Automation is a great way for talent acquisition (TA) professionals to reduce their time to fill by automating mundane tasks, but new technologies are now allowing recruiters to automate even more aspects of their jobs.
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That’s right. We’re talking about recruitment marketing automation (RMA) technology—say that three times fast!—and to help answer some of our questions surrounding this topic, Adrian Cernat, CEO of SmartDreamers, joins us.
HR Daily Advisor: For TA professionals who are unfamiliar, how is RMA technology similar to the technology regular marketing departments use?
Adrian: Right now, a typical marketing department is leveraging social media channels like Facebook and Snapchat, plus ad networks like the Google Display Network, to attract customers and nurture leads. To save time, more and more marketers in recent years have turned to marketing automation platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout that let them target ads, schedule advanced posts, and manage online interactions from one central location.
RMA uses those same principals to power smarter, faster candidate attraction. As modern job candidates increasingly expect to be treated like customers, TA teams need the same kinds of tools that traditional marketers do, but those tools need to be tailored to their needs. Thus, a high-quality RMA solution will automate social activity and Web advertising in a way that integrates with users’ applicant tracking and management flows.
HR Daily Advisor: What are some pros and cons to using this technology during the hiring process?
Adrian: By and large, the pros of RMA are similar to those of traditional marketing automation: Recruiters can manage dozens of social campaigns from a central location within a matter of minutes. Not only does this put them in a position to track and measure their efforts in a comprehensive way, but it also gives back time that can be used to drive value in more creative and engaged ways.
At the end of the day, TA is about people, and effective automation gives recruiters and HR teams the time and energy to go above and beyond for the people they interact with. This can lead to improved hiring velocity and more efficient HR resource usage overall. Some businesses may see the costs involved with adopting any new technology as a con, but if you take a longer strategic view, it’s clear that faster, better hiring will bring about a return on investment pretty quickly.
HR Daily Advisor: Should recruiters favor RMA over their applicant tracking systems (ATSs)?
Adrian: In a perfect world, these two systems (RMA and ATSs) would interconnect within the same recruitment technology ecosystem. Part of the reason that HR teams sometimes wind up unsatisfied with their ATS software is because it leads to silos and candidate “black holes.” This can slow down applicant review processes and make HR decisions seem opaque, all while creating a poor applicant experience for candidates who simply never hear back about their job applications.
These issues are not, however, inherent to the ATS as a concept—in fact, integrating RMA and ATSs can do a lot to ameliorate these kinds of issues. Let’s say your RMA solution automatically imports and updates open jobs from your ATS. All of a sudden, you can radically increase transparency into the entire applicant funnel, preventing silos from cropping up in the first place.
HR Daily Advisor: How can RMA technology improve a company’s talent pool?
Adrian: At a very basic level, RMA makes it possible to reach more candidates online than even an extremely enterprising recruiter could manage by hand. The first bottleneck HR teams face regarding the size of their talent pools is the reach of their employer brands. The more passive job candidates you’re able to reach online with your messaging, the more candidates will enter your funnel going forward.
But posting the necessary employer branding content to the right channels for the right audience at the right times can quickly become laborious and time-consuming. If you can create, deploy, stop, and restart ads across dozens of channels with ease, on the other hand, there’s nothing stopping you from reaching your target audience in huge numbers.
HR Daily Advisor: As technology continues to take over the workplace, more employers are becoming concerned with the bias that may come from humans teaching machines. Can RMA technology help decrease bias in the hiring process?
Adrian: One of the big concerns with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in recruitment is that a program designed to predict who the best hires will be might gravitate toward the kinds of hires you’ve made in the past. If you haven’t hired diversely before, then your software isn’t going to feed you diverse candidates.
RMA, by contrast, is all about expanding your reach—using automation not to weed out candidates but to engage them in large quantities. No one piece of technology can solve bias wholesale, but insofar as companies fail at inclusion because of “pipeline” issues, step one is to improve their pipeline. A smart RMA solution gives you the tools to do just that, increasing your odds of reaching folks from different backgrounds.
HR Daily Advisor: Personalization is a great way to engage jobseekers during the hiring process, but with automation, will the “personalized” aspects fall through the cracks? How can TA pros keep their efforts personalized when using RMA?
Adrian: Again, TA is all about people, and TA professionals can more easily engage with people in an attentive, individualized way if they’re not completely swamped. The more you’re able to take rote, repetitive, never-ending tasks off of recruiters’ plates, the more they’ll be able to turn their attention to the kinds of personal touches that candidates really appreciate.
By the same token, the more easily recruiters can track applicants throughout the candidate journey, the more effectively they can send the right message to the right person at the right time. In this way, RMA leaves robotic tasks to the robots and lets people concentrate more on the things that matter: providing candidates with a great experience and filling openings with the best candidates.
HR Daily Advisor: How can TA pros get executive buy-in for getting RMA technology at their companies?
Adrian: Three words: return on investment. RMA solutions provide better hires at a lower cost. They aren’t fancy gadgets that will be collecting dust on people’s hard drives 6 months from now; they’re a reflection of the ways that hiring is changing, and the best solutions are tailor-made to help TA pros meet the challenges of a competitive market.
In terms of getting executive buy-in, it should be a matter of presenting case studies and other data that show the extent to which RMA can increase the reach of your employer brand, boost your applications, and improve your time to hire. You’ll have to define your goals for the RMA deployment clearly, but with those goals in place, you should be able to present a pretty compelling case for cost versus benefits.
 Hi, I’m Adrian Cernat, CEO and Cofounder of SmartDreamers, a recruitment marketing automation platform used by global companies to streamline candidate sourcing from various sources across the web such as social media, nice websites, and job platforms. We launched SmartDreamers in 2014, and we were quickly able to help a number of companies here in Romania to run social campaigns that successfully engaged their ideal applicants online. Since then, we’ve expanded our operations throughout Europe, the U.S., and the APAC region. |