How Automation Can Improve Your Hiring Practices Throughout the Candidate Experience

HR leaders are often responsible for the entire professional lifecycle of an employee. From attracting them with a job posting to easing them into retirement, HR managers help teams navigate and grow within a company. When there is healthy growth, companies often see a spike in hiring, leaving the brunt of the work to the hiring managers. 

Automating parts of the hiring process—and other HR processes—can improve productivity, efficiency, and overall happiness in your HR department. This leaves time to focus on community building, mediation, and creating a culture aligned with your mission, vision, and values. 

The Indeed Hiring Events allows hiring managers to access Indeed’s reach and expert knowledge in the job seeker market and implement automation that improves hiring workflows like screening, scheduling, interviewing, and onboarding. This automation enables hiring managers to connect with more candidates, reducing periods of unresponsiveness and improving reviews of their qualifications. 

Before automated hiring, HR managers were responsible for preparing job postings, screening, reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, coordinating follow-ups, and onboarding new employees. Automation takes many repetitive, monotonous tasks off their plate so they can focus on crafting questions that allow for better screening and hiring. 

Automation doesn’t just benefit employers—95% of candidates who complete a post-interview survey rate the experience favourably, making the Indeed Hiring Events beneficial to both parties. 

Automation can remove bias in the hiring process 

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DI&B) matter. Ethnically diverse teams tend to outperform more homogenous groups in everything from effectiveness and efficiency to quality of work and deeper engagement. Diverse organizations are also 1.7 times more innovative.

Diversity is good for employee happiness and good for business. Unfortunately, with human error, unconscious biases can occur in the hiring process. Simple aspects can be impacted, like screening processes and job requirements. These seemingly small oversights can have significant consequences—negatively impacting a company’s DI&B initiatives. 

Technology, in its purest form, is not biased. But those who implement the technology can influence it, creating AI that produces biased results. One notable example is Amazon, which found that its new automated hiring platform favoured male candidates over women. Ultimately, women were being discriminated against because the technology referenced historical employment trends, which meant leaning towards male hires. 

Amazon found the error and stopped using the platform until they could fix and prevent critical issues. Moving forward, they implemented processes to detect and audit for biases. Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate to a wariness of hiring technology. The real lesson is that human bias can translate to AI as well. 

The good news? Correcting technological biases is more attainable than fixing them in people, making an automated process more equitable. 

Automation allows for culture building and employee happiness

Employees leave their job when they’re unhappy. It’s one of the top reasons, second only to unfair pay. Understanding a candidate’s alignment and qualifications for a position can reduce turnover and employee churn. 

That’s not to say hiring for culture is easy—even the best hiring managers bring their own unconscious biases to the table. But technology can assist organizations in implementing more equitable DI&B hiring practices. 

Automating tasks in the candidate experience lifecycle allows leaders to define their company culture and craft screening processes to identify alignment. Company culture is not about similar ideas and personalities coming together. Conversely, it’s about team members’ alignment with the central mission of the company and its values.