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    5 Automation Habits of Highly Effective Recruiting Teams 

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    In a talent-short market, having a consistently engaged talent pool sets recruitment firms apart from their competitors. Thankfully, cutting-edge automation tools are helping recruiters to engage, nurture, and, ultimately, place top-level talent into new roles at the pace and scale demanded by their clients. In fact, according to Bullhorn’s aggregated data, agencies that use automation have a 64% higher fill rate and submit 33% more candidates per recruiter than those completing tasks manually. How are firms making the most of automation to see these incredible results?
    Here are five habits of Bullhorn customers who leverage automation to create an engaged talent community that is excited to work with them in the short and long term.
    1. Engage regularly with talent
    According to our recent survey of 2,000 candidates, the number one reason talent becomes frustrated with recruiters is poor communication. Automation enables recruiters to manage communications more effectively and to keep candidates informed at every stage of the process.
    Many firms already use automated emails, surveys, and text messaging in the recruitment process. However, recruiters need a tightly integrated tech stack to guarantee that they’re able to gather handy information across every channel, as this is essential for personalization and for generating reliable talent insights.
    Recruiters can send occasional feedback requests through automated messages to new hires, those nearing the end of their contracts, or people that have been in a job for a while. These timely interactions will ensure recruiters stay top of mind and will pay dividends once candidates start looking for new jobs – without the burden of conducting manual ‘busywork’.
    Furthermore, AI-based automation can significantly improve the matching process by intelligently recommending candidates for jobs and jobs for candidates. This is particularly useful for temp or contingent workers, whom recruiters can quickly redeploy into newly available positions as soon as their contracts end.
    It’s also important to note that most recruitment firms have numerous candidates in their databases with whom they don’t engage regularly. Using AI, you can stay in touch with them over time and give them content by suggesting jobs, articles, and tips. It’s also a way to notify them that you want to keep their personal data in your database. However, under GDPR, you need to delete their data if they request it since candidates have the “right to be forgotten”.
    2. Improve data health
    Recruitment teams will always have to collect, store, and analyze data in order to succeed – and it’s something to avoid doing manually, especially on a large scale, as siloed, error-filled data can create just as many problems as unified, clean data can solve.
    With the right automation, recruiters can streamline data management and compliance tasks. These include anonymizing candidate records and updating job, company, and contract status for all the records within the applicant tracking system (ATS).
    Declutter your ATS by using automation to identify outdated records, people with no contact information, or records without activity to speed up searches. To make sure you are GDPR-compliant, your ATS must have all its processing activities governed by a contract under EU legislation.
    Don’t forget that internal reminders are an integral part of data collection – remind recruitment teams to send an early message to new contract starters to get feedback on their well-being and work conditions. Unlike traditional recruitment methods, automation simplifies mass communication with candidates.
    3. Stay organized
    Automating simple tasks within the ATS like notes and alerts gives recruiters back valuable time to spend on building candidate and client relationships. With so many candidates competing for so many vacancies, this solution is invaluable for staying organized.
    It also helps recruiters to set interview reminders and let applicants know whether they’ve been accepted or rejected. Importantly, if a candidate has been offered a position and it falls through for whatever reason, you can contact other suitable job seekers and fill the job quickly if your database is up to date.
    4. Streamline onboarding
    The ability to automate paperwork eases the process of onboarding talent. This is especially relevant for recruitment firms working across different locations and industries, where there might be different laws on taxes and compliance. Companies also have different policies on harassment, pay, benefits, company culture, and other aspects they want extra documentation on.
    A well-defined, automated onboarding system tailors processes to different types of hires and mitigates hiring risks. Back-office mistakes not only distract from an employee’s productivity, but mistakes like worker misclassification also carry the potential risk of fines and penalties.
    5. Scale up marketing
    Automating marketing campaigns to candidates and clients across channels like web, mobile, email, and social media is extremely helpful. Equally helpful is the ability to automatically personalize your content to better communicate with specific groups and ensure everyone receives relevant and interesting offers.
    Determine the segmentations you want to use in your marketing workflows and create lists. This will help to target specific contacts with relevant content. The workflow doesn’t just engage prospects initially but is critical to establishing a sustained interaction with them. As a result, you can expect better engagement scores (and closing ratios) from clients or candidates who are actively being nurtured, instead of those who aren’t.
    Nurturing sales prospects with valuable content enables a recruitment agency’s sales team to focus on engaged leads while automatically engaging with not-ready-to-buy prospects. Some of the metrics to track include engagement score (points are added to prospective candidates’ profiles on the database each time they engage with content), pipeline revenue (income generated through lead conversions), and new lead close rate (the percentage of leads that turn into conversions).
    By Jason Heilman, Senior Vice President, Automation, AI, and Talent Experience, Bullhorn.
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      How to Embed Diversity and Inclusion into Your Recruitment Policy

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      The ‘S’ (social) in ESG campaigns is integral to any business, a lack of diversity can negatively impact growth and stifle creativity. Diverse teams generate almost 20% more revenue than those that are lacking in this area.
      Thinking carefully about the specific language used in job adverts, using blind CV assessments, and employing inclusive interviewing techniques can all help businesses embed diversity and inclusion into their recruitment policies.
      With almost one-third of jobseekers and employees have said they would not apply to a company where there is a lack of diversity among its workforce, it’s time that businesses start to scrutinize their recruitment policies.
      Think about the job advert
      Pay attention to the nuances in recruitment communication to ensure what is written is inclusive and unbiased.
      Job adverts should avoid phrases such as “competitive nature” and “aggressively determined” in favor of truthful descriptions of competency, these phrases are also typically ‘male-coded’, so might deter female applicants from applying. Similarly, complex jargon and specialist terms can also overwhelm applicants. Adverts should be as simple and to the point as possible.
      The use of equality and diversity statements in job adverts can aid in creating an inclusive atmosphere from the very start of the recruitment process. One study found that job adverts with an empathetic diversity statement left 71% of potential applicants with a positive impression of the hypothetical employer.
      Similarly, awards such as ‘The Times Top 50 Employers of Women’ can be mentioned on job applicants to reassure minority applicants that they are welcome to apply.
      Blind CV assessment
      The Department for Work and Pensions sent out applications to 1,000 job vacancies with 2/3 containing names typically associated with a certain ethnic group. Results showed that ethnic minority applicants needed to send out 74% more applications in order to generate the same success rate as those with White sounding names.
      Removing names, ages, genders, and postcodes from CVs before they are assessed can remove opportunities for bias to enter the recruitment process. A number of top employers adopt this technique, including the UK’s Civil Service.
      Championing diversity and inclusion is not just about CV blind initiatives. It’s a complex and multifaceted agenda.
      Keeping an eye out for opportunities to learn more about diverse talent pools should be a priority. At Totum Partners, we host a series of successful diversity and inclusion webinars, such as: ‘How to create the most diverse firm in Britain’.
      Inclusive interviewing
      Once a candidate is at an interview, the best way to minimize bias is to combine a number of efforts, there is no magic bullet approach.
      Standardizing the interview questions in a structured manner will allow the employer to focus on the candidate’s skills that will determine their ability to perform the job. Unstructured interviews are difficult to compare, making it more likely that personal factors will infiltrate the hiring decision.
      Sometimes called a “mental shortcut”, affinity bias is common. This means we gravitate towards people who we feel are similar to ourselves. Training modules and workshops are a good way to generate self-awareness of your own biases.
      The importance of succession planning
      Employees should be able to see diversity all the way up an organization. Last month it was reported that 2 in 5 Black employees have left their job because of a lack of diversity.
      Initiatives that only focus on entry-level recruitment leave BME employees without anyone to look up to. Since 2018, among the Fortune 500 boards, of the 974 seats filled by new directors, 80% were by White directors, this is an example of bad succession planning.
      Organizations should consider lateral workplace diversity when looking at how to progress talent internally. Firms that ignore this form of conscious inclusion, will soon be left behind, especially considering the escalating numbers of employees quitting their jobs in the UK in recent months.
      Accountability
      Having awareness of the benefits that diversity brings to the workplace is important, but actions speak louder than words.
      As a recruitment firm, Totum is committed to questioning candidate lists that show a lack of diversity. Feedback on a BME candidate that reads “something was not quite right” needs to be followed up for factual feedback. Too often this behavior goes unquestioned.
      This is embedded into the Race Fairness Commitment that Totum is a part of. The Commitment pledges all members to engage in activities to ensure equal access to opportunities for all candidates.
      Calls for diversity and inclusion will grow louder in 2022. Deloitte’s 2018 Millennial Survey demonstrated that diversity is integral to workplace loyalty, with candidates saying they are more likely to stay with an employer for over 5 years if there is diversity in the workplace.
      Employers must be aware of how to entrench diversity and inclusion into their recruitment policies, or both their business and colleagues will suffer. CV blind assessments, inclusive interviewing, and succession planning should be a staple in any recruitment process in 2022 if businesses want to take this agenda seriously.
      By Deborah Gray, Director at Totum Partners.
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      3 Reasons Why We’ll Continue Remote Interviewing Post Pandemic 

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      Interviewing has gone remote. While some think this is temporary, it’s actually the future.
      When the pandemic began, businesses were focused on putting their heads down and weathering an uncertain economic environment. For many, this meant a temporary freeze on hiring. As things thawed, hiring came back; but this time, it was remote.
      A Gartner poll found that “86% of organizations were incorporating new virtual technology to interview candidates” by the second month of the COVID-19 pandemic. This mad scramble to integrate new interviewing tools was, for some, disorienting; but in tech hiring, it’s been a godsend. While we still appreciate face-to-face interaction, the digital nature of remote interviews comes with so many benefits that we won’t be whiteboarding coding challenges with candidates ever again. Here are three reasons why:
      1. Less Work; More Data
      I work in tech and love data. Tech companies evangelize harvesting data wherever possible, but before the pandemic, interviews were a data dark spot. Most of the information conveyed lived either in the mind of the interviewer or via their notes. Even if there were coding assessments that added a quantitative element to the interview, these were often done on whiteboards or pieces of paper that then needed to be digitally transferred. The result was that interviewers often spent an extra 30 minutes simply capturing what had already transpired.
      Today, the entire process is digital, which means that so much more data is automatically captured, and it’s now being put to use. We have transcription tools and video recordings that make reviewing the interview that much easier. According to HackerEarth’s State of Developer Recruiting 2020, 56.9% of recruiters said a major benefit of remote interviewing came from pair programming with a collaborative code editor, as this automatically captures and assesses a candidate’s coding skill in a collaborative, work-like environment. We even have automatic feedback generators that request performance input after specific questions. These are then compiled into an after-action report that simply needs to be edited rather than written from scratch.
      This means that interviewers spend less time writing and more time carefully weighing a candidate’s skill. Starting digitally puts all the data at our fingertips and allows us to make the most informed decision. Instead of a data dark spot, remote interviews are now richer than a resume.
      2. Geographic Flexibility
      There’s no question that tech has a talent shortage. Only 60% of all tech positions are filled. When we were dependent on in-person interviews, we constrained our talent pipeline even further. With tech roles only becoming more important over time, we can’t think locally about tech hiring anymore.
      The pandemic opened up new talent reserves in geographically diverse locations. We can now hire anyone from anywhere. According to HackerEarth’s State of Developer Recruiting 2020, 50.6% of recruiters say that remote interviews are beneficial due to their logistical flexibility. A further 40.4% said they saved significant time. Remote interviews with built-in features like pair-programming and real-time code editing, which now constitute 11.1% of all remote coding interviews conducted, have basically solved the problem of onboarding the most qualified candidates regardless of location.
      There is now a bigger pool of tech talent that can work from anywhere, and assessing them remotely has never been easier. In fact, 30.7% of recruiters said that remote hiring had actually increased their talent funnel. As the global workforce becomes even more accustomed to remote work, this means that remote interviews will be a feature of the hiring process for years to come.
      3. Reduced Bias
      57.6% of enterprises have placed extra emphasis on hiring for diversity in 2020. But as much as we love meeting candidates face-to-face, first impressions are often clouded by personal biases that can unintentionally limit diversity. Recruiters and hiring managers tend to prefer candidates that mirror their own backgrounds in what has been termed by researchers “Looking Glass Merit.” While interpersonal and other soft skills are absolutely important, face-to-face interviews sometimes overvalue them relative to hard skills.
      Thankfully, remote interviews add a layer of separation that gives interviewers input on things like body language without placing undue influence on them. While 10.2% of recruiters at SMEs say that challenging unconscious bias is still a major pain point, and 13% of recruiters are specifically choosing assessment tools that help eliminate bias in the interviewing process.
      One way to combat this problem is to mask personally identifiable information (PII) during remote interviews so a candidate’s skills can speak for themselves. This means things like their name, gender, academic background, etc. are hidden during the interview itself, so the interviewer’s impression of a candidate is solely based on their skills.
      A Remote Interviewing Future
      Even after a vaccine is widely available and things start to return to ‘normal’, we won’t be looking back at how we used to hire. We may still meet candidates for in-person interviews from time to time, but will certainly continue to use digital interviewing tools for a better interviewing experience. Pair programming is just better on a computer, and we shouldn’t want to go back to the days of whiteboards and hand-written notes.
      Today, tech hiring is more competitive and geographically untethered than ever, so we need to make the interviewing process as convenient and flexible for candidates as possible. In the end, remote interviewing saves the company and the candidate time, and more importantly, allows interviewers to limit bias significantly relative to in-person interviews. These more objective interviews are helping managers create the best tech teams where only skills matter.
      By Sachin Gupta, CEO of HackerEarth.

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