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Supersizing small businesses with recruitment automation

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By The Fetcher Team

Supersizing small businesses with recruitment automation

8 mins read

small business recruitment
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Small businesses are the backbone of the economy. In every corner of the world, small businesses are innovation hubs.

The past few years have been tough for many small businesses, but small-business owners are optimistic as the economy recovers and the pandemic subsides. Like their large and mid-size counterparts, the success of small businesses relies on the quality of their employees. However, hiring new talent continues to be one of the largest challenges for small businesses.

A large contributing factor to this is the many hats recruiters and hiring managers have to wear at small companies. At a small business, a three-person HR department might be in charge of processing payroll, managing employee benefits and policies, recruiting, and onboarding. That’s a lot to manage! When recruiters are spread thin, they can’t move candidates through the talent pipeline effectively and they end up making desperate decisions leading to hires that may not be the best fit for the role or the company.

Additionally, unlike larger counterparts, smaller businesses don’t always have large budgets to pay a headhunter or outside recruiting agency. Automation, and its variety of uses, is the extra muscle small teams need to power their recruiting process!

Automated Sourcing

On average, recruiters spend thirteen hours a week sourcing candidates for just one role. On a small team, committing this much time to finding prospects just isn’t feasible when you are juggling other HR responsibilities as well. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can slow down your search. Top candidates won’t stay unemployed for long so you need to move quickly. This often leads to working longer hours or on weekends to find the right candidates.

Here’s where automation can help. Fetcher, for example, will help you cut down on sourcing hours and cost. Calibrate your search parameters, and Fetcher scours the internet bringing qualified candidates right to your inbox while you sleep. Additionally, your dedicated human-in-the-loop reviews all the candidates that Fetcher’s AI surfaces to make sure they’re meeting the standard you set.

Our 1-click web extension allows you to add a candidate from LinkedIn directly to your outreach list. No more searching for candidates’ personal email addresses, keeping track of multiple tabs, and copy-pasting until your fingers fall off.

TIP: Find our what your open roles are costing you to help your prioritize which roles to fill and plan your recruiting budget.

Automated Outreach

Personalized outreach is so important and the first step in successful candidate engagement. Crafting and sending these messages is also time-consuming but generic messages where only the prospect’s name changes will go unread or wind up in a candidate’s trash.

Fetcher allows recruiters to create personalized outreach and follow-up email sequences. You can create custom templates and set the frequency and schedule of your follow ups. With Fetcher, you can send 150+ emails an hour. Manually this would take over 10 hours!

Automated Assessments

Assessments are a key tool for recruiters and hiring managers. They’re essential for skilled-based jobs like software engineers and they're becoming popular amongst all job types because they help to remove bias from hiring decisions.

Automating your assessment process reduces time spent screening candidates. Organizations report 39% lower turnover rate and 36% higher hiring decision satisfaction rates when incorporating assessments. To learn more, check out Digital HR Tech's thorough review review of 40+ pre-employment assessments tools.

Automated Onboarding

Onboarding occurs during a new hire's first days at your organization and can make a lasting impression. Strong onboarding leads to better employee retention. While not every step should be automated (a huge piece of onboarding is meeting your new team!), some elements can be streamlined to save you and your new hire time:

  • Pre-onboarding. Use tools like DocuSign to process new hire’s documents sooner. Allowing a hire to track and sign contracts, NDAs, W-9s, and other documents before they start means they can focus on introductions and learning job functions from the get-go.

  • Employee data. There are many data entry software options available that integrate with your accounting system, payroll, and employee rewards program. Take data entry off your list!

  • Benefits enrollment. Simply send an automated email to new employees with an explanation of the offered benefits package and instructions. Schedule automated reminders to make sure your employees meet important deadlines.

There are a lot of tools available to help you onboard with ease. Check out Capterra’s list here.

Other Automated Recruiting Integrations

Whether you choose to build out a full recruiting tech stack, consider implementing one or more of the below to streamline processes. Anything you can automate leaves you more time to focus on the candidate and new hire experience.

Announce new hires in Slack or Microsoft Teams channels.

It’s so important for a new employee to feel welcome on their first day and it’s so easy to forget to send a company wide email or pop a message in your shared slack channel. Make sure no new hire feels unappreciated by automating your welcome messages!

  • Slack uses GreetBot to automate welcome messages and other onboarding functions
  • Microsoft Teams uses Power Automate Power Automate to automate welcome messages and integrate many other apps into teams
  • Pre-schedule welcome emails before a new hire’s first day so you don’t risk forgetting to send
Notifying your team about candidate progress

Hiring managers will want to be kept informed when candidates pass assessment tests, HR will also want to kept in the loop on when background checks clear, and IT will want to be notified of new hires ASAP for employee provisioning. By automating internal communication, everyone will be on the same page at the same time, and those that need it will have access to review candidate results.

Inform sourced candidates when a position has been filled or of a hiring freeze.

No one likes waiting in the dark but, sometimes schedules are just too hectic to reply to all candidates to let them know the position has been filled. Consider integrating an email bot, or schedule emails in advance, to let candidates in your ATS down easy. They’ll appreciate you getting back to them and this will work to your advantage if you want to keep a candidate warm for future job openings.

By integrating automation into your recruiting process, your team will be able to get more work done in less time and with less manual effort. It will reduce time-consuming and repetitive work, improve organization, reduce time to hire and cost of hires, and surface better candidates.

For example, if your business wants to hire 5 engineers in the next year, Fetcher will save your recruiters on average 2 hours of work per week per role and roughly 12 days overall in the hiring process. For a small business, that time and money can allocated to others areas to help the company continue to grow.

Most importantly, by allowing automation to handle your more mundane tasks, you’ll be able to focus on candidate engagement and overall hiring strategy. If you’re ready to take your small business’s efforts recruiting to the next level, check out Fetcher today!


About Fetcher

Our mission is to help you engage talent that will transform your business aspirations into reality. Great talent is hard to find - that's why we offer a talent sourcing platform that not only gets your brand in front of the right candidates but also gives you a competitive edge in talent acquisition.

Begin building a relationship with your next great hire today and let Fetcher handle the rest. Get started for free.

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