The Role of Automation in the Recruitment Process

How will automation affect the recruitment process in the future? Just as intelligent bots and automation stand to replace millions of jobs involving repetitive tasks in various industries, the same advanced technologies pose new opportunities and challenges for the HR and recruitment industry.

Industry experts focused on collaboration and social technologies in the workplace predict that, although it will take some time to be integrated into large businesses and enterprises, technologies like bots and artificial intelligence will become commonplace in most companies by 2025.

Moreover, automation could replace at least 24% of HR and recruitment positions by 2022, based on subsequent analysis in several HR departments.

Traditionally, human resources include talent acquisition, administrative work and employee retention. According to HR.com, recruiters spend most of their time with talent acquisition, pre-screening and scheduling candidates. In reality, these tasks take more time than face-to-face interviewing candidates.

However, bots can automate talent acquisition processes. Bots can be successfully used for pre-screening research, interview scheduling, qualifying candidates, thus allowing for more time for HR personnel to interview qualified candidates and make better hiring decisions.

In a recent survey aptly titled The Global Role of the Recruiter, a majority of recruiters interviewed said that the prevalence of big data, artificial intelligence and bots had changed the way they recruit, providing valuable insights, freeing up more time, and improving candidate sourcing with higher quality leads.

Automation can ultimately result in HR focusing on more personal interactions and higher strategic work – the so-called human aspect of the business. Recruiters remain an important part of the recruitment tasks, for example, face-to-face interviewing, due to the required soft skills like empathy that cannot be replaced by bots – at least not in the immediate future!

View more on the source and more recruitment stats here.

Professional Sourcing is a top-tier South African-based recruitment agency operating internationally, IPM accredited, LEVEL 2 BEE RATED and 51% Black Owned.