The Great Resignation has created one of the hottest labor markets in living memory. As candidates explore their options and leaders seek to fill newly vacated seats, speed-to-engagement has become one of the most critical elements of the recruitment process. Like with sales, being early to conversations with candidates improves your chances. With the average hiring cycle close to 29 days, shortening this timeframe, while maintaining the quality of the candidate’s experience, can result in big wins for recruiters.

In addition to a tight labor market, the talent acquisition process has also become increasingly digitized. Today, most candidates seek work through digital platforms, like job boards or social media networks. This has made email, phone, and text the standard means of communicating with recruiters.

Enter automation — one of the most important tools for recruiters in today’s talent market. With automation, you can speed up and scale your recruitment efforts. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to automate the multiple touches required for a good hire. Here we take a look at the benefits of automating your recruitment processes.

Automation creates an engaging, multi-touch candidate experience

Recruiters strive to deliver an engaging and personalized candidate experience as fast as possible. Once candidates are identified, it’s not enough for recruiters to use just one or two channels to communicate. According to a study by recruiting software provider Lever, it takes at least three touchpoints to get a response from a cold candidate.

“Candidate experience is probably the number one factor in determining whether someone accepts or declines a role,” says Ryan Beaudry, a talent acquisition manager at ZoomInfo. “The other factor is speed.”

Email, phone, text, and social media are all available to recruiters, but not all channels of communication are equal. The timing, medium, and pitch of your recruiting messages need careful consideration. They should weave together a cohesive candidate experience.

Here’s what an automated, multi-touch recruiting process includes:

Automated recruiting emails

Email automation in the talent acquisition process can be a huge time-saver. Automation that delivers well-constructed messages to attract new candidates and nurture them along the recruitment cycle, frees up time for recruiters to focus on interactions that require a more human touch.

Email automation that is built around solid data can have a huge impact on how quickly a recruiter is able to fill your talent pipeline. Sending candidates automated emails helps establish an initial touchpoint to get a response from candidates. Another bonus, candidates are more likely to check their phone and personal emails than a job board or social network.

Automated recruiting phone calls

Calling candidates is the next step for recruiters who want to connect with ‘non-responsive-to-email’ candidates or build another touchpoint into the workflow.

Once a solid list of ideal candidates has been established, auto-dialing can vastly improve the efficiency of the outreach process. Call automation platforms allow recruiters to access bigger call lists, connect with candidates, and leave voicemails if they cannot be reached.

Automated recruiting text messaging

According to Jobvite, people say texting is the main reason they keep their phones with them during the workday. Text has a considerably higher open rate than email. Using automated texting triggered at various points of the recruiting process can be a great way to distinguish your employer brand.

But executing all these emails, calls, and text messages is a lot of work. Without automation, recruiters can spend up to 14 hours a week doing manual tasks, especially if they have to fill multiple positions. By taking a page from the digital marketer’s playbook, recruiters can supercharge the process with more candidates at the top of the funnel and better match quality towards the bottom.

What are the benefits of recruiting automation?

Here are some of the advantages of automating multiple touchpoints into your recruiting process:

1. Scale personalization across the board

Personalized calls, voicemails, and text messages go a long way in compelling candidates to respond to recruiter outreach. Studies have shown that personalized emails garner six times higher response rates. Despite this success, 70% of employer brands don’t use personalized emails.

Personalizing your recruiting effort doesn’t have to take tons of time. The process can be automated through the use of email variables that dynamically insert information from your candidate database into emails, such as your target’s first name or their current company’s name.

2. Run multi-channel drip campaigns

Recruiters can use automation to easily coordinate outreach to elicit a response from candidates. Such a campaign might start with a personalized introductory email, followed up by a phone call to get more information about the candidate, and finally a text message that serves as a meeting reminder.

Recruiters can determine what actions and channels work best for their employer brand through testing and monitoring performance for a variety of sequences.

3. Improved candidate response rates

Using a variety of channels can help recruiters convey urgency when pursuing a candidate for a particular role and convince them to respond. Better response rates mean a more robust talent pipeline for the organization.

4. Scale recruiting efforts

In addition to saving time by not sending multiple one-off emails, recruiters can use automation to pull much larger lists of ideal candidates. They can then add that list of candidates to automated message streams, making the recruiting process much more efficient by reaching far more people.

5. Get to know candidate behavior

By monitoring responses, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and other metrics through automated candidate outreach, recruiters can better understand their targets and tailor their approach to them in real-time.

6. Build the right team

The ultimate benefit of embracing automation in your recruiting process is the stellar team that you’ll build. Hiring the right people who fit well into your organization and will stay for the long term starts with a solid recruiting process.

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Automation fuels your recruiting funnel with real-time data

Data is the fuel that drives your recruitment funnel. High-quality candidate and company information help build a list of ideal candidates. By starting with the best-fit candidates, you improve the quality of the entire recruiting process funnel.

Without accurate and complete information, efforts to acquire top talent can fall short of hiring goals. Teams that can’t reach the right candidates quickly find themselves behind the competition for filling roles.

When people change or leave jobs, their contact information naturally changes, and finding them becomes more difficult. For recruiters, the ever-changing nature of business data means that the candidate information in a recruitment database requires regular maintenance, cleaning, and appending.

Recruitment technology tools automatically organize, identify, and engage candidates amongst a constantly changing talent pool. When new candidates enter the market, or a company that you’re targeting experiences a big news event, recruiting technology can help you reach out effectively and connect.

Automate your entire recruiting process with ZoomInfo TalentOS and Engage

TalentOS is ZoomInfo’s platform for recruiters. It is a recruitment database of best-in-class data to power actionable decisions. TalentOS users also have access to ZoomInfo Engage, an automated outreach platform that enables recruiters to email, call, and (very soon) text candidates.

Engage allows recruiters to build automated communication by using Talentflows to do the following:

Build email templates and cadences directly from your primary email
Set up auto-dialing call lists
Leave pre-recorded voice messages if a candidate doesn’t pick up the call
Create multi-touch, multi-channel talent flows that can be easily duplicated and edited for other roles
Automatically add or remove candidates from email sequences based on their responses
Decide on the right amount of time in between messages
Export and upload candidates who engage to your ATS for further processing
Set up text messaging (this feature is currently in Beta and will be available soon)

“ZoomInfo Engage gives recruiters the ability to send hundreds of personalized emails at once. It really takes the manual effort out of recruiting, allowing them to broaden their reach and increase response rates,” says Christy Green, a senior product marketing manager at ZoomInfo.

Automated recruiting has the potential to drive positive business results by scaling every aspect of candidate outreach. Using TalentOS in tandem with ZoomInfo Engage streamlines your entire recruiting process so nothing falls through the cracks. Recruiters can track every interaction within the hiring process and gain visibility on talent acquisition across their organization.

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