Evolution of recruitment automation

It’s hard to be a good recruiter, by the way. The good recruiter has to always trim the sails to the wind looking for the rare talents, she/he also has to engage the capricious candidates and catch hire ‘em. Certainly, a skilled recruiter has to do it all quickly, numerously and diversely.
HR professionals of various companies have reached the different levels of recruitment automation seeking the bonus way to increase the sourcing results.
I have even developed my own concept of systematization of hiring managers by the principle of being attached to technical progress.
Level #0. Handwork. A lot of.
Records in the massive notebooks, personal organizers and countless phone talks — that’s what recruiter’s reality had been like before the Internet era came. It was Ok then, but not now. If your working style is still like that, you should teleport yourself to us urgently — just 20 years forward 🙂
Level #1. Individual digitality.
Excel + Google Calendar + folders full of CV files on PC
These were the first electronic tools along with wire mouse each recruiter grabbed right after evolving from the previous stage. I would say, every newbie in recruitment should try to work this way at the start to feel despair inconvenience and will for changing the hiring process into more effective mode.
Not for a long time! Just week or two would be enough actually. Then it’s time to look for the proper recruitment automation solution.
Level #2. Communal digitality.
Shared Google Spreadsheet + Google Calendar + Google Drive with CV files
Clever recruiters quickly realized that they can achieve greater results only by acting in flock teams. Thanks to Google, the appropriate cloud based solutions were released just in time. The tools were undoubtedly useful and helped HR professionals a lot at the time, but were not aimed for recruiting originally.
As it usually happens, development of the HR industry caused new demands to distribute tasks among recruiters, to hand over the data if needed, to provide interchangeability and track the hiring effectiveness.
This level together with the previous ones can be referred to as “training”.
The general problems with all the mentioned tools are low usefulness and little help they give compared to the rising demands of the industry. The rivalry on the market is rising too.
Level #3. Homemade software.
Some employers (as a rule, those were IT companies) had despaired by searching the proper solution for their requests and decided to develop their own applicant tracking systems.
There were many software companies that tried to make ATS for themselves at odd times and failed. The matter was they didn’t pay enough attention to the real scope and complexity of the task. No wonder, that every do-it-yourself solution for recruitment rarely was released at all or it was launched as a kind of MVP intentioned to be completed on the run. Then (all of a sudden!) it appeared to be very unprofitable to develop ATS for one given company’s needs.
Quite not the same for vendors distributing professional software for recruitment only. They constantly upgrade their products along with improving features, UI and UX, because of the high competition on the market.
Surprisingly, numerous businesses refuse to leave this particular level for the more efficient one because:

• Management of the company wants to squeeze the situation dry is hard to admit that the whole idea was wrong and all the efforts were made in vain.
• And yep, in some cases the self-made recruitment solution can interact with the corporate CRM and other software better than any ATS by the third-party developers (Spoiler: to keep the same level of usability, one should require the implementation of the similar features from the new software vendor).

Level #4. Professional solutions for recruitment.
There are modern, intuitive and pleasant-to-look-at platforms providing to recruiters numerous advanced options for fast and easy candidate management. The recruiting skills of an HR professional still are crucial (yet, you know, they are) when hiring staff for complicated vacancies. However, usage of the special software usually brings 40-200% increase of the recruitment effectiveness, depending on how the hiring process ran without it.
Here’s good news for you! If you use professional software for recruiting you are ahead of many others already. But the ATS vendors offer different functionality realized in their solutions — how can one make the best choice?
We did some experiments on volunteers to discover the key options every professional applicant tracking system must have:

• A range of methods available to add candidates to the CV database quickly using minimal manual input.
• Accurate and adjustable search in the database.

If your software for recruitment automation don’t comply with these criteria, and moreover, has other dreadful flaws, you should look for the substitute. The transfer to the handy system will pay off really soon.
Level #5. Intelligent HR software.
Wow! That would be every hiring manager’s dream! In this case, a recruiter would get ready-to-use results of the highest quality on his/her query.
AI candidate management system is software of the future. The recruitment automation platforms vendors make great efforts to achieve to this level, but still are far from it.
Modern professional software belonging to the 4th level offers to a skilled recruiter a bunch of useful tools, which reduce the tedious routines to a minimum. The program solution of the next level would be proactive. It would ask a recruiter of the future clarifying questions, show the methods of boosting the efficiency and additional ways to solve the task, and certainly, find candidates fitting vacancies the best but wouldn’t make a coffee though.
Evolution is tough. It does require much efforts and doesn’t spare the weak. Come to the next level of recruitment automation in your company ASAP, to avoid being a victim of natural selection… 🙂 It will bring happiness to you and your business!
Vladimir Kurilo
CEO @CleverStaff