Automation has arrived, and it’s here to stay. You’ve heard of cars that park themselves, AI that creates art, and drones that deliver packages—but how can automation help staffing agencies and HR departments?
Automation isn’t an all-purpose solution, but it can save your recruitment team valuable time by taking over some of the most tedious tasks in your workflows. If your people are currently spending hours each day on repetitive administrative work, then your company could undoubtably benefit from implementing some degree of automation. After all, boring, repetitive jobs just happen to be what computers do best.
How can automation help with recruitment?
You might be surprised by just how many ways automation can come in handy for staffing agencies. By automating a few key tasks that your team is doing by hand right now, you will not only save time, but you’ll also streamline your workflows. The result? Hiring happens faster, and clients and candidates enjoy a better experience.
Automation has the capacity to fundamentally transform the world of HR and recruitment, particularly in staffing for the skilled trades, where licensing and certification requirements can slow the hiring process. From finding candidates and creating shortlists to tracking certifications and communicating with—well—everyone, automation is a game-changer for recruitment.
The best news? This transformative technology isn’t a pipe dream of some far-off future; it’s here. You can bring the power of automation to your recruitment team today.
How do I bring automation into my staffing agency?
The short answer? Software. The right staffing software is an all-in-one solution that takes care of your day-to-day work in one place. The entire life cycle of your hiring process should be contained in a single platform, ensuring that your team wastes less time jumping from window to window, account to account.
Beyond keeping work contained to one platform, your software should make your team’s day easier by automating tasks that technology can handle. Ideal staffing software is designed to save time, smooth out the kinks in your workflow, and empower your team to do more.
What tasks should your staffing agency or HR department be automating?
A range of everyday tasks in staffing and hiring can be automated. If you’re bringing automation to your staffing agency or HR team, we recommend starting with these four core functions.
1. Building candidate profiles
Put an end to manual data entry. Thanks to the magic of AI, you can now enter contact information and even work experience into your system without typing it out by hand. The right software can analyze information from IDs or resumes and build a candidate profile from scratch, automatically.
Your team will thank you for eliminating a tedious task, and candidates will be grateful to avoid completing long, repetitive applications. Just upload the right documents, and voila! You’re done.
2. Contacting candidates
We know that contacting candidates can be a time-consuming part of the hiring process. Fortunately, some communication can be automated to help your team quickly contact qualified people and determine their availability.
Your system can automatically send a list of candidates a quick text message or email asking if they’re interested in a job—all in just one click, and all within the same platform. No more switching from app to app, and no more long email chains.
3. Building shortlists
If your staffing team is still building shortlists for clients by hand, you’re wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere. At the touch of a button, the right software can search your entire database for the right candidates and build a list that meets your client’s specific criteria.
Not only is the process quicker than building a list the old-fashioned way, but automation also eliminates bias in your shortlists, ensuring that you always select the best candidates for the job.
Learn more about reducing bias in your recruitment process.
4. Maintaining candidate certifications
If you staff jobs in the skilled trades, managing certifications likely keeps you up at night. The last thing any company wants to do is unintentionally staff a candidate with expired credentials. That said, it’s tough to manage the certifications for an entire candidate database, especially within industries that have extensive licencing requirements, such as mining.
Fortunately, automation can be a lifesaver in this area. Leading staffing software now includes certification management functions that automatically remind candidates when it’s time to renew. Plus, the system will flag candidate profiles with expired certifications, so you can filter them out when you’re staffing the next job.
The bottom line
If you’re not incorporating automation into your staffing agency’s workflows, you’re missing a valuable opportunity to staff jobs quicker and get ahead of the competition. Over the life cycle of a hiring process, you can automate a range of tasks that will help your people work more efficiently and effectively. With the help of the right staffing software, automation will empower you to streamline your work and build your business.
Bring the power of automation to your HR department or staffing agency. We designed Labourly to automate the most common and time-consuming hiring tasks to save your team time and resources. Book a demo call with our team to explore staffing software solutions for your company.