Whatever your feelings are about recruitment AI and the role of machine learning in our industry, there are some parts of a recruiter’s workload that simply need to be automated if you want to keep up and remain competitive. 2022 is the year to stop holding on to all your manual processes just because it’s ‘how we’ve always done things’ and accept that in the long run, they’re just slowing you down.
Automating the mundane admin in your day allows you to focus more of your time on the parts of your job that can never be automated – like solving client pain points and nurturing strong relationships with your candidates.
So, here are three candidate-focussed processes that you need to accept AI can do more efficiently than you. Let technology take the reins so you can focus on the human parts of your job that make you truly indispensable as a recruiter!
1. Candidate Registration
If your candidate registration process still involves you or the candidate filling out a form by hand only for you to then sit and manually input the data into your CRM system, you’re wasting valuable time - and unnecessarily!
Nowadays, any good recruitment software package will allow you to digitally capture key candidate information for an initial candidate registration at all the usual touch points and transfer this data to your CRM automatically in a way that’s fully GDPR compliant too.
So whether the candidate is completing a web registration form on your website, applying to one of your job adverts or sitting in your reception completing a registration form on an iPad or laptop, all these journeys should go straight into your CRM and eliminate the additional registration admin that I still see a lot of recruiters wasting time on and it drives me crazy!
2. Candidate Matching
How many of your colleagues are holding on to candidates in their inboxes or on their desktops that could be a great fit for a job you’re working just because it’s too much work to get these candidates onto your CRM? And how many CVs do you have floating around on your computer that are probably out of date as the candidate has updated it three or four times since you received it?
The number of missed opportunities due to recruiters not letting technology automating this process is frightening! Most forward-thinking recruitment agencies are now using self-serving candidate portals where the candidate is in charge of keeping their details up to date, and any updates they do make will trigger notifications to tell the recruiter they could now be a match for a role they weren’t previously qualified for. 
Allowing machine learning to match candidates to jobs and clients naturally makes sense as technology picks up on details instantly in a way that a human could never do – or at least a machine can do in seconds what would take a recruiter a whole day to do! With machine learning, your CRM can learn what type of candidates you’ve recruited for in the past, what skills you’re looking for now and which candidates match your hiring managers’ needs so you can be proactive and seize current, future and previously-unknown opportunities.
3. Candidate Compliance
Ensuring your candidate database and processes are compliant isn’t the most exciting of jobs, and it can be hugely time-consuming and costly for a recruitment business to uphold. But this is actually one of the easiest processes to automate, so the idea that any recruitment business would still choose to do this manually blows my mind!
Whether you choose to handle candidate compliance at the initial point of introduction or just prior to placement, the technology is there to handle this for you and ensure you’re remaining compliant for the candidate’s entire journey with you – whether this lasts weeks or years. For example, Pre-Employment Screening (PES) can be automatically checked prior to any placement and the expiry dates of a candidate’s documents can be set to trigger an alert to tell you just prior to expiration so you can take action immediately.
For more guidance on how to streamline your compliance processes under GDPR, click to download the eBook at the bottom of this page.
By letting go of the tasks that take up your valuable time and stop you and your team for being the most efficient that they can be allows you to use the skills that will never be able to be automated. In a nutshell…
“Valuable recruiters don’t send CVs – they solve pain points” @wendymcdougall - click to tweet this.
Solving pains is something that can never be automated, and that’s what makes us so indispensable!
Therefore, any time away from your hiring managers doing admin is time wasted. Your real value is your knowledge, your networks and your ability to communicate with your hiring managers and understand what is keeping them up at night – then come up with a solution to help them. Do this and you’ll always be valuable, credible and the first person they call when they need help with a hiring challenge.
