Your Gateway to Top Talent: How to Automate Social Media Recruitment
In our recent webcast with Happy Recruiter, the panelists considered why HR professionals and robots should be best friends and how they can get more capacity using the technology now available.
The panelists considered how using technology and automating recruitment processes can leave more time for humans to add the human-centric value in recruitment that cannot be automated.
Watch the on-demand webinar to find out how you can implement and integrate technology effectively and some further benefits of what automation in recruitment can do for you.
This isn’t unfamiliar territory. But the pandemic has shown the extremes of two of the biggest challenges for recruiters. For some roles, you get more candidates than you can handle, and for some, too few.
Watch this on-demand webinar for discussions on:
What challenges within recruitment do we have today?
Julie Lavigne, Digital Recruitment Guru at Digital Talent Hunters discussed on the recent webinar that she believes the biggest challenge for recruiters is finding the right talent. And this can be said for pre, during, and post-COVID. She noted that there needs to be a different approach as to how recruiters find, target, and persuade talent, and understanding this has made the difference for her and her team.
The panelists also talked about the need to think about candidate needs and wants. In our mobile-first and digitally native worlds, candidates are expecting their job searching experience and recruitment processes to follow the same seamless, “one-click”-type setup that most of their daily interactions are like – whether it’s mobile banking, online retail, or Netflix – candidates expect instant gratification and to have that consumer-grade experience. Julie spoke about how finding and applying for jobs should be as simple as sharing a picture with friends.
Recruiters need to picture the candidates’ activity online and the steps they need to take to their job, from creating an account on a complicated ATS and uploading a CV from your 5-inch mobile phone to the first day on the job.
Liviu, Co-Founder of Happy Recruiter, considered that a big part of the stressful steps, both for candidates and recruiters can already be solved by technology. Starting from reaching people automatically, screening them, nurturing their experience in the early stages, (where the risk of ghosting is the highest) and understanding what goes right and what goes wrong in a recruitment process can all be aided by technology, he told the audience.
Using technology and automated chatbots for recruitment – the pros
Liviu asked the audience to think about their day – “with the robots you have used already, starting from the coffee machine to the navigation app that drives us to the office and the emails that replace a lot of the activities we, as humans, used to do back in time.”
Even if you have an abundance of applicants, the benefits of employing a robot to screen and nurture your candidate pool are invaluable said both Liviu and Julie. And, if you do not have applicants – a robot is the perfect way to reach them automatically, via social media. Automation helps recruiters to increase capacity, productivity and the speed of the end-to-end recruitment process. Not only this, but it can enable a bias-free, always available, and on-brand approach to recruitment.
The technology now available helps recruiters get happier and do their jobs better by automating parts of the recruitment process.
Julie told the webinar audience, in 2019 her and her team started using some new technology, Dora by Happy Recruiter. Dora is a recruitment chatbot, that via targeted campaigns on social media reaches a talent pool on Facebook/Instagram. Dora reaches out to a mainly passive talent pool that Julie and her team would not have been able to reach if they were still adopting a traditional inflow.
Skepticism around technology – you’re not alone
Julie spoke about her belief that recruiters can be skeptical of technology through fear of the unknown and the sense of relinquishing some control. “I understand it can be frightening to have a first screening done by a recruitment bot, for example” Julie told the audience. She noted that this is where a “phygital” approach is really important. The technology can automate and speed up the initial stages in the recruitment process, but then the human interaction is still important in the secondary stages.
She went on to consider where some additional concerns may stem from. “A bot for example does not pay attention to name, gender or age… there is also something to be said concerning inclusion and diversity using these tools. Of course I understand these arguments. If you start using technology that has no scientifically proven base, or has been build quite randomly or on biased data, things become dangerous, but isn’t that the same with an unskilled biased HR person…? I think the main point is to search for help in HR tech for some part of the processes, but always to be verified or completed by humans.”
A glance into the future of automating recruitment
Looking to the future, Julie told the audience that she believes many parts of recruitment (search & selection) will be influenced by new HR tech such as AI tools to check soft/hard skills, or to map the different kinds of intelligence, to find out when someone is ready to change jobs & in what company culture or drivers he/she fits best. As well as chat and recruitment bots automating a big part of this process.
“I believe tech and transformation work best when combined with a human person backing up the process or taking over the process at a certain point. To add a well-needed layer of advice, coaching, guidance, empathy to the journey. To make it a real experience.” she also commented.
And for Liviu, he believes “the future of recruitment will be fast and happy, with candidates finding jobs and recruiters managing to process the applications in hours. When we were recruiting, a few years ago, having 500k interviews in a year was, for a mid-size agency, a dream. The chatbots can do that with no effort… to survive and thrive, the recruitment future is definitely digital, with automatic tools to increase efficiency at any possible step in the process.”
Both panelists agreed that technology can really improve the inclusivity within recruitment and there are many other pros for recruiters when it comes to automating processes, but recruitment will never become unmanned.