Recruiting Automation: How Much Is Enough?

As the owner of a boutique recruiting firm, I am constantly approached by a variety of vendors who tell me that their new product will revolutionize recruiting. Everything from using algorithms to monitor candidates' social media postings to creative ways of finding and sourcing passive candidates. While all this sounds wonderful, does it really work for all the extra cost?

While I firmly believe that some automation is needed to effectively recruit in today's world, I also believe that it is impossible to 100% automate recruiting because there are so many moving parts with candidates and clients. In addition, those hard-to-find and highly-sought-after candidates are generally turned off by all this automation as they are constantly bombarded each days with waves and waves of emails and LinkedIn emails from recruiters. In fact, many of these candidates have told me that they don't check their email and LinkedIn because of the deluge of emails from recruiters.

To me, effective recruiting is still all about building trust and relationships with candidates; ideally over the phone. Many times, the trust and relationship building comes well before they may be ready to make a job move. Recruiting is also a very blue-collar function of hard work and effort. You can't just post jobs online and sit back and wait for candidates to come to you nor can you expect automation to eliminate the need for this hard work. Effective recruiting is still all about really knowing what the client requires in the job, then researching for and approaching potential candidates.

I feel that the only automation that a good recruiter requires is a good applicant tracking system that has basic capabilities such as resume search, automated job posting to various internet job boards, and the ability to produce reports. Besides the ATS, I really only see the need for a Premium level LinkedIn account. I have been very effective with just these two tools. To me, anything else is overkill and not money well-spent.

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