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.