Repairing the ‘Pitfalls’ of a Manual Recruiting Process

According to business-software matchmakers Capterra, only 26 percent of employers use an ATS to manage their hiring process. That number is much lower than I expected. Despite the various flaws of ATSs and similar recruiting software solutions, more employers may want to adopt them: Capterra also reports that companies who do use recruiting software to manage relationships with candidates are 40 percent more likely to rank as “best in class.”

We probably shouldn’t be surprised about software’s ability to improve the recruiting process. Indeed, traditional “manual” recruiting processes come with their fair share of annoying (and talent-deflecting) pitfalls — four pitfalls, to be exact. At least, that’s what the people behind ServicePRO’s work management software believe.

The Difficult Business of Manual Recruiting

Ask the ServicePRO team what’s wrong with traditional recruiting, and here’s what they’ll tell you:

• Collaboration between departments is haphazard: If you’ve ever been involved in the employer side of the hiring process in any capacity, you’ve likely experienced this firsthand. Collaboration is likely limited to whoever has a moment to spare; vital pieces of the puzzle (e.g., department managers, team leaders, etc.) rarely play as big a role as they should.
• Communication streams via email can become overwhelming and difficult to manage: With so many cooks in the kitchen, email threads quickly become messy, tangled, fractured webs of partial information, contradictory messages, and conspicuous silences. Plus, at least one person is abusing the “reply all” function.
• Cumbersome access to documents: Are you emailing resumes back and forth? Are you running physical copies between offices? Are people adding notes via post-its? Did some careless jerk — god forbid it — lose the best candidate’s resume, and now you can’t find another copy?
• Synchronizing meetings between personnel in various departments is a challenge: You thought general collaboration was bad? Try actually getting everyone into the same room at the same time. Good luck!

All of these stumbling blocks combine to drastically slow down the recruiting process, making companies less responsive to candidates. Ultimately, these delays send candidates into the arms of other, more efficient, employers who can proffer job offers before you have a chance to even phone-screen a potential employee.

This isn’t to say that traditional recruiting is totally bankrupt: after all, we know it’s important that recruiters maintain personalized relationships  with potential candidates in order to attract the best talent.

We also know that efficient hiring means using the right software to avoid the more problematic aspects of manual recruiting. What can the right recruiting software do for you? To answer that question, I spoke to Sandeep Soni, vice president of Help Desk Technology Corporation, the company responsible for ServicePRO.

4 Ways Recruiting Software Improves on Manual Recruiting

According to Soni, recruiting software benefits the talent acquisition industry in four important ways:

• Reduces time to hire: The average employer takes 25 working days to fill an open position. This is a 13-year high, and cutting it down is a top priority. The faster your recruitment process moves, the more adept you’ll become at grabbing the best candidates before other companies can entice them away from you. “Every process has a workflow attached to it,” Soni says. “Traditionally, you could have manual workflows, but our system allows [companies] to have electronic workflows, which streamline the process quite a bit.”

• Lower recruitment cost: More efficient, fast-moving workflows also lower overall recruitment costs. Your recruiters can fill positions in fewer man-hours, maximizing their time and effort. Lower recruitment costs, it must be mentioned, are also good for the company’s profit margins: “[Software] will really increase HR’s contribution to the bottom line,” Soni says.

• Reducing administrative duties: “This ties into the first two parts,” Soni says. “When there’s a lot of manual processes involved, there’s a lot of overhead cost. [Electronic systems] can free up the time to focus more on strategic business processes. Less of the printing, less of the photocopying, less of the posting, because everything is already in the system and available to you.”

• Increasing the quality per hire: “You lose top talent to your competition when your processes are slow, cumbersome, and messy,” Soni says. When you streamline your processes with the right software, you have a better shot at bringing in the best talent, which enhances the overall workforce quality.

So, if you’re still lagging behind in the technology department, now may be a good time to find the right software for your company.