1. Fully understand your current state – and find the areas ripe for improvement
Whether you’re ready to introduce AI and automation across your recruiting process or want to identify fast and easy wins, you’re more likely to achieve desired business outcomes if you start with a complete understanding of your current process. Enter process mining, which uses data from business systems to mine your current processes and find areas of improvement: bottlenecks, administrative drain and inefficient candidate interactions. Armed with this information, you can more objectively decide where to apply AI and automation, and even test the impact of changes before applying them to your organization.
Once you’re able to observe your current state, you can then identify which intelligent automation solutions — such as digital workers such as AI assistants — can reduce administrative burdens like gathering application data or scheduling interviews. Or, as Wick says, “Imagine having a daily digest sent to recruiters with a rundown of that day’s scheduled interviews and other top priorities. That immediately helps with prioritization.”
The typical onboarding experience also involves too much back-and-forth: Confirming salary information, start date, manager name, offer letter terms and other information across multiple parties can be streamlined and automated through intelligent systems that collect and organize onboarding data and distribute it to all parties.
By automating these dull and often repetitive tasks, recruiters have more time to do the job they were hired to do: act as advisors to the business.
Check out recruiting automation with IBM watsonx Orchestrate
2. Shorten the application process
Most organizations gather applications and resumes via career sites and online portals, where candidates have to input copious amounts of information — including re-entering basic resume information. “That can take as much as five minutes — and in today’s marketplace, those five minutes will result in too few applications,” Wick says. The improved approach, especially for jobs that are paid hourly, is to forgo a lengthy registration process chock full of form fields and file uploads and shift to what Wick calls a “soft application.”
This could include asking candidates to enter their name and contact information and answer up to five custom questions that align to a specific open role or help expand a candidate’s application to other opportunities. This process would ideally occur via text message versus a website to match how most consumers prefer to communicate with businesses today.
3. Ask only what you need to know
The recruiting cycle can be shortened by as much as 21 days for hourly wage jobs. Wick provides an example: Candidates for an hourly warehouse position are asked whether they can lift 40 pounds and if they are willing to work nights and weekends. They fill out the application in less than 90 seconds and, with the help of automation, are directed to schedule an interview or to the right recruiter for follow-up. Wick says that when this effort is applied to 50% of an organization’s job openings, the recruiting cycle can be shortened by as much as 21 days for hourly wage jobs.
4. Approach repetitive tasks like a retailer
Wick says, “People are mobile-centric,” explaining that interview scheduling should feel more like a consumer experience. Make it as easy as scheduling a hair appointment, ordering a meal, or shopping online.