How to Improve Your Recruitment Agency's Productivity Through AI

Running a recruitment agency can be challenging because you have to think about two fronts of the business: the client-side and the candidate side.

First, you must make sure that you get clients to work with. This includes creating a sound strategy that would satisfy prospects consistently to have them onboard and secure a long-term partnership.

Next, recruiting agencies must deliver and be able to fill job vacancies with the best talents effectively and efficiently. This is their ultimate goal and should be their number one priority.

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As if those responsibilities aren’t heavy enough, there is also the constant pressure of competing with other recruitment agencies in the market in acquiring top candidates. In the US alone, there are over 20,000 staffing and recruiting companies—imagine if you add all the international ones, too!

It’s not an easy feat to be running such a cutthroat venture, which is why you have to know how to continually improve your work productivity. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in!

In this article, we’ll talk about how you can make the most out of your business through the use of AI.

3 Main Benefits of Higher Productivity

But first, why go through all the trouble in ensuring higher productivity? Here are three clear reasons why:

‍More sales

The more productive you are as a recruiter, the more sales you earn for the agency. This is a good KPI for the business, and it’s one that you would wish would curve up the chart steadily.

It would also allow you to expand as a company. With higher sales, you can afford to hire more recruiters, purchase recruitment software, and many more!

Saves costs

When you are fully maximizing the work hours and getting the most out of the manpower, you’re reducing costs in several ways.

You get a significant reduction in cost per hire, you get higher ROI from your company expenses, and so forth.

Focus on what matters 

When your recruiter is productive, you divert your attention away from tedious and repetitive tasks, but instead towards human interactions.

Don’t underestimate this part because ensuring meaningful engagement and human interaction create the most value in the business. You’ll have more time to address their needs and concerns, which can lead to more and better candidates.

On top of all these, you’ll be happier and more fulfilled in your role as a recruiter!

These three are convincing factors that are worth striving for, and AI pushes you further to achieve those results.

Introducing the Power of AI

In definition, artificial intelligence or AI leverages computer science and data set for machine learning for such tools to be able to make decisions as humans do.

It analyzes sets of data and variables and takes responsive actions according to the commands registered.

How is AI used in recruitment?

In the recruitment sense, utilizing AI serves specific purposes. They are as follows:

Cuts time and effort which boosts work productivity

By automating high-volume tasks, it now takes less time to achieve an end-to-end hiring workflow.

Did you know that it takes at least 23 hours of a recruiter’s time and effort to have one successful hire according to Toolbox? Take note that this doesn’t include the unsuccessful ones! Finding the right fit isn’t easy, but AI provides undeniable support in many ways.

Some recruitment software like Manatal screens resumes for you. It takes into account hundreds and thousands of CVs and filters them based on what you’re looking for.

You’ll know that you have a great AI-powered technology when it seamlessly integrates into your current process. Everything is conveniently done and it doesn’t disrupt or add unnecessary steps into your candidate hunt.

In addition to that, you’ll also be more likely to acquire the best talent and beat competitors to it! Finding top talents is always every recruiter’s goal. With AI, you can be one step ahead.

Ensures consistent quality

As skilled or talented as your recruiters might be, we’re all still humans. There are factors like fatigue, stress, and pressure that affect our work output. These can cause mistakes that might be otherwise overlooked.

AI in recruitment avoids such mistakes by having machine learning algorithms as a support system. AI can think and act like humans to work well consistently-- that’s the keyword.

It is programmed to do a routine set of tasks without constraints so that quality is observed throughout your hiring process. You won’t worry about not properly screening candidates, not following up, and many more!

Removes unconscious bias

With AI, it removes the unwanted bias that may occur in the selection process. Machines can go through the whole hiring flow without unnecessary prejudice towards certain factors.

Be it gender, ethnicity, educational background, and more, it helps recruiters screen applicants in a just and fair manner. It considers important factors and does not mind minor details that may come off as bias.

This will be a great way to improve company diversity. By being open to anyone regardless of nature, it can raise the company’s creativity and innovation. It brings together people of different walks of life, which can yield out-of-the-box thinking and ideas.

The next million-dollar project may start from the idea of the least suspecting person!

Gives a smoother candidate experience which improves employer branding

AI for recruitment isn’t only good for the recruiters. It’s also great for the job seeker as it eases their experience throughout the whole application period.

With amazing automation, they can proceed with certain steps (interview schedule, ask certain questions, etc.) in a matter of seconds. They don’t have to wait for a human to give them a response.

Here’s an example. Chatbots give them instant replies that can satisfy any queries or concerns an interested person might have. If this is answered well (and swiftly), that’s one applicant more to your list. Trust us!

Improves team collaboration

Last, but not least, some AI technology helps solidify communication and cooperation among involved parties through its collaborative features. It allows involved parties to utilize the same software together.

This guarantees that everyone is up-to-date with what’s happening and in the loop of any activities in the project. This way, people would know who’s handling what and who’s in charge of certain tasks.

It’s normal to forget certain things, but with such a collaborative tool onboard, recruiters can nudge and remind each other. This accountability and reliability promote a more fruitful and productive workplace.

We’ve learned what the benefits of a productive recruitment agency are. We’ve also talked about what AI is and how it can help recruiters. It’s time to connect the dots!

5 Steps on How to Improve Your Recruitment Agency Productivity through AI

There are plenty of ways to improve your recruiting agency’s productivity. You can always train recruiters to hone their skills, enhance your marketing efforts both online and offline and more. However, using AI will take things to the next level.

Here are 5 crucial steps that you can take to do so:

Use Recruitment CRM

Don’t confuse this with the candidate relationship management software. A recruitment CRM or customer relationship management allows you to manage and track progress with all your potential and existing clients in a single platform.

In a nutshell, a recruitment CRM is a solution that helps a company coordinate its communications with clients and potential leads. It is leveraged for two main aspects:

• to increase revenue
• aggregate and organize client data

When your recruitment agency uses this, you can easily establish a good rapport with those you work with and ensure that everything in the pipeline is executed.

Not only will your sales process be more efficient, but it will also guarantee a satisfactory client journey that can eventually lead to a signed contract. You’ll get more clients this way, and as mentioned, more sales!

We have this handy feature at Manatal. You can read more about it here.

Use recruitment ATS

Aside from recruitment CRM, your agency would benefit from using recruitment ATS, as well. An Applicant Tracking System or sometimes called Applicant Tracking Software is a cloud-based software that ultimately sources candidates across multiple channels and funnels all incoming applications into a centralized platform.

Since everything is stored online, users can access all the data anytime and anywhere even years after. This makes it more organized to keep track of all activities relevant to the hiring strategy.

Think about it, it’s quite impossible to remember candidates that you’ve had years ago! With a reliable ATS, all information is stored there for your perusal.

It also smoothens and optimizes the recruitment process by providing an all-in-one solution using various tools and features. This improves day-to-day operations greatly by giving users a seamless experience from sourcing candidates down to obtaining reports & analytics.

Manatal is a great recruitment ATS software to use. It has all the features that you might need and want to be able to hire successfully. To add to that, it has a recruitment CRM capability, too! Talk about hitting two birds with one stone!

The best part? Manatal only starts at $15/month!

Use candidate assessment tools

There are AI recruiting tools that help screen candidates faster. A recruiter has a lot to juggle in their daily endeavors, so something as crucial as this should not be taken lightly.

With a candidate assessment tool, they will be able to check for top talents that match the job criteria fast. It won’t take long to read CVs individually and assess if there is a fit. AI will automatically check relevant keywords according to the vacancy.

Here’s a concrete example. Manatal’s AI candidate recommendation system is a powerful functionality that suggests individuals based on scores. The “score” here credits information such as experience, skills, educational background, etc. Then, it checks if it applies to your job post and then scores job seekers out of a 100 from there!

Amazing, right? A list of top applicants will be presented to you and you just have to re-check and decide with your HR team if they will move forward or not.

You’ll save a lot of time with little effort thanks to our trusty software!

Use interviewing tools

Technology is truly the future with AI. If, before, you needed an HR professional to interview you for a job, now it’s possible for the candidate to do it themselves.

For instance, with an AI video interviewing software, you can let applicants go ahead and do a pre-screening at their own time to help recruiters make better hiring decisions.

They will be asked a series of general questions, and the software will record the response and save it in their system for you to review after, also at your preferred time. It benefits both parties because everything is done in succession and nobody has to wait for the other to proceed with the initial step.

You might be asking, “how accurate is this?”. For one, the AI tool will register crucial words into the system in order to check if there is a fit. Second, it also takes into consideration the tone of the application, which can reveal a bit of their personality if you want to maintain a healthy company culture. 

Lastly, you can always review the video again if you want to double-check. The AI helps summarize details for you, but you’re there to finalize it and scrutinize if the candidate matches the job or not.

Use chatbots

Going beyond recruitment, there are tons of information that potential applicants request before they hit the “apply now” button. However, what if you fail to respond on time? This can lead to application drops and it might reduce your chances of getting purple squirrels.

Avoid this by integrating chatbots into your recruitment system-- even Forbes knows the value of using one! According to this study, it saves 40% of needed human interaction time and increases sales by up to 25%!

When a question or concern is addressed quickly, the chances of people applying are going to be very high. They already got the answer that they need and they can proceed with the application. Chatbots are designed to give intellectual responses based on registered programs and stored information.

It digs deep into your system and answers questions as you would yourself. If the person requires a more in-depth answer, that’s where you can come in and address it yourself.

Trust us, the candidate journey will be more seamless and satisfactory that it will be smooth-sailing from here on out.

Running a recruitment agency can be tough, but with the help of AI, following these steps will yield more sales and reduce expenses significantly.

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