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June 16, 2022
4 min read
Recruitment Automation Expert at Talkpush
An automated screening process can help employers handle 100x the application volume and hire faster without increasing the recruitment team's headcount.
We understand the desire to speed up your recruitment journey and onboard quality hires as quickly as yesterday, but for many employers, this desire will continue to remain an ideal scenario rather than a reality unless they embrace innovative recruitment strategies.
Are there steps in your current recruitment journey that should be automated or even skipped entirely? Do you need help identifying these steps? You are in the right place. Let's explore screening strategies in the recruitment funnel.
This is especially true when employers have to use archaic or manual techniques to shortlist qualified candidates early on in the process.
The good news is that you can shorten this screening period to a matter of just days, even when engaging in high-volume recruitment! Technological advancements have improved and, in some cases, eliminated recruitment practices that overwhelm recruiting teams, lengthen screening periods, and lower productivity.
Implementing an effective recruitment strategy will involve speeding up time-consuming processes like phone screening and manual interview scheduling that cause delays and result in high candidate drop-offs and a longer time to hire.
Phone screening is an initial call made to candidates before an interview is scheduled. It's a way for recruiters to screen candidates for culture fit, determine if they possess the right personality and professionalism and if they meet certain expectations required for the job. Usually, these phone screening interviews last about 30 minutes. Now, imagine that a recruiter has to screen at least 100 candidates in order to schedule them for an interview - this is 300 person-hours expended on just pre-screening candidates. These valuable hours can be expended on more crucial tasks.
For global BPO company Transcom, with over 29,000 employees and facing increased hiring demands in the Philippines, ramping up hiring would almost be impossible if valuable hours are expended on phone screening candidates. See what they did differently.
Automated screening, on the other hand, involves using a tool that can administer a predetermined set of questions to applicants via their preferred communication channel like WhatsApp or other messaging channels and then carry on personalized, asynchronous, and even synchronous conversations with the candidates. This tool has to be rich and flexible enough to allow audio and video responses and also be able to communicate in multiple languages in order to provide an exceptional experience to candidates.
So what are the major differences between phone screening and automated screening? We've compiled some of them below:
In today’s mobile-first world, meeting your talent where they live is a critical success factor in your recruitment strategy. This is why many employers are embracing social recruiting as a means of meeting volume hiring demands since social media usage among young adults is very high, and the cost of attracting leads via social channels is competitively low.
However, the number of leads attracted via social channels, although very high, need to be qualified before they are shortlisted. A manual process of qualifying these leads would involve downloading these leads from social sourcing channels like Facebook, assigning the leads to recruiters for processing, calling the candidates to pre-screen them, and when the candidates are not reachable, recruiters have to call them again to ensure they are screened. So for companies that use social media for hiring, although the external cost per hire (marketing costs) is comparatively very low, the process of qualifying these leads will result in a really high internal cost per hire.
With automated screening, social sourcing and candidate processing is more efficient. Leads from various social sourcing channels are centralized in the recruiting platform. Recruiters do not have to engage with unqualified leads as the recruitment tool takes care of the screening process, disqualifies candidates who do not meet set criteria, and ensures recruiters only engage with qualified candidates who meet the job requirement. The automated screening process is cost-efficient and results in lower external and internal costs per hire.
The job market is evolving, and organizations that do not adapt to changes in candidate behavior will continue to lose a considerable percentage of qualified candidates to the competition.
Research suggests that although millennials may live on their phones, they do not like to pick up phone calls for many reasons, including the fact that it is too time-consuming. More so, a phone call from an unknown number will likely go unanswered, which means candidates are not being reached.
Automating screening can eliminate the arduous task of phone screening entirely and speed up the candidate selection process.
Volume hiring comes with many challenges, including managing the number of applications received per vacancy. Automated screening can help you set parameters that will disqualify candidates who do not meet your requirements, discontinuing them from moving on in the application journey and reducing the amount of grunt work your recruiters do.
Employers who do not want to increase hiring costs can use automation to ensure that recruiters do not feel overwhelmed with the sheer number of applications received per vacancy. Automating certain stages of the recruitment process, like the screening process, can ensure recruiters only engage with qualified candidates. This frees them up to focus on other more important hiring tasks that can speed up conversion.
When faced with tight deadlines and need to be fast and detailed without sacrificing the quality of your candidate engagement strategy, automating candidate engagement can help deliver asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized conversations to candidates throughout their recruitment journey.
Even when you need to test for language ability in the pre-screening stage, a simple language test tool can be seamlessly integrated into your top-of-the-funnel hiring stage, quickly disqualifying those who do not have the desired language proficiency.
Candidates do not want to wait around for recruiters to eventually call them just for interviews. These processes can be stressful, especially if the recruitment process will require multiple video interviews in later stages. Automated candidate pre-screening reduces anxiety and gives candidates a fair chance to answer questions without feeling pressured. They can even delete their pre-screening responses multiple times until they get it right before submitting applications.
Do you need to accurately report the number of applicants who went through pre-screening and submitted applications? Your pre-screening tool should accurately represent those figures so you can make better hiring decisions. Do you have an increased number of incomplete applications? Perhaps your screening questions are too much and need to be reduced. An efficient tool can show you this valuable data at a glance.
Over the years, we've seen various recruiting technologies come and go. As machine learning continues to evolve rapidly, new generations of automated screening tools are making it easier to process applications quickly and cut down lengthy screening processes. These tools are powered by AI and can carry on automated screening interviews. Screening candidates, keeping them engaged throughout the application journey, and ensuring a great candidate experience can also be augmented via social media and instant messaging. Your automation tool must be flexible enough to integrate with your various sourcing channels, whether job boards or social media.
Companies like iQor in the Philippines integrate with Talkpush, the leading automated recruitment platform, to pool all their sourcing channels in one place, screen candidates faster, gain transparency on the performance of sourcing channels, and increase candidate satisfaction rates.
So, what can you do to ensure you are automating the right way in volume recruitment so that valuable data won't get lost in the sea of already existing tech?
We will go over factors to consider when automating your application process.
Talkpush is a recruitment automation platform that allows employers to automate their recruitment processes, engage at scale on social media and improve the candidate experience. This robust platform automates your hiring process so you can maximize your high-volume hiring results.
Talkpush captures leads from your various sourcing channels, including job sites and Facebook ads, in one place, creates a profile for each lead, and immediately prescreens them. These leads are then segmented into different folders to show those who have completed the application process, incomplete applications, qualified and unqualified candidates for easy management.
With Talkpush, you can engage with candidates at scale on social media, guiding them through the application journey, keeping them informed, and interacting with them via their preferred messaging channels, including Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, and more. With Talkpush, employers can even personalize candidate engagement even in asynchronous conversations, thus improving the candidate experience.
Want to see how Talkpush can automate your candidate screening process and improve your hiring results? Schedule a demo
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