With recruitment technology becoming more and more sophisticated, innovators are looking for ways to help recruiters and sourcers better manage their time and automate many of the time-sinking tasks that talent acquisition teams struggle with on a daily basis.  But the automation is going beyond simple job posting, opt-in talent network building and automated notifications and becoming more strategic to full enterprise.  It’s with these new abilities and functionality that recruiting organizations need to begin thinking more intelligently on how they use automation in their process for the recruiting goals that they want to achieve.

The important thing to remember is that automation should not be done for the sake of automation.  There are a number of recruiting areas that should not be automated and it’s up to organizations to figure out these areas.  If used correctly, the right technology in the right areas of your process can help you recruit more effectively and free up your recruiters time for more important tasks.

So when we think about automating the process, here are some areas you may want to think about:

Intelligent job posting:  When you look at most solutions that provide job posting, they will provide a quick and easy way to get your job ads to the recruiting destinations you use in recruiting (job boards, social networks, niche sites, etc.).  They will all differ on the sites supported and the recruitment metrics they provide.

Job Posting technologies are an automation method that many organizations use to help their recruiters save time with this time-consuming process.  But many technologies are going ever farther than that.  With automated job posting to free sites such as Indeed, social networks and to unlimited inventory job boards, they are trying to help recruiters automatically get the word out for their jobs.  But not all automated job posting is equal.

Depending on the job you would like to post, you will most likely have a different recruitment marketing mix for it.  For tech jobs you may use sites like Dice or StackOverflow, for marketing jobs you may use Craigslist or CareerBuilder.  In these scenarios, job distribution providers are begin to make automated job posting more intelligent by providing functionality that is smart enough to make sure newly open jobs go to the targeted recruitment mix that you’ve strategically selected and set-up.  As all your jobs shouldn’t be going to the same job destinations but a targeted selection based on the job type and category it’s part of.

Web Sourcing:  Your sourcing team is consistently doing web sourcing campaigns to find the right candidates for specific positions you are hiring for and using sites such as LinkedIn, Monster, CareerBuilder and the Open Web.  Many of these candidates that are found in these searches are then brought into a database or CRM, where you can manage outreach and workflow for the candidates.  It is in these Recruitment CRM‘s that some automation in this process is possible including being able to coordinate and run automatic searches directly in the interface and easily move the right contacts from these searches into the system.  This can help your sourcing team run more searches and screen more overall candidates.

One thing to keep in mind when selecting technology to help you manage these searches is the information you will want to pull from candidates with the given sites that you use.  There are a number of tools that provide the ability to search multiple sites at once when doing a search.  These can save a good deal of time but also can restrict the richness of the data that you can capture from each site.  The Monster and CareerBuilder databases for instance offer varying fields and information within their search API and with a single search you may lose out of some of the information as opposed to if you searched the database directly from a CRM tool.  Make sure to balance the time to the richness of the data you want to collect when automating your web sourcing through these tools.

SEO Job Pages:  This has been around for a while but many companies still don’t have Career Sites that are SEO friendly with keyword relevant job pages.  Finding a solution that enables you to automatically create and optimize every new job that you launch in your ATS can be a great way to attract more candidates to your positions and attract them when they are looking for jobs on search engines.

This is a pre-requisite for any Career Site solution that you look to implement (and is lacking in many of the ATS modules offered today).  You should also look for functionality on how to create dynamic one-off landing pages via any technology you use.

Talent Network Campaigning:  In speaking with recruiting organizations, many struggle with how to engage and consistently communicate with their Talent Network contacts.  For many of the candidates that interact with these organizations, it can hit-or-miss on the amount and quality of interaction they receive from the company.  Many recruitment marketing solutions are making it easier to strategically think about your communication process with candidates and most importantly implement it.

From action based trigger campaigns to marketing drip engagement campaigns, there are a number of solutions that can help you better conduct engagement to the different candidate populations your recruiting team interacts with.  While a good deal of your interaction and candidate experience will be determined with one on one interactions between candidates and recruiters or hiring managers, robust campaigning can be a way to fill in the gaps between these interactions and remain top of mind with candidates that are waiting for the right position to be available on your organization.

Recruitment Reporting: Slowly but surely the reporting functions in many technologies is evolving.  In today’s marketplace, it’s becoming less an issue about capturing the data (although trust me, there is still innovation to be made) and more about how to better present the data so quicker smarter decisions can be made.

With data most likely in multiple solutions for recruitment source metrics, Career Site data and CRM campaign data, organizations (and vendors in these spaces) are still trying to find ways to better integrate this data together so they can have all this data in one place and at their fingertips.  With the rise of integrated solutions and better integration between systems, the opportunity for visual and easy to use Analytic Dashboards that house all your most important recruitment data is becoming a more of a reality by the day.  It is also getting to the point, that technologies are looking more about doing the number crunching behind the scenes and determine how to better present the data needed for quick decision making.

Automation is not always the best thing to ensure you find quality candidates in your recruiting process.  You need to be able to weigh the pros and cons of automation in every step of your process and make sure to use it intelligently to help drive results in your recruitment strategy.