With automation on the rise, what’s in store for the future of recruiting? CodeSignal Co-Founders Sophia Baik and Tigran Sloyan discuss which areas of recruiting are moving toward automation – and which parts of the recruiter’s job are here to stay. Read on to learn about:
- The top 3 areas for future recruiting automation
- How automation will impact the job of the recruiter
If you’re a recruiter, you’re likely aware of the move toward more and more automation in the recruiting world. Your company may already be using automated tools for candidate screening, interview scheduling, and applicant tracking, and the use of automation continues to expand. A recent study found that 71 percent of Talent Acquisition Professionals believe that technology will play a larger role in their company’s hiring process this year than in previous years.
What does this mean for your job as a recruiter? CodeSignal Co-Founders Sophia Baik and Tigran Sloyan identify the top three areas for future recruiting automation and describe how automation will shape the job of the recruiter.
Top Areas for Future Recruiting Automation
There are three key areas that will be highly automated in the near future. From least to most impacted, they are:
3. Scheduling
Scheduling phone screens, interviews, and on-sites with candidates has long been a tedious and time-consuming task for recruiters. Automated scheduling tools like Interview Schedule use machine learning algorithms to find the best time slot for both interviewers and candidates – even for complex panel interviews with multiple interviewers and sessions.
Some automated scheduling tools can also handle basic interactions with candidates, like sending reminder emails the day before an interview. Sloyan, for one, feels confident that “there’s been enough progress made in this area over the last two years to safely predict that, eventually, we’ll all move towards automation” in scheduling.
2. Outreach and Follow-Up
Outbound recruitment methods, like sourcing, have typically been done manually and eat up a huge amount of recruiters’ time. Successful outreach to sourced candidates requires multiple follow-up communications. In fact, 77 percent of recruiters say they send more than two emails before sourced candidates engage.
Currently, technology in this area uses automation assistance to augment a human-driven process rather than being fully automated. It won’t be long, though, before outbound recruitment is more thoroughly automated, Sloyan predicts.
“You can imagine a world where you can specify what type of candidates you are interested in, and the automated tool can both produce the ideal template outreach and do automated follow-ups to get you the top of the funnel interest you are looking for,” says Sloyan.
1. Technical Skill Assessment
The most impactful area for future recruitment automation, Baik and Sloyan believe, is technical skill assessment at the top of the funnel. Resume review is time-consuming, inefficient, and expensive – and so is conducting skill assessments manually.
Sloyan advocates for skipping the resume review process altogether and opting instead for skill assessment. “Most organizations resort to looking at a resume as a proxy for skills, but more and more, once we identify core skills that need to be assessed at the top of the funnel, we should be able to completely skip that process.”
Skill assessment tools like CodeSignal “give a complete automated view of the top candidates that you should be talking to out of your entire applicant or candidate pool,” says Sloyan. These automated tools also allow recruiters to filter candidates using more objective criteria – a crucial step toward eliminating biases in hiring – and make for a more scalable hiring process.
How Automation Impacts Recruiters
While automation might look like a threat to a recruiter’s job at first glance, Baik and Sloyan agree that automation will simply change human-driven recruiting, not eliminate it. In fact, a recent study finds that over 80 percent of recruiters agree that automation tools can boost their productivity.
With more automation, a recruiter’s job will shift more to relationship-building rather than carrying out mundane tasks like scheduling and updating candidate profiles. And this is a good thing. Candidates’ decision-making around accepting an offer isn’t just about pay and benefits – it’s also driven by candidate experience and trust. These are built through meaningful conversations and relationships with recruiters.
The main job of a recruiter, says Sloyan, is not manually scheduling candidates, reviewing resumes, or sending templated emails. “It’s getting candidates to be really psyched about working at your company.”
Learn More
Want to learn more about how you can build a winning organization through data-driven recruiting? Visit CodeSignal to find out how you can measure technical skills effectively and objectively with its automated assessment and live interview solutions.