Growing a stronger workforce begins with the basic goal of finding the best candidate for each new vacancy—and that process has grown vastly more complex over the past two decades. You can always choose the best candidate from a pile of resumes, but how can you expand the quality of your applicant pool and attract the best candidates out there to your organization?

When it comes to recruitment technology, automation is one of the best ways to streamline the process and make it more effective and efficient. Many time-consuming tasks for HR teams (like posting jobs on multiple job sites) can now be automated, freeing you from having to perform the mindless, repetitive parts of the job. Intelligent automation takes this concept one step further because artificial intelligence can perform these tasks without any human intervention. That makes the process more efficient in the day-to-day, but it can also make your hiring smarter and allow you to grow a stronger workforce over time.

Intelligent automation doesn’t simply perform time-consuming tasks—it tackles tasks that require problem-solving, decision-making, and learning. Candidate sourcing can involve multiple jobs that may require a lot of research: scouring the internet, collecting data to assess sources, engaging candidates, and much more.

Let’s explore 5 reasons why it’s time for you to engage a smarter and better sourcing strategy.

Offer An Efficient, Organized Process

The quality of your applicant pool can wither if you do not have a robust candidate engagement strategy. The best strategy, of course, is to keep the hiring process as efficient as possible. Top-tier candidates may be siphoned off by competition, or due to disinterest, if the hiring process takes too long. Intelligent automation optimizes the efficiency of your hiring from start to finish. More specifically, you can automate tasks like interview scheduling or employ AI chatbots to field candidate questions and manage expectations. This is crucial to keeping top-tier talent engaged throughout the hiring process, but can also lay the groundwork for future hiring. A better candidate experience can offer a favorable impression of your organization, bolster your company brand, and lead to return applicants and referrals.

Make Smarter Decisions About How And Where To Place Job Ads

Sourcing candidates with automated job ad technology can help boost the quality of your candidate pool through targeted advertising, which finds the best candidates where they are likely to search on the internet—all based on data and algorithms. It cannot be overstated: intelligent automation is crucial to navigating job ad placement, particularly as it allows a granular approach to budgeting.

The data points and variables of the job ad can be calculated by AI in a way that is nearly impossible for a human to research—there are simply too many websites for the average HR team to handle efficiently. Job ad tech that employs intelligent automation can assess job ad performance in real-time, stop spending on underperforming ads, and allocate spending toward better ad placement—all automatically. This is smart, quick, decision-making based on the data that helps optimize your recruitment budget.

Reduce Human Error And Optimize Efficiency

With repetitive tasks, occasional error is almost a given. Intelligent automation helps reduce these errors. While it is important to look at the larger landscape to get a sense of what’s working well with your hiring process and what aspects of your hiring could use a boost, reducing repetitive tasks is always a key micro-target for maximizing efficiency. A rote task can be draining, boring, time-consuming, and entirely unnecessary for the talent acquisition team to perform when it can be automated. Reducing human error is a simple way to save time and money.

You Can Reduce Bias

When you reduce bias at the hiring stage, your organization can increase diversity and inclusivity, which are correlated to better business outcomes. Diversity and inclusion efforts should happen at all levels of your organization and are an important way HR can help enhance a workforce for the better—greater diversity and inclusion attracts more talent to your organization.

The way intelligent automation helps is to find talent based on data. It is important to note that AI software can replicate past hiring patterns that may include unintentional bias, but it can also be set to overcome that bias. Unintentional bias, similar to “human error,” is sometimes inevitable. Intelligent automation can be important to put bias in check and grow a stronger, more diverse workforce.

Receive A Constant Flow Of Analytics

Intelligent automation has the added bonus of being able to continually assess and incorporate new data into its process, helping you grow and improve over time. You cannot improve your hiring without the vital tool of analytics. While you may recognize trends that happen month to month, recruitment tech with intelligent automation can anticipate trends, detect small changes, and provide detailed data reports to help communicate your efficiency gains.

While this process is embedded within the tech to help it continually “learn” how to be more efficient, it further helps communicate and define the success to decision-makers and the whole HR team. Understanding how your hiring gets better is key to actually implementing a better hiring strategy and growing a stronger workforce.