How Automation is Taking the Drudgery Out of Recruiting

Once upon a time, a recruiter posted a job, and a manageable amount of people applied. But not any more. The internet has meant that the friction to apply is almost zero. Where once a candidate had to fill out a form by hand, now they can just hit a couple of buttons on an app. This means there are now huge amounts of applicants for every job. Which makes screening a tough job.

And on top of the numbers, because it is so easy (and because unemployment is low), something like 80% of these job-seekers are passive job-seekers. They’re open to something, but they’re not desperate. This means that sourcing applicants is more important than ever, even though it’s must harder when you’re wading through thousands of lukewarm applications.

In short, the basic behaviours of recruiting haven’t changed — but the supply and demand landscape has transformed. You are expected to source and screen huge amounts of candidates to satisfy multiple stakeholders, because the job is the same as it ever was: Fill open roles with qualified candidates, as fast as you can. But technological changes now mean that both screening and sourcing are more time-consuming than never.

And lots of the legwork of this time-consuming work is pure drudgery. Against the clock, you find yourself performing the same actions, over and over again:

• Gathering job requirements from the hiring manager.
• Setting a bunch of filters on LinkedIn, and hitting search.
• Scrolling through people’s work histories to get the info you need, assessing whether they might have the hard and soft skills the hiring manager is looking for.
• Tailoring a boilerplate message for each individual.
• Juggling a hundred ongoing conversations to try and suss out if a candidate might be the right fit for the role you’re doing.
• Trying to coordinate a good time to get on the phone, or schlepping across town to a strange coffee shop for an interview.
• Presenting the qualified candidates to the hiring manager.
• (And so on.)

In short: recruiters are battling against the challenges of screening and sourcing, but in this battle, a lot of what they do is pure repetition. The same things, over and over again. As every recruiter knows, the interesting bit of the job comes once you have matched an ideal candidate with a client’s open role. But for every instance of this, there are hours of drudgery behind you.

Wade & Wendy is revolutionizing the recruiter role through task automation. Integrating with major ATS systems, our cutting-edge conversation and comprehension technology enables recruiters to offload all of these repetitive tasks, and fast-forward to the creative, involved end of the job.

Automating these tasks helps recruiters hit numbers that would be impossible without teaming up with an artificial intelligence. In one case study, over the space of three months, a Wade & Wendy user was able to submit more than 900 qualified and interested candidates. A top sourcer, over a comparable period, would usually submit around 100.
In another two week case study, a Fortune 100 Wade & Wendy user turned to us to rectify a hiring cul-de-sac. They had 63 roles, and over the previous 30 days, they hadn’t found a single qualified candidate. In two weeks, Wendy delivered 325 highly qualified — and, just as importantly, interested — candidates.

All of this happened without any repetitive, draining focus being expended by a human worker. And the feedback from candidates was overwhelmingly positive.

Recruiting is a dynamic, exciting and important process. Its future should be one where thinking gets more lateral, more creative and more human: from building teams, to getting more creative with interviews, and so on. By taking the drudgery out of recruiting, we can move toward a future where artificial and human intelligence split the responsibilities in a way that everyone benefits.