1.  Fully understand your current state – and find the areas ripe for improvement

Whether you’re ready to introduce AI and automation across your recruiting process or want to identify fast and easy wins, you’re more likely to achieve desired business outcomes if you start with a complete understanding of your current process. Enter process mining, which uses data from business systems to mine your current processes and find areas of improvement: bottlenecks, administrative drain and inefficient candidate interactions. Armed with this information, you can more objectively decide where to apply AI and automation, and even test the impact of changes before applying them to your organization.

Once you’re able to observe your current state, you can then identify which intelligent automation solutions — such as digital workers such as AI assistants — can reduce administrative burdens like gathering application data or scheduling interviews. Or, as Wick says, “Imagine having a daily digest sent to recruiters with a rundown of that day’s scheduled interviews and other top priorities. That immediately helps with prioritization.”

The typical onboarding experience also involves too much back-and-forth: Confirming salary information, start date, manager name, offer letter terms and other information across multiple parties can be streamlined and automated through intelligent systems that collect and organize onboarding data and distribute it to all parties.

By automating these dull and often repetitive tasks, recruiters have more time to do the job they were hired to do: act as advisors to the business.

Check out recruiting automation with IBM watsonx Orchestrate

2.  Shorten the application process

Most organizations gather applications and resumes via career sites and online portals, where candidates have to input copious amounts of information — including re-entering basic resume information. “That can take as much as five minutes — and in today’s marketplace, those five minutes will result in too few applications,” Wick says. The improved approach, especially for jobs that are paid hourly, is to forgo a lengthy registration process chock full of form fields and file uploads and shift to what Wick calls a “soft application.”

This could include asking candidates to enter their name and contact information and answer up to five custom questions that align to a specific open role or help expand a candidate’s application to other opportunities. This process would ideally occur via text message versus a website to match how most consumers prefer to communicate with businesses today.

3.  Ask only what you need to know

The recruiting cycle can be shortened by as much as 21 days for hourly wage jobs. Wick provides an example: Candidates for an hourly warehouse position are asked whether they can lift 40 pounds and if they are willing to work nights and weekends. They fill out the application in less than 90 seconds and, with the help of automation, are directed to schedule an interview or to the right recruiter for follow-up. Wick says that when this effort is applied to 50% of an organization’s job openings, the recruiting cycle can be shortened by as much as 21 days for hourly wage jobs.

4.  Approach repetitive tasks like a retailer

Wick says, “People are mobile-centric,” explaining that interview scheduling should feel more like a consumer experience.  Make it as easy as scheduling a hair appointment, ordering a meal, or shopping online.

“As a franchisor, we have a big responsibility. People who become franchisees are trusting us with, in many cases, their life savings,” explains Gordon Logan, Chairman and Founder of Sport Clips. “The question we always receive from new franchisees is, ‘Where do I find the people I need to staff my store and deliver that championship haircut experience?’ We need to give them peace of mind that when they come on board, they’ll be able to find quality people to staff their stores and they’ll have the tools they need to grow their business.”

When it comes to talent acquisition, Sport Clips is using one of IBM’s AI assistants (IBM watsonx Orchestrate) to handle interview scheduling and help ensure the recruitment process runs smoothly for the hiring company as well as the job candidate. ThisWay Global further supports teams’ talent acquisition efforts by giving them instant access to 169 million diverse candidates and providing an unbiased AI-powered matching algorithm that makes it easier for hiring teams to ethically source and identify qualified candidates for their open roles.

It took less than an hour to onboard Sport Clips’ franchisees to IBM watsonx Orchestrate and ThisWay Global and start gaining productivity. Franchisees will have the ability to integrate different systems and tools into a single user interface they can use to manage their end-to-end recruiting process. Through chat-style interactions, users will be able to initiate automations (known as skills) for tasks such as creating new job requisitions, socializing job listings on job boards and identifying qualified candidates using ThisWay Global. This approach to talent acquisition is intended to free up franchisees to focus on building relationships with prospective stylists and accelerate their overall recruitment process. It’s also intended to free them up to focus on running their stores.

“Many people are talking about automating labor and replacing labor. We think about it the opposite way,” explains Edward Logan. “We believe in AI and automation for the purposes of enabling labor and expanding headcount: for allowing team members to do what they do best and what they enjoy.”