Automation in Staffing: 4 Ways Firms Can Harness Automation Now and in the Near-future
With the global talent shortage reaching its highest level in over a decade, employers are struggling more than ever to fill open positions. According to Bullhorn’s Global Recruitment Insights and Data (GRID) research, recruiting professionals identified tight talent pools as the top hiring challenge of 2022.
Fortunately, technological innovations are constantly changing the way staffing professionals do their jobs. With the help of major tech advancements like automation, recruiters are able to ensure they’ve found the perfect candidate for any role. And this just one of the many possible uses for automation in staffing.
While some firms have already adopted automation to aid in running their businesses, many staffing firms have yet to make this leap in performance. Here are four ways you can implement automation now and in the near future.
1. Find available and passive candidates
Is it easy for you to source interested passive candidates? With the U.S. unemployment rate at 3.6 percent, the unfortunate answer is probably not, because the best candidates for a job are not always the ones looking. Passive candidates make up 70 percent of the global workforce, so it’s important to have a good strategy to source them.
Automation helps streamline the process. Automation-powered applicant tracking systems already exist and assist in sorting through a large applicant pool of candidates, and the power of automation to screen passive candidates effectively will only continue to improve. Automation can screen for passive candidates that are most likely to respond based on how long they’ve been in a role, if they’ve been promoted recently or at all, and how well the firm is performing, all while removing any potential for bias.
2. Anticipate market skill demand shifts
Technological innovations are not only changing the nature of our work but also have the ability to anticipate which skills will be in demand in the future. Automation is impacting almost every job sector, displacing workers along the way whose roles involve repetitive tasks that could be replaced by technology.
But automation will also create millions of new jobs and will be able to use algorithms to analyze market behaviors and environmental situations to better predict what skills will be needed in the future and in what locations. With enough anticipation of a set of skills in demand, staffing firms may soon be able to combat a particular job need before it becomes a shortage. On top of predicting market uncertainty, recruitment automation will even be able to predict how likely an employee is to quit their job. All of these next-generation capabilities will allow automation to determine what jobs are needed and who is open to filling them.
3. Craft better job listings
Automation is already replacing many portions of the job process, so why not let it write a killer job posting, too? Staffing professionals are already able to leverage automation to screen and schedule interviews, predict matching and redeployment, and for VMS order intake and time processing, but soon automation will assist in crafting a great job posting too.
Language analysis tools can help craft the ideal messaging to drive responses for a position while eliminating any potential for gender-coded words, unnecessary or confusing jargon, and racial bias. Automation also has the capacity to independently make tweaks to see how the adverts perform differently. With automation-assisted job listings, firms can begin eliminating recruiting bias from the earliest stage of the hiring process.
4. Assess customer risk
How is your firm assessing customer risk? Imagine never losing an unhappy client to a communication error because your applicant tracking system flags it for you. This is already a feature of the best applicant tracking systems, and these abilities will only further develop as automation progresses. While firms have always used massive amounts of data to make risk-averse decisions, the cognitive ability of automation will allow for tech to learn along the way, detecting patterns to help users make decisions that may have once fallen into the gray areas of human reasoning.
Through predictive intelligence, automation can positively impact your staffing firm’s ability to assess risk management. Automation can flag potentially at-risk clients for your recruiters and salespeople before they become a problem. Together, recruiting pros and tech will be able to identify and assess customer risks that were previously invisible.
Automation will continue to change the way recruiters work. Staffing professionals who embrace the next generation of solutions built on automation will free up many hours in their day allowing them to shift their focus to building real authentic relationships, something automation alone can never do.
Interested in learning more about all automation can do? Learn about what Bullhorn customers have accomplished on the journey to automating one billion tasks.
