Recruitment process: to automate or not?

To predict the future, you need to know the past

I started writing this analysis before the pandemic, and I expanded it following the many exchanges I had with HRDs, and the news affecting Recruitment (big resignations, talent shortage…). It seemed necessary to me to come back on this subject to draw up a state of the art and especially to share my vision on the latter.

My starting point is the Recruitment strategy, which varies from one organization to another and is directly or indirectly impacted by several factors:

• The core business: certain (niche) skills are rare on the market, or conversely, supply is sometimes greater than demand.
• Recruitment policy: the HR Department defines and implements recruitment policy, which can sometimes be modified by the Executive Board or Management Committee.
• The degree/maturity of digitization: a recruitment process may not be 100% digitized, but is destined to be transformed according to the new functionalities offered by editors, as well as recruitment trends and business challenges.
• Company culture: recruiters use digital marketing or social recruiting tools that conform to the company’s culture.

From an organizational point of view, this strategy is often subject to discussion between several teams: General Management, Strategy, Organization, Management Control, HR and finally IT. Hence, the complexity of addressing the subject in a proactive and anticipatory manner with respect to the specific challenges of each business line in the company.

As for regulations, they vary according to the country or region of the world: for example, in terms of RGPD in Europe, or the use of temporary employment contracts in France.

And recruitment processes are far from being standardized compared to other HR functions such as Payroll or Interview Management.

With this in mind, the Recruiter, as the main player in the BPO (Business Process Owner) process, has a wide scope for imagination when it comes to rethinking or developing HR processes and practices, which sometimes go beyond the technical reality of the tool. When deploying or upgrading an HRIS in SaaS mode, the flexibility and adaptability of standard ATS (Applicant Tracking System) settings are put to the test to cover the company’s specific business needs.

However, it is important to keep in mind that being able to configure everything is not necessarily good news for the recruiter, as it can generate complex or cumbersome processes in terms of daily use or maintenance, and scalability to integrate HR or company organizational changes over the long term. Sometimes, the only option, if not the easiest to implement, is for the company’s business processes to adapt to the tool’s uses, in order to fit into the standard proposed by the editor.

Support for change is a key factor in the success of the project.

In this multi-parameter equation, we must not lose sight of the fact that the time spent on recruitment to publish an offer and close it, is a good indicator to measure the effectiveness of the recruiter’s activity.

To return to the subject of Strategy, we can categorize companies’ projected recruitment priorities in a HRIS on 3 levels:

1. Simplification/standardization of processes and reduction of recruitment time, without much concern for the integration of new uses driven by technology.
2. Attractive to implement market trending features (candidate matching/scoring, Chatbot, AI, Assessment Platform/Video Interview), while having complex or lengthy processes.
3. Alliance between modernization of HR practices and simplification of processes.

To understand how an organization can find itself in one of these situations, it is necessary to analyze several factors that can sometimes be abstract or concrete. Based on my experience in Council, the organization of the company and the vision of the business are the most important factors in the life of the company that directly impact the recruitment process.

When an entrepreneur creates his company, he starts by building a small recruitment team, because a company in its early stages minimizes its costs related to support functions, and invests in the core business(R&D). In order to generate growth, the company aims to develop by defining a corporate strategy:

• Expand its service offering to access new market segments;
• Offer new services to diversify your business;
• Acquire new companies;
• Merge with other companies;
• Etc.

This is necessarily accompanied by organizational changes, which can impact existing recruitment processes. Depending on its strategic priorities, the HRD is then led to either review the current recruitment process in order to plan an overhaul/improvement, or to leave it unchanged for various reasons.

Develop a collective awareness to better prepare for process improvement

Over the years, the recruitment process can either stagnate or evolve as a result of all the changes mentioned. It is therefore necessary to be aware of these changes in order to anticipate any evolution of the recruitment process, and to ensure that the transformation is as smooth as possible. Therefore, it is necessary to review the business processes, to trace their history in order to understand the existing, the evolution and to find an adapted solution for their transformation in the future. This can be a long process.

Indeed, HR business processes are often not designed/documented by companies: it does not necessarily fit into a business line, or simply no employee has been designated to perform this task. This is where the role of Consultant comes in, to support companies in this exercise.

Regardless of the decisions made by the HR department, I am firmly convinced that ” the more a company grows, the more it must think about simplifying its recruitment processes” . If this is not done at the right time, the company may have to manage several processes at once, or processes with a number of steps that do not allow the desired time savings to be achieved in an automated process, in this case Recruitment.

Often, during an HRIS deployment project, the approach is to go directly into the specifications to study the feasibility of business needs. This step is essential to define the scope of the project and therefore the budget, but it must be completed by taking a look at the tool and its features. At the same time, you need to ask yourself about the recruiter’s vision of the tool, his or her priorities and projections for the coming years, not only in terms of the job itself, but also in terms of the organizational and strategic changes that may occur within the company.

In short, the deployment or change of an HRIS tool is a project in its own right, which must be anticipated, keeping in mind :

• A clear vision of the organization over the next 5 years, the average lifespan of an IS being 5 years (e.g. change of management, company takeover, etc.).
• Well-defined strategic priorities on the HR or IT side, depending on who is responsible for the HRIS project.
• That this is a golden opportunity to review and improve your recruitment process.

With the pandemic, recruiting habits deserve to be challenged, especially for companies that had already fallen behind. Similarly, particular attention must be paid to the “external” dimension: employer branding, talent attraction, technologies developed by application management software publishers…

It is also interesting to accelerate on Artificial Intelligence projects to improve Recruitment, which is only a marketing concept in 2022, while the back-office of the Recruitment process is not aligned with the current market, may prove to be a strategic mistake and will only delay the resolution of the real problems of “traditional” Recruitment.

If you would like us to support you in this process improvement and/or HRIS project implementation for your recruitment business, please do not hesitate to contact us at.

See also our feature on "HR strategy management tools".

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• The different HR management tools to carry out your HR strategy
• HRIS software: the different areas of intervention for the HR function
• How to convince your management to invest in an HRIS tool?
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• What indicators should be defined to measure the performance of an HR strategy?
• HR strategy: how to achieve effective HR reporting?
• Who should drive HR projects in the company?
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