Your Gateway to Top Talent: How to Automate Social Media Recruitment

Due to the pandemic, the number of candidates available to change jobs is low. This is where recruiters face their biggest challenge as they have roles to fill and fewer applicants willing to change from their current jobs.   

The pressure is also expected to intensify for recruiters in the coming weeks, as restrictions ease. Many existing employees will begin to look for new roles as the fear of insecurity caused by the pandemic lessens. This will create further difficulty for recruiters as, for some roles, they are likely to have more applicants than is manageable in an ‘always-on’ employer branding approach to recruitment. 

This isn’t unfamiliar territory. But the pandemic has shown the extremes of two of the biggest challenges for recruiters. For some roles, you get more candidates than you can handle, and for some, too few. 

In our recent webcast with Happy Recruiter, the panelists considered why HR professionals and robots should be best friends and how they can get more capacity using the technology now available. Panelists consider how using technology and automating recruitment processes can leave more time for humans to add the human-centric value in recruitment that cannot be automated. 

What challenges within recruitment do we have today? 

Julie Lavigne, Digital Recruitment Guru at Digital Talent Hunters discussed on the recent webinar that she believes the biggest challenge for recruiters is finding the right talent. And this can be said for pre, during, and post-COVID. She noted that there needs to be a different approach as to how recruiters find, target, and persuade talent, and understanding this has made the difference for her and her team. 

The panelists also talked about the need to think about candidate needs and wants. In our mobile-first and digitally native worlds, candidates are expecting their job searching experience and recruitment processes to follow the same seamless, “one-click”-type setup that most of their daily interactions are like – whether it’s mobile banking, online retail, or Netflix – candidates expect instant gratification and to have that consumer-grade experience. Julie spoke about how finding and applying for jobs should be as simple as sharing a picture with friends.  

Recruiters need to picture the candidates’ activity online and the steps they need to take to their job, from creating an account on a complicated ATS and uploading a CV from your 5-inch mobile phone to the first day on the job.   

We live in a world of speed with fast answers

Julie Lavigne, Digital Recruitment Guru, Digital Talent Hunters

Liviu, Co-Founder of Happy Recruiter, considered that a big part of the stressful steps, both for candidates and recruiters can already be solved by technology. Starting from reaching people automatically, screening them, nurturing their experience in the early stages, (where the risk of ghosting is the highest) and understanding what goes right and what goes wrong in a recruitment process can all be aided by technology, he told the audience.   

Using technology and automated chatbots for recruitment – the pros 

Liviu asked the audience to think about their day – “with the robots you have used already, starting from the coffee machine to the navigation app that drives us to the office and the emails that replace a lot of the activities we, as humans, used to do back in time.”   

Skepticism around technology – you’re not alone 

We see lots of tech initiatives promising the world and the sky

Liviu Livanu, Co-Founder, Happy Recruiter

Julie spoke about her belief that recruiters can be skeptical of technology through fear of the unknown and the sense of relinquishing some control. “I understand it can be frightening to have a first screening done by a recruitment bot, for example” Julie told the audience. She noted that this is where a “phygital” approach is really important. The technology can automate and speed up the initial stages in the recruitment process, but then the human interaction is still important in the secondary stages.

She went on to consider where some additional concerns may stem from. “A bot for example does not pay attention to name, gender or age… there is also something to be said concerning inclusion and diversity using these tools. Of course I understand these arguments. If you start using technology that has no scientifically proven base, or has been build quite randomly or on biased data, things become dangerous, but isn’t that the same with an unskilled biased HR person…? I think the main point is to search for help in HR tech for some part of the processes, but always to be verified or completed by humans.” 

Liviu discussed his appreciation for why recruiters might be skeptical about technology. “Definitely we see hundreds of tech initiatives promising the sky and we all see recruiters with success stories and recruiters not happy. At the same time, what the recruiters usually are skeptical about is not only about the technology but mostly the way new tech can integrate with existing flows. In most of the initial discussions we have with recruiters, it always starts from understanding where the organization stands in terms of digitization and what are the chances that the innovation will land in the HR department before the organization is ready.”  

Watch the webinar to find out how they believe you can implement and integrate technology effectively and some further benefits of what automation in recruitment can do for you.

A glance into the future of Automating recruitment

Looking to the future, Julie told the audience that she believes many parts of recruitment (search & selection) will be influenced by new HR tech such as AI tools to check soft/hard skills, or to map the different kinds of intelligence, to find out when someone is ready to change jobs & in what company culture or drivers he/she fits best. As well as chat and recruitment bots automating a big part of this process.

“I believe tech and transformation work best when combined with a human person backing up the process or taking over the process at a certain point. To add a well-needed layer of advice, coaching, guidance, empathy to the journey. To make it a real experience.” she also commented.

And for Liviu, he believes “the future of recruitment will be fast and happy, with candidates finding jobs and recruiters managing to process the applications in hours. When we were recruiting, a few years ago, having 500k interviews in a year was, for a mid-size agency, a dream. The chatbots can do that with no effort… to survive and thrive, the recruitment future is definitely digital, with automatic tools to increase efficiency at any possible step in the process.”

Both panelists agreed that technology can really improve the inclusivity within recruitment and there are many other pros for recruiters when it comes to automating processes, but recruitment will never become unmanned.

Featured Presenters:

Liviu Livanu, Co-Founder, Happy Recruiter

Liviu is an experienced former HR recruiter and learned the hard way what the recruiters need to be happy by doing recruitment. In 2017, together with a team of experienced recruiters, launched HappyRecruiter.com and Dora, the recruitment robot.

Julie Lavigne, Digital Recruitment Guru, Digital Talent Hunters

House of HR is constantly redesigning the world of human resources management according to the needs and opportunities that arise across geographic and disciplinary boundaries. In March 2017 they received the award for Innovative Hiring Practices from Great Places To Work. Julie works closely with a team of driven colleagues in the domains that fascinate her: (digital) recruitment with a physical approach and a great deal of attention for customer & candidate experience.

Watch on-demand now!