Hire the best: make the journey enjoyable.
Many companies are feeling confident again and hiring in anticipation of growth. Hiring good people will be challenging and there will be musical chairs. 41% of people considering new pastures after the pandemic according to a recent survey by MS. Many are NCB (not coming back). Many already moved job and house. The tubes in London are 44% of their pre-pandemic passenger levels now. Who can predict where that number will be in a month or two let alone 2022?
Several companies reminding themselves how to find staff and are buying an ATS for recruitment efficiency. That alone is a good motive. A small monthly fee will save many times that sum in saved recruiter wages because you can hire more with less HR staff.
However, there is an even bigger advantage to an ATS that is often overlooked: Diversity and fairness.
How do you get the diversity in your team that will bring in all those brilliant new ideas?
Recruiters are discussing whether it is better to have a picture of the person you want and look for that person or whether you should put up the job needs and see what comes in. Which works for you will depend upon the job and its envisaged career paths.
Automation will help if you are really looking for a diverse team that will respect each other because they are unified by a recruitment and selection journey they felt was just and meritocratic. We have all talked to people who have been on the awful old application processing forms which were slow an impersonal. Modern ones are much better and free up time for you to spend personal time with the good candidates. Whatever you say about automated application forms, they are not unfair to anyone!
If you are hiring stewards, catering staff, security personnel merchandisers, promoters and many others in high numbers, you can really leverage an automated impersonal application process. People applying may have to deal with filling in a machine form. But then you need people with such skills now anyway to use your staffing app and online workforce management system.
Most importantly, a standard application form is a level playing field. You can collect pictures and names and other, more personal data, so you can ID to them later in the process. However, you need only show the people doing the initial selection the data they need to run down a list and choose who goes to the next stage. They simply tick those applicants who have the specific skills and attributes best suited to your needs regardless of the skin colour, religion, gender or anything that might introduce bias.
This is a win all round. Eliminating bias, keeps your process compliant. An audit trail in most applicant tracking systems shows who was selected at any stage and why.
You will build a great team and they may be different to the one you loved before the pandemic but they will probably be better because times have changed.