Automation is assisting companies across a wide range of industries, streamlining workflows and improving business outcomes. How will recruiting automation make an impact in 2023?

When it comes to automation, HR and recruitment professionals have needs that are different from many industries. However, those needs do bear some striking similarities to marketing in particular. 

There are plenty of connections between how customers expect to be treated and how candidates expect to be treated. 2023 may be the year that recruiting automation truly kicks in to address those expectations.

Why is automation so critical for hiring professionals? Let’s look at the current pipeline challenges facing recruiters:

Why you need recruiting automation

Traditional hiring and recruitment methods are not as effective as they once were, due to the changing landscape of recruitment and the state of work in the United States. Candidate experience is now driving recruiting outcomes.

Companies must adapt in order to secure top talent and avoid the costs associated with making a bad hire.  Additionally, they must figure out how to keep high-value candidates in the pipeline long enough to both identify the best candidate for the open role, and make an offer they can’t refuse.

While entry-level workers are still relatively easy to find and hire, retention is a challenge. For higher positions, the current skills crisis is significantly affecting organizations’ abilities to secure capable employees.

Recruiting automation can help fully or partially alleviate many of these issues, delivering a way to streamline the hiring process and improve candidate experience, while giving recruiters and hiring managers the precious time needed to take the measure of each candidate and arrive at a solid hiring decision.

Recruiting automation can help hiring managers select the right candidates, improve diversity, increase productivity and efficiency, and create a uniform, consistent hiring process that extends into onboarding. Here are 8 recruiting automation predictions for 2023 and beyond:

Recruiting Automation Predictions

As the need to automate the hiring process and make data-driven hiring choices has grown stronger, software and processes have been evolving to make recruiting easier, faster, and more accurate. Here are four of the most exciting, interesting, and useful developments we can expect to see continue gaining ground in 2023:

1. Chatbot support for applicants

A staggering 92% of applicants will never complete an online application they started. Reasons may vary, and include frustration with the length of the applications as well as repetitive requests for the same information in different formats.

However, many applicants simply get stuck, unsure of what to do at any given point due to non-intuitive application processes. Obviously, looking at your application itself and figuring out what is causing confusion is a must, but even with the best application process, an occasional applicant will have questions.

Worried about whether or not applicants will find chatbots an acceptable form of help? Don’t be. According to one survey, job seekers have come to terms with the idea of chatbots helping with job applications:

• 59% are comfortable engaging with recruitment chatbots during their application
• 61% are comfortable with AI chatbots administering their skills assessments
• 66% are comfortable with chatbots that schedule interviews and help with preparation

The majority of job seekers overall feel comfortable with chatbots that help to automate and streamline recruitment-based processes. Being able to answer a candidate's questions almost immediately can be key to preventing applicant drop-off in the earliest stages of the hiring funnel.

The ability to ask a basic question and have it answered promptly can help keep applicants moving forward and prevent them from abandoning their applications. Reviewing these questions can help you pinpoint what application steps are proving most difficult for applicants, and also highlight if your job descriptions are leaving out in-demand information.

2. Streamlined onboarding steps  

In one recent survey, half of the HR leader respondents said they didn't think that their company was currently effective at hiring, onboarding, and retention. If you’re doing recruitment right, these three steps are all part of one seamless, continuous process, not separate, isolated incidents.

Automated onboarding experiences are improving candidate satisfaction, new hire productivity,  and employee retention rates. Some companies may view onboarding as completely separate from the application and recruitment process, but it should be an extension of those steps.

Candidates who are extended an offer and then allowed to preview the next steps can be more excited about starting their new position and more inclined to hurry up and accept the position. Additional benefits of automated onboarding steps include:

• A 16% increase in retention rates for new hires
• A 18% improvement in initial performance
• A 52% increase in new hire retention rates  

Automated onboarding can make the simplest and most tedious parts of the process easier and faster. Employees will be able to supply their personal and payment information, choose their preferred benefits options, review official company policy documents, and get started on basic training as well as gain access to their business accounts, tools, and login information.

3. Faster, easier pre-hire processes

There are many ways that recruitment automation can make getting through various pre-hire processes smoother for both candidates and recruiters/hiring managers. 

*• Pre-hire assessments

Pre-hire assessments can be automated so that the applicant can take them online at their own convenience, with the results automatically recorded and sent to relevant parties.

• Reference checking

Tedious, time-consuming, and mostly ineffective traditional reference checking can be transformed into fast, easy, and high-value candidate checking with tools like Crosschq 360 that deliver useful data on candidates and allow clear comparisons across metrics that really count.

• Interviewing

Interviews can be scheduled swiftly and easily with an app that checks all parties' calendars and gets stakeholders in a room, physical or virtual. This promotes collaborative interviewing, helping to reduce unconscious bias in hiring and surface the next overall candidate.

The faster and more easily your pre-hire processes can be completed, the fewer your candidates will self-select out of the hiring process, and the lower your drop-off rate will be.

4. Data accessibility for better hiring decisions

We have more data than ever before on job candidates, but if most of it is buried in the applicant tracking system (ATS), it can be hard to surface the information required to make the most informed decision.

TalentWall™ by Crosschq sits on top of your current ATS and for a birds-eye view of your talent pipeline and the ability to see deeper insights into individual departments, recruiters, or candidates with a simple mouse click.

Crosschq Analytics provides more than 80 reports to help you learn more about how your recruitment pipeline is working, and how your candidates are measuring up against existing employee benchmarks for Quality of Hire.

Data on your candidates can also be tracked through each stage to ensure your hiring practices are in-line with your stated company goals in regard to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), helping you build stronger, more innovative workforces.  

It’s an accepted fact that companies with diverse teams outperform non-diverse teams by more than 30%, and this is driving 71% of HR professionals to say that achieving gender parity at their company is a priority for their organization.

Take Action Now to Stay Competitive with Recruiting Automation

Recruiting automation in 2023 will continue to gain ground as organizations realize the benefits of using artificial intelligence and automated processes to streamline their hiring funnels and keep high-quality candidates from abandoning the process.

To learn more about how Crosschq can help you adopt recruiting automation tools and platforms in 2023, contact us for a free demo