Recruitment automation tools in an applicant tracking system can bring huge benefits to a recruitment team in a number of ways – time-saving, improved efficiency, well-informed teams, and a better candidate experience.
We’ve outlined the array of automation features to take advantage of in your applicant tracking system to help streamline your recruitment process.
- Job status automation = faster processes
- Incomplete application reminders
- Success confirmation emails
- Advertise jobs faster
- Supporting Hiring Managers with reminders
- Getting hires started
- Automating offer approvals and reminders
- Reminders to referees
Often there are lots of stages when you’re advertising jobs. Our Jobtrain applicant tracking system helps track these by using statuses against jobs, whereby it tells users where in the recruitment stage the job is at – i.e. is it awaiting approval to advertise; is it live; has it been completed?
Triggered by actions taken on candidates’ applications, our intelligent job status automation feature automatically moves the job’s status to the next relevant stage in the process. It helps ensure a fast pace is kept throughout and that stakeholders know exactly where a job is in the process.
By automating this, it helps inform, streamline, and requires little manual intervention. Automation like this is invaluable to organisations in talent-scarce sectors that manage a large volume of recruitment.
Some organisations may have long and arduous application forms for candidates to complete. If this is the case for your organisation, then often candidates may start completing it, but not finish with the intention of returning to it before the job closes. With quality candidates becoming more difficult to locate, making sure incomplete applications turn in to complete ones is crucial!
We’ve all been there. “Has my application been successfully received? I’m not sure, so I’ll call the recruitment team and check.”
This can all be avoided by using a simple automated email to confirm an application has been successfully submitted! It’ll save both your recruitment team and candidates time and energy.
Job approvals are a key stage at the very start of a recruitment campaign – and automation can play a part here too.
For many organisations, strict protocols are in place when a Hiring Manager wants to recruit. The organisation might need to know if there is budget in place or understand the justification for recruitment - is it a replacement hire or is it a new position? Without automation in place, getting approval is normally a time and admin-heavy process of paperwork going from one person’s desk to another through the chain of approval.
Using an online, automated job approval process removes this burden - every applicant tracking system should have this alongside time-stamped logs too. Ultimately, it saves everyone time – from Hiring Managers to HR and Recruitment – and ensures new jobs are approved, advertised, and new hires started without costly delays.
Hiring Managers aren’t recruiters and have busy day jobs away from recruiting into their team. But for most organisations, Hiring Managers still need to get involved in the shortlisting process and may need a friendly reminder so the process can keep moving!
Automated reminders to Hiring Managers can be such a time and admin saver for recruiters. Using a variety of criteria, you can choose at which stage of the process an alert should be sent to Hiring Managers. For example, when a job has closed, a reminder can be sent to Hiring Managers to shortlist candidates still awaiting review.
Finding the perfect candidate can be difficult so when you do, you want to move through the offer and onboarding process like lightning before any counter-offers come in.
Offer approvals work in much the same way as job approvals. Getting an offer out quickly whilst wrangling with an admin-heavy, manual, and paper-based approval chain is not going to get you off to the best start. Moving the offer approval chain online will speed up getting the offer out to the candidate.
If an approver in either the offer or job process has not approved or declined the request after a set number of days, then automated reminders will ensure you don’t have to worry about chasing them up!
In our applicant tracking system, automation also helps to speed up the referee process too. As part of our onboarding and reference hub, if you’re still waiting for a response from a reference request, an automated email reminder can be sent after a set number of days.
This is a high-level snapshot of just some of the possibilities that can be automated in recruitment. In isolation, automation may only seem to be assisting a relatively small number of tasks, but when combined, automation is a powerful asset for recruitment teams with huge benefits – from time-saving through to decreased risk of human error.
To find out more about how Jobtrain automates much of the recruitment process, contact our team who will be happy to show you.