6 Tedious Hiring Tasks That Startups Can Automate
For decades now, if needed to automate your hiring process, you outsourced it to a third-party recruiter. This arrangement has plenty of benefits, but it’s costly. Established organizations with big hiring budgets can usually afford it, but it’s not economically viable for small startups, which usually hire on shoestring budgets.
Thanks to the arrival of sophisticated online applications, however, automated hiring processes have become far more accessible. These services can often do many of the things that a flesh-and-blood recruiter can do at a fraction of the cost – meaning even startups can afford to automate the hiring process.
Now that hiring automation is a realistic option for even the most cash-strapped of startups, you may be wondering where to begin. For that reason, I’d like to offer this list of six tedious hiring tasks you may want to consider automating via the right software:
1. Posting Job Advertisements.
Do you individually post your job advertisements to several job boards? If so, you’re wasting a lot of time you don’t need to. You can easily reduce the amount of time and effort you put into post job advertisements by investing in an applicant tracking system (ATS) that posts jobs for you. Many of today’s ATSs will post your jobs to multiple board at once. All you have to do is click a button.
2. Resume Screening
One of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks you will face when hiring is screening resumes. You might get 50 applications for a job, and you’ll need to manually look through each one of them when you’d much rather be working on the business.
The reality is that you don’t need to do this. If you use an ATS, you can have applicants upload their resumes directly into your system. From there, the ATS can rate and rank each candidate’s resume. Some ATSs can even generate a short list for you.
3. First-Round Interviews
Typically, first-round interviews are carried out face-to-face in your office. This cuts into your day, forcing you to set aside time to sit down with candidates and give them you undivided attention. That wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t for the fact that startups are inherently flexible and dynamic organizations. Such strict scheduling doesn’t always play well with the startup life!
4. Acknowledging and Rejecting Applicants
Research shows that failing to acknowledge and respond to candidates can damage your reputation, yet most startups probably struggle to find the time to do this as diligently as they would like to. You can automate this process by setting your ATS to auto-respond to all applicants. That way, your brand does not get damaged, and you don’t have to spend hours manually emailing every single candidate.
5. Interview Scheduling
This is my personal least favorite hiring task. Coordinating your schedule and the candidate’s schedule can be a major pain – but you can relieve yourself of that pain if you invest in an automated scheduling tool. Plenty of ATSs offer this function, so make sure you look for it when shopping around for the right ATS.
6. Reference Checking
Yes, automated reference-checking tools do exist: SkillSurvey, Checkster and VidCruiter’s VidReferencing can all automate and enhance the reference-checking process, providing you with actionable reference reports that improve your selection decisions.
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Hiring software has become so powerful, easy to use, and task-specific that almost every stage of the once manual hiring process can be automated in whole or in part. This saves the busy entrepreneur money and time and frees up more resources to plunge into the core business.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by hiring responsibilities, then it’s probably time to look into some software that can automate your stress away.