Recruitment Automation is the most efficient way to engage with the top talent and build an endless top of the funnel, with automated reach outs, timely nudges, and periodic follow-ups. It builds relationships between the recruiter and the candidates, so the brand is on top of their minds when a candidate finally decides to explore.

Recruitment Automation allows recruiters to be always in touch with candidates and not build a top of the funnel after every intake meeting.

Instead of building a new top-of-the-funnel talent pool after every intake meeting, Recruitment Automation empowers recruiters to keep their talent pools continually engaged with personalized messaging beyond sporadic InMails.

How Recruitment Automation Transforms the Way Recruiters Operate

The way we have been recruiting for all these years doesn't work anymore. The best candidates don't apply to jobs anymore. Recruiters don't wait for candidates to apply anymore.

Recruiters don't wait for the best hires to apply to a job when they put the opening out on their website or LinkedIn or Indeed or anywhere else. There are more openings than ever, and fewer candidates than ever. In this talent war, the recruiters who emerge victoriously are the ones who nurture their relationships with their talent pool. These are the recruiters who are on top of their candidate's inbox, whenever the candidate decides to explore.

Recruiting has evolved, and the world agrees.

• 86% of HR professionals surveyed indicate that recruitment is becoming more like marketing. (Source: Glassdoor)
• 65.7% of Recruiters say building Talent Pools for the future is their top priority. (Source: Career Builder)
• 'Recruiter' is one of the Top 5 jobs of 2021. (Source: LinkedIn)

Recruitment has become a strategic priority for brands, in the same vein as Sales and Marketing. It's high time the tools catch up.

How does Recruitment Automation work?

The Recruitment Automation platform doesn't replace your recruitment stack, rather complements it. It takes care of everything between the sourcing stage (sourcing platforms, self-sourced candidates, employee referrals) and the ATS.

The framework of Recruitment Automation can be boiled down to 3 stages:

1. Building your talent pool
2. Continual engagement with candidates
3. Measuring and optimizing the talent funnel

Let's go a level deeper on every stage.

Building Your Talent Pool

Sourcing currently is broken into silos - LinkedIn, Indeed, Ziprecruiter, your phonebook, multiple spreadsheets - are some examples of those silos. A recruitment automation platform will have a module to bring all your contacts together, to manage them efficiently.

This part of a marketing automation platform functions as a Candidate Relationship Management platform or a talent CRM.

With Kula, you can add candidates in bulk by connecting your LinkedIn, bulk upload through CSVs, import from your Gmail, one-click add through our chrome extension (Kula everywhere), or add them manually one by one. You can then slice and dice based on details such as experience, geography, source, etc. to get a better hang of your entire candidate database.

Since we have been recruiters in the past life, we understand that in some cases you wouldn't want to share your candidate database with everyone else in the organization and that access control is inbuilt from Day 0. You always have control over the relationships that you have nurtured.

The next and arguably the most critical pool of sourcing is referrals.

When we were defining the boundaries of Recruitment Automation, we knew we had to include referrals as an integral part of the platform. That's how Circles was born. Currently, the referral flow is dealt with by niche tools that solve for a fraction of the workflow. Circles is an entire module dedicated to referrals.

Within Circles, your entire workforce can bring their connections on one platform. Imagine a workforce of 1000 people, everyone having an average of 2000 LinkedIn connections - that's a talent goldmine of Two Million first-degree connections, open for introductions. And Circles extend way beyond this, to multiple integrations, and a real-time view of the referral flow - both for the recruiter and the referrer.

Continual engagement with candidates

Engaging with the talent pool is currently limited to just sending bulk emails by keeping everyone in BCC or driving oneself crazy with trackers and follow-ups. The intent is overpowering but the tools are missing.

That's why continual engagement forms the next and the most pivotal part of a Recruitment Automation platform. The continual engagement module should enable the recruiters to constantly be on top of mind of their talent pool by being able to send valuable content pieces or timely personalized nudges across professional and personal channels.

With Kula, engagement becomes the cornerstone of the platform. The engagement features nuanced to cover use-cases elevate the overall experience of using the platform. Minute featurettes like engagement workflow, Kula enrichment - to add more contact touchpoints for a candidate, sender profiles - to change the sender from a recruiter to hiring manager and vice versa, and the effortless, intuitive email editor makes the learning curve of the platform minimal while making the experience delightful.

Measuring and Optimizing the Talent Funnel

Currently, the metrics across the recruitment funnel are either absent altogether or present in nooks and corners of the plethora of tools we use. Through our customer research stage, we uncovered that every week, an average recruiter spends at least 4 hours updating and maintaining the data and creating reports for their own analysis or for the leadership quick view. The insight affirmed our personal experience as well.

Hence, Measurement and Optimization becomes the third module of a Recruitment Automation platform.

A recruitment automation platform needs to serve quick view metrics for hygiene checks and should also be able to provide insights covering the overall recruitment funnel.

With Kula, you get both the campaign level metrics to gauge engagement and funnel level reports to bring predictability into the recruitment process. Try it for yourself, if you'd like to! 

Explore More About Recruitment Automation

In our humble effort to define the recruitment automation category, this is the first thought piece. We have built Kula to serve the recruiters and evangelize their pain to arrive at a solution that makes their life easier. This will be a living-breathing document and we will be incorporating more insights and picking up all the feedback we can get.

This will be one exciting ride, to explore and define a category for a function that is an unshakable identity of our being. I would want you along for the ride, if you would like that too, find us on LinkedIn and join the conversation.