If you’re finding that your college is missing out on great candidates because your hiring process is too slow, recruitment automation is the strategy to look into.
Hiring involves a whole lot of admin, and just keeping on top of it all can slow you down to the point that by the time you’re getting round to sending out interview invites, your best candidates have already accepted a job offer at another college.
With the right education recruitment software, you can easily automate some of the most time-consuming admin tasks in your recruitment workflow. That way, you can focus on selecting the best candidates for your roles before someone else snaps them up.
Here are some recruitment automation examples you can use to take over some of the most admin-heavy stages of the recruitment process.
1. Posting job adverts
Promoting your job advert once a vacancy goes live is a task that can take anything between 20 minutes and around 3 hours to do. It all depends on how smart you are with your process (and how much your recruitment software can help you)!
For a start, using an Applicant Tracking Software that provides best practice job templates for different roles will half the time it takes to post your vacancies. With the right recruitment software, you can automate job advertising from the get-go using pre-built, SEO-friendly job templates based on your vacancy’s job title, as well as create, save and manage your own templates. Multi-academy trusts can even upload trust-wide templates for a centralised and consistent approach to job adverts.
But it’s at the sharing your job advert stage that you can really save yourself hours of work using automation. It’s no secret that the best way to get the word out about your vacancy is to post it across as many platforms as possible (for example, on education job boards, across your social media channels, etc.). But logging into each individual platform to upload and share your advert is time-consuming admin that no busy hiring manager needs.
If you’re using recruitment software that has a multi-channel vacancy broadcast feature, you’ll be able to post your job advert across multiple platforms with just a few clicks. Once you’ve used an automation feature like this, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to get anything done by handling the process manually.
2. Sourcing CVs
Once a vacancy is live and promoted across all the main education job boards, most recruiters’ next step would be to start sourcing candidates who suit the role. But the reality is, no educational facility has the resources for this sort of proactive candidate sourcing. There’s a reason why some agency recruiters focused entirely on sourcing – because it’s hard!
But the good news is, this is where your recruitment software automations can save you a whole lot of time and effort. If you have a college Talent Pool in your ATS, you can filter by subject or role name and the software will automatically pull relevant CVs from your existing database and present them in your dashboard for you to review and invite to apply. That way, you don’t need to do any digging – the candidates will be brought straight to you.
Setting up activity notifications for your Talent Pool will also help you reach the best candidates fast. Rather than wasting time searching for new activity every day, you can set up notifications to alert you as soon as a great new candidate drops into your Talent Pool so you can reach out to them before another college does.
3. Shortlisting applicants
The fact that there’s a severe shortage of educators in the UK right now doesn’t make it any easier to gather and sort through applications. In fact, in a way, it can make it harder. To promote your vacancies sufficiently in a candidate-short market, you need to cast your net as wide, promoting your roles on as many platforms as possible. But the downside of this is that you have a lot of platforms to keep track of applications coming into.
But nowadays, there’s no reason for you to have to log into all your different job boards to review candidate CVs on the individual platforms. If your recruitment software has a Fast Apply feature (a mobile-optimised, online application form), this means every application will filter straight into your ATS for you to review and qualify in your hiring pipeline.
And the really excellent thing about Fast Apply automation is that it massively benefits the candidate too. Without Fast Apply, a candidate will first need to apply for the role on the job board, only to then be redirected to your college’s Career Site and have to fill out their details all over again (a process that has been shown to cause a large number of applicant drop offs - and understandably so!).
With Fast Apply, the candidate only needs to fill out their details once, as all data from their profile on the job board, will be pre-populated into the online application form – reducing the time it takes to complete your application, and reducing the chance to drop offs. You really can’t underestimate the impact automation like this can have on your application numbers.
4. Sending confirmation emails
The only way to keep candidates engaged and provide a positive experience for them is to communicate with them consistently throughout the entire recruitment process.
But sending box-ticking emails – like interview or application confirmations, and rejection emails – are all admin tasks that don’t need to be handled manually to provide a personal, human experience.
Using email automation, you can set up personalised emails that will be pre-populated with information from the candidate’s profile (like name and the role they’ve applied for), so they read as though they’ve been manually written by you.
These emails can then be triggered to go out when the candidate moves into a new stage of the recruitment pipeline – like ‘first interview’, ‘second interview’ or ‘rejected’. Once you put in the initial work of building out the recruitment email templates and setting up the automation workflow, you can leave your recruitment software to do its thing, saving you hours of email admin.
Start using these recruitment automation ideas today
All of the recruitment automation examples in this article can be set up in FEjobs’ education recruitment software. To learn more about how your college can start using recruitment automation to massively save on admin time when hiring educators, get in touch today
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.