A Deep Dive into Sourcing and Recruiting Automation
I'm delighted to welcome you to this article on sourcing and recruiting automation. Today's discussion covers the general logic of sourcing automation and why it's essential to learn how to automate these processes. After reading this, you'll be able to fill positions even faster than before, which always has a positive impact on income. If you're a recruiter, you'll be able to earn more by filling more positions. If you're a recruiting manager, you'll become a more effective leader because your recruiters will fill positions faster. Clients will be more satisfied, and management will be happier, whether it's the human resources director or the chief executive officer.
The Need for Automation
In the past, there weren't many automation tools to speak of. Early attempts at implementing applicant tracking systems were often so slow and cumbersome that recruiters felt they would slow down their work rather than speed it up. On the positive side, automated staff requisition forms were a step in the right direction.
Later, more advanced systems emerged that saved recruiters a lot of time on preparing reports. These systems could also be used to send mass emails to a résumé database, integrating all the résumés a company had received over many years. This allowed for mass email campaigns to a vast pool of candidates. Throughout a career in this field, one can fully utilize various automation tools, including different sourcing automation tools, mass mailings, plugins, and so on.
What is Sourcing?
Let's start with the basics: what is sourcing? Sourcing is about searching. It's when we don't just sit and wait for candidates to respond but when we actively search for them ourselves. It's also called proactive search, active search, or direct candidate search, and it involves working with passive candidates.
At the same time, sourcing is often about finding information that isn't readily available on the surface. It's not just about going to a website, selecting a couple of filters, typing in a job title, and looking at résumés. It's a bit more than that. It's often about using search tools that most recruiters, unfortunately, aren't using yet. And it's the cheapest and fastest way to fill a vacancy.
When you're waiting for candidates to send you resumes, you might be waiting for a long time. If your company isn't super famous or international, you might not receive a huge number of résumés. This can be detrimental because you'll be choosing from just two or three candidates. If the company is a well-known, huge international one, you might get a lot of candidates, but they might be far from the most relevant ones. That's why sourcing is a tool for both small and large companies—basically, for any company.
Sourcing itself consists of several key steps: 1. Searching for candidates using X-ray and boolean search techniques. 2. Finding contacts and profile names. 3. Contacting them, often on a mass scale.
Sourcing is often not about searching one by one but rather a mass search. We're not looking for just one name; we're looking for multiple candidates and their contacts. For example, when building a sourcing system for a lesser-known company, it can be difficult to hire people because they don't understand what the company is or how it works. There are almost no responses to job postings. Sourcing helps in these situations. Thanks to sourcing, you can independently find over 2,000 candidates for each vacancy. These aren't just any candidates; these are pre-screened candidates who fit certain parameters. A mass mailing of letters offering to consider the vacancy is sent out, and among those who are interested, negotiations and interviews are conducted to select the finalist. This helps hire people for any position.
Why Automate Sourcing?
Like with any automation, it's about saving time. For example, you wash clothes at home in a washing machine—a washing machine is the automation of laundry. You can wash your clothes by hand, which will take you a couple of hours, or you can throw them in the washing machine, which will take 2 minutes. Why do you need a robot vacuum cleaner? That's automation too. You can go around and vacuum yourself, or you can start the robot. A dishwasher is the same story.
When automation is available, doing many things manually starts to seem strange. Washing clothes by hand, washing dishes by hand, or driving a car with a manual transmission now looks a bit strange because why waste your time when there's automation available? The same goes for sourcing automation.
Sourcing automation is about saving time in finding candidates, which means you can find more candidates faster. For example, a standard could be to find about 100 candidates in one day that you could message. These aren't just any candidates. If we're looking at a business analyst position, a recruiter finds 100 relevant business analyst profiles in a day on LinkedIn or other resources, finds their contacts, and prepares a mailing. These people receive a series of several emails. Some of them start responding immediately, but within a week, you get some kind of reaction from everyone. For each vacancy, you might allocate hundreds of candidates. Of those, about 30% convert into interviews, and then you end up with one finalist.
This process saves time in finding contacts. Sourcing involves various tools for finding contacts, and automation does this on a massive scale. Plus, of course, contacting candidates. Writing to each candidate individually would take a lot of time; writing to people en masse is much faster. For example, one can send out thousands of messages daily through a network of contacts. Imagine doing this manually; you would probably only send a handful of messages a day. With automation, the message-sending process can run in the background.
This leads to the selection of the most suitable candidates. Consequently, less time equals higher quality candidates, lower cost per hire, and increased brand awareness. In fact, people react positively when they see that recruiting teams are using these kinds of technological tools for searching and contacting. They are surprised and find it cool and interesting to work with you.
Important Note: Automation doesn't mean that if you have taken any plug-in or service, you have already automated. These are specialized tools, and they are a bit different. As a rule, they are for mass operations. If a plug-in opens a contact on a LinkedIn page, this is not full automation yet. If a service allows you to find all of a person's contacts, that's also not complete automation. In automation, we're always dealing with bulk processing of contacts and profiles in lists. There are many mass actions involved, and everything speeds up significantly.
Key Automation Tasks and Terminology
What tasks does automation solve? - Collecting all kinds of lists (e.g., from Google or LinkedIn search results). - Enriching the list with contact information. - Sending out emails and collecting statuses.
These are the three key tasks that recruiting and sourcing automation tools solve, and it's also where the most time is spent. When you hear about sourcing or recruiting automation, you might recognize these words. Let's break them down.
Scraping: This refers to collecting any lists from web pages to process them later. For example, extracting a list of candidates to find their contact information. But it's not just in recruiting. Scraping can be used to generate lists of any kind when you need to convert a list of something into a table or export a file for analysis by artificial intelligence. For example, one could use a tool like Instant Data Scraper to collect all search results for a product on a marketplace, extract thousands of listings, and send them to an AI chat to get the best options in terms of price and quality. These skills can even help you outside of recruiting.
Parsing: This is a bit different. It is collecting detailed information from candidate profiles for further analysis. So you end up having a copy of the candidate's profile somewhere in your system. This is what many applicant tracking systems (ATS) do. For instance, you want to have the candidate's full resume in your system, not just their job title and name. You also want their LinkedIn profile to download into your system so that various internal searches within your system would work.
Outreach: This is the process of contacting candidates. There are many terms for it: drip campaign, email chain, sequence of messages, and so on. This is also actively used in sourcing and recruiting automation. The idea is that we process candidates in bulk, all at once. One recruiter might do things manually, like sorting through resumes, while another uses automation tools for outreach.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Recruiting
Initially, automation was without artificial intelligence—just some tools that save time. Artificial intelligence allows for even greater savings, achieving more and improving work. What can artificial intelligence give us?
- Prepare job descriptions
- Source candidates
- Communicate with candidates and provide answers
- Perform initial screening
- Conduct subsequent assessments (interviews, code reviews)
- Formulate offers
- Assist with onboarding
In general, artificial intelligence is not just simple text; it can now cover a large number of processes in recruiting and sourcing. There are already many systems offering artificial intelligence, and they continue to grow. A few years ago, when AI chat tools appeared, nothing happened for a long time. But then, about a couple of years later, it was like mushrooms after the rain—suddenly a lot of things started appearing.
Here are a few examples of what artificial intelligence can help with: - Select the most suitable candidates: From your database, showing you candidate ratings using stars, circles, percentages, or something else. Some systems have external databases and can select candidates for you from their own database. - Explain candidate fit: AI can explain why a particular candidate is a good fit, which criteria they meet, and where they might have some shortcomings. - Improve job postings: Some systems can improve the job posting text, highlight what might not work well, and suggest what's worth improving. - Create assessments: Since hiring developers is an expensive process, most candidate assessment solutions appeared primarily for evaluating developers. Now they're slowly starting to appear for other professions, including various types of tests, simulators, and dialogue-based assessments. - Intelligent resume parsing: AI doesn't just extract information; it analyzes it. It can identify achievements, skills, and experience, organizing the resume more intelligently before entering it into your database. - Candidate profile evaluation: There are systems where you can import a list from LinkedIn, and the system will tell you whether these profiles are suitable for your job opening. - Chatbots: A chatbot can communicate with candidates, answer simple questions (especially for bulk hiring), pop up on the career site, process résumés, and so on.
Final Thoughts
Automation is possible where there are tasks for it. I encourage you to formulate your own tasks for automation. Specifically, think about what you would like to automate in your processes. Describe several of your current processes and identify opportunities for improvement. The next step is to go through various tools, see how they work, and what tasks they solve.
