At some point in your career I’m sure you’ve had a life coach or motivational speaker ask you this doozy of a question: What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? And you probably listed a bunch of super amazing things, and then the life coach probably told you to throw caution to the wind and just do it!
While it’s a fun exercise, we live in the real world. And in that world, unfortunately you can fail.
This pretty accurately mirrors the recruiting automation dilemma: If we fully automated your recruiting and hiring processes, imagine all the magical things your recruiting team could do for your organization!
But it’s a trap, right?
The recruiting automation dilemma goes beyond our recruiting team when we talk about high-volume hiring. Because in most high-volume hiring, it’s not the recruiters we are worried about but the front-line managers who do most of the hiring; so really, the automation is saving time in operations. Each bad process step, each login, and each manual hiring transaction that has to take place in the field is time away from normal business operations.
If we believe that automating our high-volume recruiting process will save time across many aspects of the organization, the real question becomes what do we do with all that captured time savings?
What’s high-class about automating hiring?
Um, everything! If we think about all the waste in a traditional process that we have humans doing, automating most of this process gives real, measurable time back to the organization. Why have a team of recruiters and recruiting operations working day and night scheduling interviews and following up, sending out assessment links, and nudging candidates and managers to dot i’s and cross t’s?
Fully automating your high-volume hiring is high-class, not because of time savings. That’s an outcome of great technology and implementation investment. The high-class part is what it allows you to do with all that captured time.
Bad and average recruiting shops fight fires all day, every day, with their manual and disconnected processes. They are on a treadmill that never stops and never slows down.
Great TA functions utilizing full-automation are free to do the following:
- World-class pre-onboarding and onboarding
- Community relationship building into desirable talent pools
- Strategic recruiting branding and marketing initiatives
- Competitive recruiting analysis to stay in front
- Building and analyzing high-level recruiting data insights for growth
- Breathing!
That’s a high-class problem when we have too much time and capacity, to the point where you no longer just have to survive the day but can actually plan for tomorrow.
You might roll your eyes at this concept. Sure, Tim, my problem is having “too much” time to do good stuff. Yeah, right. But the reality is that most of us don’t change to this model because we are more afraid of that future than our current reality. That is the high-class automation problem. That we know what we have now, and while it sucks, it’s known. If we change, and it works, then what?
I’ve spoken to leaders that have said, “Well, if the future of TA is like this, we’ll all be out of a job.” I want to tell them that, most likely, they are already out of a job with that mentality.
Great TA leaders aren’t the best firefighters; they’re the best at stopping fires from starting in the first place. They aren’t fearful of a world where automation takes away the tactical parts of hiring. They rejoice in the fact they can now take their function and their career to the next level. A future-ready TA leader is constantly looking at ways to automate and capture time.
Time is money. Time is an opportunity to do better. I want high-class problems in TA. I want to sit down with my CEO and CFO and explain what we are going to do with all of our new capacity. How we are going from good to great to world-class.
Many TA leaders will not work to build a fully automated hiring process. They are unwilling to trade in their low-class problem for a high-class problem.
The next part in the series on the new way to define quality when hiring at scale is here.
If you missed the previous part, the new way to handle high-volume personalization is here.
