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Balancing recruitment automation and human touch is much like walking a tightrope. Too much automation? Your hiring process starts to feel robotic and impersonal. Too much human touch? Your daily recruitment tasks become far too tedious and inefficient.
Reaching a perfect balance between automation and humanity is the secret to building solid relationships with candidates and maintaining the efficiency that’s needed to engage top-tier talent. So—how do you achieve the perfect balance?
Automate To Boost Human Connection
HR professionals spend a whopping 86% of their time on administrative duties. The right tech tools can slash this time in half. But while your tech automates tasks for you, should you kick your feet up and bask in your newfound free time? Of course not—you have candidates to attend to!
Recruitment automation is only helpful to the extent that it gives your talent team more time to connect with applicants on a personal level. If you use technology to replace rather than amplify human connection, you’re doing something wrong.
As wonderful as it is to have your tech stack take care of recruitment tasks, certain human elements are incredibly hard to replicate. Take empathy, for example. 96% of employees agree that empathy makes them want to stay at a job. Displaying empathy from the first moment a future employee interacts with a recruiter is crucial, and true empathy simply doesn’t have a technological equivalent.
Far too often, people view HR tech tools as a threat to human connection. But in reality, it isn’t the tools that are threats. The ways that some people use the tools are the true threats to connection. Talent professionals must recognize that technology can free up time for their teams to focus on what matters: building empathy, trust, and transparency to create better candidate relationships.
Leverage Talent Tech for Personalization
Personalization goes a long way in making people feel special, and the same applies to candidates. It’s the reason why people love personalized music recommendations. We want to feel unique, and above all, we want to feel seen. It’s only human nature.
While recruiting tech can’t replicate all the human elements that a successful hiring process requires, technology that enables personalization adds a human touch. For instance, custom email templates that automatically generate personalized communications for each candidate foster meaningful connections with minimal effort. The companies that succeed in making their automation feel less automated are the ones that come out on top.
Use the free time that automation provides to further emphasize personalization and elevate the recruiter-candidate relationship. Spend time jotting down more notes on relatable aspects of a candidate’s background that could translate to conversations in the interview stage (who knows—maybe you attended the same college).
Candidate Relationships Are Human Relationships
Applicants have increasingly high expectations of your recruitment process. They expect a tech-driven hiring process to match their tech-driven lifestyle. However, candidates still want to connect with your talent team on a human-to-human level. After all, candidates are humans, too. If candidates don’t connect with your company in the process, there’s a good chance that they’ll turn down your job offer.
Ironically, while candidates crave a personal touch throughout the hiring process, more and more candidates seek virtual work opportunities. Now that remote hiring is the norm, companies are pulling out all the stops to make hiring from across the world feel a bit less distant.
Achieving a balance between leveraging recruitment automation and human touch is the key to competing in today’s fiercely competitive market. To strike the perfect balance, treat candidate relationships the same way you would treat human relationships. Texting a friend can sustain a friendship, but you still need to connect in person once in a while. Likewise, recruitment automation can boost your hiring efficiency to impress applicants, but you still need to personally refine your connection to candidates.
Say Hello to Candidate Relationship Intelligence
Pre-pandemic, less than half of recruiters said that they have the technology they need to build relationships with candidates. 53% wanted to emerge post-pandemic with the tools needed to improve their relationship building. Want to become one of the recruiters that rave about their tech stack? Time to level up your technology.
GoodTime Hire harnesses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to automate coordination, build relationships during interviews, and provide actionable insights to continuously improve your connections with applicants. It’s the tech of your candidate relationship-building dreams.
Learn more about how Hire can supercharge your talent acquisition team.
