s tracking technology allows recruiters to track the results of QR-based recruitment marketing in real-time to figure out what locations bring the most talent and optimize their campaigns in the future.
Mobile-First Recruitment
Mobile recruitment is something that recruiters must take as a priority — it’s simply indispensable for recruiters who want to get young talents.
Mobile-first recruitment gets the process to a completely new level. Recruiters and hiring teams have an opportunity to conduct and control the recruitment process from anywhere. The only condition is the availability of an Internet connection and a smartphone. Scheduling, onboarding, conducting feedback and many other tasks are available for recruiters — and they don’t need to go to the office to complete them!
Real-Life Example
Indeed software offers recruiters an opportunity to post info about open jobs from any device. Convert candidates into high-quality hires in three steps:
What Drives Recruitment Automation?
Let’s now discuss the features that drive recruitment automation.
Data Overload
According to the Glassdoor report, each corporate job opening on average attracts 250 résumés. The amount of information recruiters need to process is immense. Each recruitment team must go through each CV meticulously, interview the applicants and choose one best fit (ideally, on the first try).
To simplify things for themselves, recruiters look for alternative ways to boost the hiring process while maintaining quality. Recruiting automation helps to do so at every stage of the recruitment process — it tackles repetitive aspects of a recruiter’s workflow, is capable of data analytics and is so much faster than humans can hope to be.
Competition
The competitive market of today made recruiters turn to AI-powered recruitment systems. Recruitment automation allows companies to win the race for the best candidate — which is essential with the current talent shortage, especially in tech.
Promotion Of a Better Brand Image
Miscommunications, misinterpretations, and errors in scheduling foster a poor image of your employer brand and can potentially cost you a good candidate. Recruitment automation within correspondence and scheduling minimizes manual responsibilities and cuts human errors, which means there are fewer drop-offs caused by misunderstandings.
High-Quality Hires
The best candidate for your job is not always the one deeply qualified or with impressive credentials. Often, the best people for your business are the ones that share its core values and can contribute to your company culture. Automation recruitment process saves the time of a hiring manager and allows them to evaluate talents on a deeper, personal level and turn them into top-performing long-term hires.
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