The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how talent acquisition works and accelerated a labor shortage in the U.S. market. A combination of fear of getting sick and other responsibilities, such as child care, has made it harder for companies to find quality long-term employees. This shift in talent availability has fueled the rise of full cycle recruitment.
What is Full Cycle Recruiting?
Full cycle recruiting is a holistic, “end-to-end” approach to recruiting in which a recruiter takes care of the entire recruitment process from screening to interviewing, hiring and eventually onboarding. Full cycle recruitment allows the recruiter to closely monitor the whole recruitment process and maintain timely communication with candidates.
This process aims at improving candidate experience, build a strong employer brand and nurture a healthy pool of candidates even in case of a rejection. In the current War for Talent, full cycle recruitment presents a business advantage for companies looking to enter hypergrowth in a post-pandemic world.
Successful Full Cycle Recruiting Depends on Good Data
The key to success for full cycle recruitment lies in good data. The purpose of having one recruiter follow through with the entire applicant experience is to ensure a speedy, hands-on, and engaged application experience. To achieve this, recruiters will need access to complete, accurate and updated applicants’ data at any point of the recruitment process.
Applicant data can exist in three main systems in the HR tech stack: an application tracking system (ATS), a human capital management (HCM) software, and an customer relationship management (CRM) software. These systems are often poorly integrated without direct data transfer. On top of that, they lack the capability to cross-verify and consolidate duplicated applicant profiles.
For example, there might be a Jone Doe, a J. Doe and a J.D. in your systems, but they all belong to the same person. Without a powerful data processing and transferring capability, the responsibility falls back onto recruiters to manually identify and merge these profiles into one, and then manually parse such data into other systems. The process is time-consuming, mentally taxing and prone to errors. Any mishaps in this transfer process will derail application processing, delay communication and defeat the purpose of life cycle recruitment.
Where Many Recruiters Are Having It Wrong
The pitfalls of many talent acquisition team when adopting a life cycle recruitment approach is failure to build a supporting structure strong enough to support the high volume of data it need to process.
Every step of the recruitment process produce valuable data, from resume screening to interviewing and keyword optimization for future job positing. Such data will contribute to both the decision-making and the optimization process, but it comes in a raw format and requires extra processing to become actionable insights. Data processing required in talent acquisition also varies in difficulty and complexity, from something as simple as converting data into a standard format to transferring across systems and de-duplicating.
Recruiters should spend their hours engaging in meaningful conversations with applicants and performing strategically meaningful activities, not cleaning and maintaining such data. The key to successful life cycle recruitment, therefore, is to move from manual processing to automated processing, leveraging power of technology to empower recruiters and applicants. Robotic processing automation, or RPA, is the solution of choice for talent acquisition teams of all sizes. By acting as a central processing machine, RPA breaks down the data silo in your HR systems without any disruptions to your existing infrastructure.
RPA can replace humans in highly repetitive, manual tasks with higher accuracy and quality. The bot can also replace hours of research by quickly collecting and analyzing data from your database to help you make faster decisions. For example, by analyzing recruitment history, the bot can identify which keyword to use for a job posting, or how to quickly screen resume for job qualification.
RPA technology allows recruiters to focus on connecting with candidates as humans and still have all the data they need to make good decisions. It puts the focus back on the human part of the HR function.
To learn more about the data challenges in recruitment and how RPA can help you overcome that challenge, watch our video series “Solving Recruitment Challenges with Automation” here!
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