In the global war for talent, HR recruiters are under pressure to not only increase their recruitment efficiency, but to also up their game in the candidate hiring experience.
According to McKinsey, HR departments spend 60% of their time and resources on transactional and operational HR activities. Many of these activities:
- are repetitive and high volume
- involve lots of complex scheduling and coordination, and
- require constant follow-up and reminders with people across the entire enterprise.
These activities result in many inefficiencies, delays, and inconsistencies in the service delivery of HR executives who are already faced with the challenge to do more and better with less people.
For instance, interview scheduling and coordination alone can take up to 30% of a recruiter's time and energy. In many cases, talent acquisition teams employ full-time recruitment coordinators just to engage in this repetitive activity of scheduling and coordinating interviews. Higher productivity is being sought after to free HR from such resource-intensive but low value, repetitive work.
As such, HR departments are increasingly looking to next-generation automation tools and AI technologies to help address these challenges, and transform HR operations.
Going beyond Automation, as Hiring is a Team Sport
When looking for the right interview scheduling tool for your team, it’s important to look beyond automation focused purely on maximizing efficiency, and consider other vital elements that will positively impact your recruiters, interviewers and candidates.
And that’s why we’re building Evie to deliver a recruitment solution that is:
- Collaborative (between hiring teams and candidates)
- Candidate-centric, and
- Consistent (in its engagement process)
1. Collaborative Approach
Coordinating interviews between interviewers and candidates is painful and tedious. We’ve engaged with global talent acquisition teams and, just like a team sport, recruiters want to collaborate better with interviewers.
Recruiters do not want to simply take interviewers’ calendar availability to propose to candidates without first checking if their calendars are accurate or up-to-date - as this practice results in frequent reschedules by the interviewers. What was meant to drive efficiency has unintentionally reversed it.
Having an AI interview scheduling tool that actively coordinates with interviewers for their preferred times is a great approach to drive collaboration between recruiters and interviewers, and maximize the success of locking down interviews times right from the start.
2. Candidate-centric
In the current war for talent, interaction with candidates and the structure of the interview process are of utmost importance as they shape the impression candidates have of your company.
While it might seem more efficient to email the candidates a web-page link and have them select interview slots from a calendar, we believe a better candidate experience would entail a personal interaction with candidates, and have them respond as though liaising with an actual person.
Candidates can express their preferred times, or negotiate a tight schedule. This has been made possible by Evie’s technology, capable of conversational understanding to deliver an interactive experience.
3. Consistent Engagement Process
With multiple roles to hire and hundreds of interviews to coordinate - and not to mention other tasks of sourcing and screening - it requires herculean effort not to drop the ball when overwhelmed with the necessity to focus on multiple tasks.
Failing to follow up with interviewers for availability leads to delayed responses to candidates and inconsistent engagement - that ultimately results in a bad candidate experience. According to this research, 60% of candidates cite that better communication throughout and after the applicant process would make the most positive impact to their candidate experience.
To close this gap, we’ve made Evie consistently follow up with both interviewers and candidates to ensure interviews are confirmed as soon as possible and reduce reschedules. With this, recruiters can be assured that nothing falls through the cracks.
A consistent engagement process allows every candidate an equal opportunity to perform their best, and gives each candidate the same amount of due attention and consideration. When all candidates are treated in a well-organized, standard way, the hiring company is seen as unbiased and respectful of prospective employees.
By addressing these 3 key elements, we believe that talent acquisition teams can deliver a warm and effective interview scheduling experience for recruiters, interviewers and candidates. Automation is now table stakes in the battle for talent - it's time for some hiring superpower.
