How to create a better candidate experience through automation and AI
“A great candidate experience starts with a great recruiter experience.”, Bill Boorman once told me. So true, right? If recruiters have more time and space, they can create a better candidate experience, linked to hard financial business returns.
Many candidate experience projects will fail as they only look at it from a candidate's experience (or want to copy a consumer experience). They request recruiters to either alter the workflow or increase their workload, therefore, removing all chance of success. Instead, the first step is to remove all repetitive tasks from a recruiter’s day and embrace AI for higher quality results.
At the moment recruiters spend their time either finding the right talent by trawling through databases and sifting through applications and/or in the line to support the hiring managers through arranging interviews, giving interview advice and other useful yet not really candidate experience enhancing activities.
That’s where automation and artificial intelligence can make a real difference:
- Self-learning search & selection tools like Pocket Recruiter create ever-improving shortlists in as little as 20 minutes.
- Chatbots like Jobpal can answer candidate questions 24/7 and take over the first level communications.
- Extensions like Calendly and MixMax help candidate choose interview slots without a recruiter having to negotiate via email with both candidate and hiring manager (I understand that some organisations won’t allow extensions to be added).
All of the above (and you could add others such as CandidateID and ResourcingInsight) enables recruiters to have more time and space to advise and consult with candidates and hiring managers and find solutions based on their real needs and motivations. It reduces the time of the overall talent acquisition funnel. At Pocket Recruiter, for example, we have not only seen the time to shortlist reduce dramatically but also time to offer for C-Level roles reduce to 11 days. Subsequently, increased automation creates more satisfying jobs for recruiters utilising emotional intelligence and creating thinking. These jobs, which rely more on the innate human skills of recruiters, are therefore less likely to be replaced soon by robots.
For this to be successful, active, forward-looking and open-minded recruiters are ideally part of the team evaluating, choosing and launching the tools.
If you want to create a better candidate experience, start with creating a better recruiter experience. That is an important step that underpins all other activities and ensures a sustainable improvement in candidate experience.
This article was first published here.
Founder | Executive Coach | CEO Advisor specializing in leadership coaching and strategic planning | Musician
7 年Outstanding! AI and automation conversations are popping up more, and more in business.
I bring skilled people together to build the Future!
7 年This brings my (our)daily hassle to the Point. And isn′t this the result everybody is complaining about? Too many recruiters abused being a Database Click dummy. Mostly it is not the fault of the recruiter but of the Company they are working for. I′ve been fighting battles over battles to get out of the "common recruitment cycle" and be able to be innovative instead!
More signal, less noise, with Recruiting Brainfood
7 年I'm believer. AI will not replace humans (yet) but that is not the promise - skeptics seem to forget this. Definitely value in several parts of the recruiting workflow - anything that involves scheduling, note taking, admin etc. Get a robot to do it.
Chief Growth Officer @ TAtech | Founder & Chairman of the NORAs
7 年With the profusion of tech now claiming to be some form of AI, many people are forgetting that the purpose behind each tool is to make life more efficient and effective for recruiters and candidates alike. It stands to reason that the more you improve the recruiter experience, the more time they have to provide an improved level of experience to candidates, through better engagement, faster hiring processes, and more human contact. Of course the improvements in accurate hiring, and speedy processes could just as easily mean each recruiter can then handle more work, and be more productive with their time. That choice will fall to the recruiter and/or their employer. Either way, automation of the duller parts of the recruitment process feeds the enthusiasm of recruiters with better hit-rates, which then has a knock-on effect to candidates themselves.