Hiring Faster: An Exploration of Automated Interview Processes
As if hiring wasn’t a big enough challenge on its own, HR professionals in 2022 are facing three situations that put even more pressure on their backs: The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and the prospect of a full-blown recession.
On top of leaving a long line of burnt-out HR specialists, this scenario contributes to record-high rates of employee turnover, further worsening the challenge of hiring good candidates as fast as possible.
Naturally, stopping the dire force of a recession (or a major culture shift) on its feet is not in any individual’s power, but HR pros can implement solutions to help their company navigate the rough waters and increase their chances of success.
At this point, you can choose two different paths: Either sink into inaction and wait for things to unfold before responding, or else do your best to shield you and your team from the storm.
Since we value initiative over indifference, we’ll seize this opportunity to take a deeper look at interview processes and the solutions to automate them.
Before we dive into these, let’s take a brief moment to understand what an automated interview process is, and also to look at the specific problems it can solve.
What is an automated interview process?
An automated interview process is an approach to assessing candidates where the human element in one or more actions of the process is reduced or replaced by automation technology.
In addition, the automated interview process can be regarded as a subprocess as well, as it belongs to the larger recruitment process.
The goals of automating the interview process are more or less the same across organizations: To streamline the business for efficiency while improving the outcomes and reducing the costs of the traditional process.
To conclude this section, it’s important to recognize the difference between an automated interview process and an automated interview.
While the first refers to actions that can be fully or partially automated within a larger process, automated interviews allude to an asynchronous method of interviewing where candidates respond to pre-recorded questions and send the answers to the interviewer.
As such, automated interviews constitute a part of the automated interview process, but the two terms aren’t the same.
Which parts of the interview process can be automated?
There are several actions and tasks in the interview process that you can automate, including:
Getting notifications and notifying others of candidate applications.
Gathering and classifying preliminary candidate data.
Scheduling interviews.
Sending scheduling links and interview reminders.
Registering candidates for video meetings.
Pulling candidate data before the interview.
It goes without saying that processes between companies vary a lot, and this can either expand or narrow the list of tasks that can be automated.
For example, some companies may include the task of posting jobs and job descriptions to social media and HR platforms in the interview process, while others place it in another process (i.e. candidate sourcing process).
The same applies to other closely related tasks, such as parsing CVs for relevant information or kickstarting the onboarding of a candidate after making a hire.
Differences aside, it’s interesting to see how much you can actually automate, which leads us to the next section: The ways and tools that allow you to do it.
Automating the interview process: Approaches and tools
Overall, you’ll find four approaches to automate the interview process. These are:
Bundled software solutions (HR suites)
Dedicated software solutions that tackle specific parts of the process
Custom-built solutions
DIY solutions
Examples of bundled software solutions that allow you to automate at least one task within the interview process include peopleHum, BambooHR, Zoho Recruit, Leo, and Jobvite.
These platforms offer extended capabilities that go beyond interviewing and can help you manage other HR aspects such as onboarding, recruiting, learning, and engagement, among others.
When it comes to dedicated software solutions to tackle specific parts of the process, there are dozens, if not hundreds of products to choose from.
There are scheduling solutions like Yello and Calendly, automated video interview platforms like Qualifi and VideoAsk, resume parsers like Affinda, and data-gathering tools like Jotform and Gravity Forms.
While limited in scope, these solutions are perfect for tackling specific tasks of the interview process in an efficient manner.
As for custom-built and DIY solutions, the limits can be diffuse, and sometimes the same product allows for both.
Make is a good example of this: You can create your own automated solutions from scratch or hire an expert to build custom ones for you.
The possibilities Make offers are virtually endless, and you can build your own custom solutions with the tools you already have, or rely on ready-to-use templates as well.
For example, the template below connects Airtable, email, Calendly, and Zoom to automatically send invitation or rejection emails to candidates based on simple inputs.
On top of it all, you’ll find that there are several complementary tools to automate the interview process. These range from e-signature tools like Docusign to communication tools like Slack or email, and spreadsheet/database tools like Airtable.
As we mentioned in the previous sections, processes between companies can vary a lot, and so do the tools involved in them.
In order to identify what to automate first, we always recommend starting with the process and then moving on to potential tools (and combinations of tools) to attain your goals.
Conclusion: Know where you stand, and automate with purpose
Based on the information presented in this article, you can now see how far the possibilities go when it comes to automating the interview process.
At this point, it’s easy to get tempted and start discussing the process itself. This is good, as the process is where it all starts.
Identifying every step of it, and learning what tools and people are involved at each step is the logical path for what follows: Choosing the right method and tool to automate the process.
In case you are curious about what you can achieve and want to start automating specific tasks, we recommend you sign up for a Make account.
With Make, you’ll be able to automate all kinds of processes and workflows - not just interviews, but hiring processes, marketing, sales, and beyond - and start working the way you imagine.
