How to Automate your Recruitment Funnel

Many companies go about their hiring without establishing a recruitment funnel. 

However with a recruitment funnel, you could accurately target the right and best talent for your business with every step to try and secure their service planned in advance. From attracting the candidates, to interviewing, to background checking, to making an offer, to onboarding and welcoming, the candidate pool may be managed and narrowed to a handful of key talented and favoured candidates.

Getting the right talent onboard is always, and increasingly, essential. Imagine running your business with a team that doesn't have the required technical or commercial skillset, or doesn’t fit the company culture. Your business will struggle to grow. Every business has to operate with the right people in the correct positions. A well-defined recruitment funnel will help you to strive for, and achieve success.

Automating your recruitment funnel

According to McKinsey Global Institute, over half of organisations have taken actions to automate business processes. 

Having a recruitment funnel is one thing, however, managing and scaling it well is another. Recruitment automation may be able to solve that problem. It refers to the category of technology that helps businesses automate the hiring process and reduce excessive tasks. Here are three reasons that you should invest in recruitment funnel automation.

• Improve productivity - automating every step in the recruitment, and letting the software do the work, could help reduce unnecessary manual steps. If your workflow is still manual, you keep repeating steps that may sacrifice your precious time to deliver other projects. Unproductive businesses may then never catch up with their industry competitors. 

• Reduce cost-per-hire - recruiting candidates with an optimised workflow implies fewer resources and managing the precious time spent on the process.  Fewer dedicated resources could be translated into reduced costs related to your hiring process.

• Reduce time-to-fill - A well-oiled recruitment funnel, powered by automation, would naturally speed things up, possibly reducing the legacy eight-week hiring cycle. As a result, hiring will be faster, but candidates' slippage will also be significantly reduced.

How to achieve hiring funnel automation 

Optimising the hiring funnel is not an arduous task. Here are three easy steps to achieve automation.

1. Evaluate the effectiveness of each step in the process

Every business could have different recruitment funnels but follow the same progression. 

What does your business need to do to successfully get the right person at each step of the recruitment funnel? First, standardise each step, with clearly defined accountabilities, and define metrics for each stage. Examples of metrics include hits on your company job page and related conversion rates, rounds of interviews, time taken for background checks, the acceptance rate of offers etc. Then, regularly visit and trend the metrics, and evaluate the effectiveness of each process step.

2. Reduce unnecessary workflows first

Once you figure out the inefficiencies across the process steps, identify unnecessary workflows and discard them. If a certain workflow delivers little or no benefit, don’t do it. Repeat the review over each step to pursue actual overall effectiveness. Resource-sapping and ineffective workflow tasks are not conducive to growth. 

3. Fully integrate recruiting automation technologies into the hiring process 

Reducing workflow inefficiencies once is not enough.  Your goal is to continuously improve and achieve effectiveness and efficiency in recruiting new talent. After eliminating redundant work, you can then integrate recruitment automation technologies across all steps of the recruitment funnel. There are a number of software and service options available for each recruitment step, including candidate sourcing, interview scheduling, CRM, ATS, background checking, and onboarding and welcoming new candidates.  Choosing the right interconnected and complementary software and service options throughout the recruitment funnel is just as important as selecting the right candidate. Making the right choices, and continually reviewing their relevant competitive strengths, helps you achieve better results in the short-term, and over the medium to long term, IF the right focus and review cycles are planned and maintained. 

You can automate background checks. 

Traditionally, background screening can easily take weeks. However, you don’t want to lose quality candidates just because the background checking process is protracted. Veremark provides automated, up-to-date and real-time notifications about candidate background checks on versatile and easily accessible reports on its mobile-first digital platform. As a result, you can accelerate your time-to-fill and get them on board quickly.

Conclusion

Optimising the recruitment process of your business has become indispensable if you seek to advance your competitive advantage by effectively employing top talent. Background screening is a critical area of the recruitment funnel that cannot be overlooked, as a large part of the company’s hiring success, culture, brand and revenue growth success comes with it. Winning in the hyper-competitive global market, across different vertical sectors,  entails choosing professional new talent acquisition technologies and services that fully integrate across your entire, and constantly improving, recruitment funnel.