10 Ways to Bring Automation Into Your Hiring

As a Life Science recruiter, you’ll likely have a whole list of repetitive or tedious tasks on your list to complete every week. Whilst these tasks might be necessary to help you achieve your hiring goals, they shouldn’t be taking up more time than they have to – and this is where recruitment automation comes in.

69% of HR professionals using recruitment automation reported that it significantly decreased the time spent on the hiring process, with 30% agreeing that it also helped to remove potential bias from the process. Other key benefits of automating some of your recruitment activities include:

• Better communication with candidates
• Less time spent filtering out irrelevant/unqualified candidates
• Better quality hires
• Less chance of qualified candidates slipping through the cracks
• More personalised candidate experience
• Quicker time-to-hire

In this article, we outline 10 ways you can introduce automation into your hiring process, from automating your job posting to carrying out background checks…

Posting Your Job Adverts

Posting job adverts can be a tedious and time-consuming task, but there is technology out there to help automate this. For example, PharmiWeb’s Job Scraper will automatically copy all of your jobs from a nominated source onto our job board every day, greatly reducing job posting administration. Any amendments you make to your job adverts will also be picked up by the scraper, as well as any expired roles, meaning adverts only need to be updated in one place.

PharmiWeb also uses programmatic software to ensure your jobs are being advertised in the right places, to the right people, and to further your candidate reach beyond our immediate pool of jobseekers.

Translating Materials for International Markets

If you’re hiring internationally, localising your recruitment materials into different languages can be time-consuming to manage and difficult to quality check if you don’t have people on your team who speak those languages. Recruitment technology is out there to help automate this localisation, allowing candidates to interact with you in their language, meaning all candidates receive a positive experience regardless of where they are.

This technology is available through software providers such as Tribepad which offers speech-to-text translation and transcription in 11 languages.

Sourcing Relevant CVs

To save you time from having to search through thousands of CVs to find the most relevant and qualified candidates, PharmiWeb.Jobs allows you to set up CV alerts. This means you will be notified by email as soon as a CV matching your specific search criteria is uploaded to our job board. You can then reach out to the strongest candidates straight away, rather than waiting for them to find you.

Learn more about our CV database here.

Recruiting With Social Media

When pushing out your job adverts on your social media channels, use a social media management platform such as Hootsuite to schedule these posts on all your channels. This will help you to be consistent with your posting and means you won’t have to dive into each channel to share the post manually.

You could even set up an automated feed on a platform such as Zapier which will allow your job adverts to be automatically posted to your social media feeds from your website. The important thing to remember with automating your social media posts is to analyse your results and track your engagement consistently. This way, you can put more resources into creating content for the channels that are most effective, and that have the potential to better engage your target audience of candidates.

Communicating with Candidates

80% of jobseekers said they would be dissuaded from considering another job opening at a company that didn’t give them any updates on their application status. Provide a better candidate experience by automating your application received and rejection emails and creating a template for interview invitation and job offer emails. This will make your communication with candidates faster and more consistent.

The further a candidate gets into your recruitment journey, the more time you should be spending on your emails. For example, for an initial rejection email, using a pre-written template along with a few personalisation tags is acceptable. However, if you’re rejecting a candidate who has had two interviews with you, take the time to provide some personalised feedback.

Screening Applicants at the Pre-Application Stage

At the very start of your job applications, include pre-defined questions that ask for a few absolute essentials that jobseekers must have before they proceed. An example would be, “Do you hold a full UK driving license?” If the jobseeker ticks no, they then see an automated message that prevents them from continuing their application, saving your time as well as theirs.

Screening Applicants Using Talent Assessments

To help remove bias from the application process whilst also saving you time, you could also use platforms such as Applied to automate your pre-screening. Applied uses skills-based questions to help you identify the strongest candidates based on data and insights, rather than gut instincts and what they have written on their CV. Companies using Applied have reportedly seen:

• A 4x increase in the ethnic diversity of candidates
• A 66% reduction in time spent hiring
• A 9/10 candidate experience rating
• A 93% retention rate after one year

This proves that the benefits of incorporating automation into your recruitment go way beyond saving you time and resources.

One-way Interviewing

Another way to screen applicants before the formal interview stage is through one-way interviewing. Platforms such as HireVue offer on-demand video interviewing software, allowing applicants to interview anytime, and anywhere. This removes time wasted scheduling and carrying out pre-screening calls and enhances the candidate experience by offering complete flexibility.

Interview Scheduling

Rather than going back and forth with candidates trying to arrange interview times, use an interviewing platform that allows candidates to schedule interviews themselves based on your availability.

Take a look at some of the top online interviewing platforms to use in your hiring here.

Carrying out Background Checks

Background checks can be a frustrating bottleneck in the recruitment process. You can use automation software to overcome this, using platforms like Checkr. Checkr automates background checking, allowing eligible candidates to get started in their new roles faster. Not only does this save you time, but it also improves the candidate experience. Candidates are able to track the status of their check through a candidate portal, where they can also speak to a dedicated live support team.

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Are You Looking for More Ways to Save Time on Your Hiring?

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