How much talent and time are you wasting with these manual recruitment tasks?

Last updated:
February 3, 2022
March 21, 2022
min read
Adrie Smith
Recruitee
manual recrui
Table of contents

Recruiters are some of the hardest working professionals out there. They’re often tasked with sourcing, screening, interviewing, coordinating, compiling vital information, onboarding, and, ultimately helping make a hiring decision. 

The list can go on and the hats keep piling up depending on the company and specific recruitment function. The stakes are high: Great hires have the potential to transform a team. Bad hires have the potential to cost a company up to $15,000.

Recruiters simply can’t afford to waste time or lose great talent in the process, which is why there needs to be a change. There continue to be so many manual tasks in recruitment, despite living in a constantly evolving, technological world. 

Not only are manual recruitment tasks wasting valuable time, but they’re also losing your hard-earned talent. Manual tasks may be allowing strong, talented candidates to slip through the cracks by either creating a poor candidate experience or making your team slower to interview or offer than your competitors.

So, with that in mind, here’s our checklist of manual recruitment tasks that could be causing you or your team to miss out on successful candidates.

Manual recruitment task 1: Synthesizing & uploading profiles

Sourcing needs to be agile and rapid-fire, especially when in a competitive candidate market. 

The sooner a candidate is screened and invited for an interview, the sooner they can potentially be taken off the market. Despite the need for speed, sourcing candidates outside of your own talent pool or database can be time-consuming and a painstakingly manual task in recruitment.

Downloading CVs and profiles across platforms (like Facebook, LinkedIn, or GitHub), only to have to save them and then manually upload them into your ATS or CRM, costs you valuable time. Even if you source and upload in batches, you may be risking leaving one candidate in your download folder.  Additionally, you may want to consider that keeping candidate data on individual computers and outside of your ATS may be a GDPR compliance risk.

The solution:

Using an ATS system like Recruitee allows you to streamline your sourcing process. With our Google Chrome extension, you can upload candidate profiles alongside your colleagues in a few clicks. Manual time is saved, and the content is infinitely more reliable. 

You’re able to place candidates directly into the sourcing system from sites like LinkedIn Search and drag them into the right category or talent pool. 

Manual recruitment task 2: Sifting through Excel sheets

Excel has long been a tool of the trade for recruiters. But times are changing.

If you find yourself regularly seeking information from Excel sheets, you may be falling victim to sunken time.

While Microsoft Excel has been a handy addition to a recruiter’s toolkit, data laws and an increase in the wide risk of viruses have caused data loss and breaches. 
Excel sheets individually stored on computers can pose risks to your data security, erode team collaboration and perpetuate manual tasks in recruitment.

Creating even a basic spreadsheet requires extensive manual data entry and are undoubtedly time-consuming to keep updated. If you’re looking to speed things up, you can always add forumaes, but these aren’t often common knowledge and can take a lot of money and time in training. 

Remember, people make mistakes. It’s human nature. And human error can (and do regularly) remove crucial information or mistype emails or phone numbers. The continued use of Excel in your day-to-day will not only waste precious time but also can pose a serious risk to your data security and candidate data access.

The solution:

Here at Recruitee, we pride ourselves on our Pipelines feature. Rather than continuously needing to update spreadsheets and risking candidate’s data security, this feature allows you to customize stages, create templates, and automate tasks to reduce your manual work. You can adapt each process and automate elements for specific roles, turning on candidate reminders and schedulers with no need to worry that anything is slipping through the cracks. 

Manual recruitment task 3: Reconciling emails

Candidate communication is of the utmost importance in any hiring process. 

Keeping track of complex hiring processes can get hectic if your email doesn’t feed directly into candidate profiles. Often individual recruiters will spend a good deal of admin time with manual tasks in recruitment, including reconciling email records.

Reconciling email records is necessary when you have to manually upload records of email contact to your candidate record. 

When you do this, you potentially leave out crucial emails and lose essential time in your day

Leaving out pieces of information can prompt you to have to ask the candidate again or risk not having it. Either way, you could be at risk of seeming amateur or unprepared leading to a poor candidate experience.

The solution:

Recruitee has a whole host of communication features that reduce time and effort going back and forth, from inbox to inbox. Not only are you able to communicate with everyone involved in the hiring process from one platform, but you can also use our mobile app (created for both Android and Apple) to stay up to date with a candidate’s process and receive email notifications.  

Manual recruitment task 4:Checking for applications

Your role surrounds uniting applications with vacancies.

Especially when requirements are urgent, you may find yourself checking your inbox on multiple platforms every 30 seconds. 

However, if a requirement has been filled or is not as urgent, you may forget you posted it on a different platform. Applications and candidate queries could go unanswered in the meantime. There’s only so long a candidate can wait for a response, and you could be allowing solid talent to fall into the cracks.

Checking for applications is a manual task in recruitment that could be costing your business successful candidates. Not to mention, it could be raising the business’s time-to-hire.  

The demand to manually check every platform or wait for sporadic and, at times, delayed alerts in your inbox could mean that some applications are unintentionally ignored or missed. 

The solution:

By using an ATS system like Recruitee, you’ll receive instant notifications whenever an application is received. Responding to applications and uniting them with the perfect vacancy is a large part of your role as a recruiter, so finding a method of organizing this such as Recruitee’s instant notifications across multiple job boards, is essential. 

Manual recruitment task 5: Posting on multiple platforms

You want to make sure as many qualified candidates as possible see your vacancy. 

Posting a vacancy across multiple channels and platforms is, without a doubt, the best way of gaining diverse applications. However, it’s also a manual task in recruitment that could be wasting your time when it comes to managing the postings individually.

If the details of an opportunity change or a requirement is unexpectedly closed, you would have to go into each platform and manually edit or remove the posting. Failing to do so could mean that you get applications for a position that has been closed, creating a poor candidate experience. Or if you haven’t edited the post, you may be misinforming candidates who apply. 

Both of these possibilities hardly create a positive candidate experience that would encourage skilled professionals to join your company. It’s therefore crucial that this doesn’t happen, which is why so much time is eaten up when completed manually. 

The solution:

Our multi-posting and smart campaigns feature allows you to access more than 1450 job boards - both free and paid - in your local area and abroad. By using an ATS system like Recruitee, you’ll receive instant notifications whenever an application is received, meaning manually checking across all 1450+ job boards is a pain of the past. 

You gain all of the benefits of posting across multiple job platforms, but none of the headache. It’s a win-win! 

You’re also able to update these boards with a tap of a button, ensuring you don’t need to go into job boards individually anymore. 

Manual recruitment task 6: Scheduling interviews

Scheduling interviews with your hiring manager and candidates can be the ultimate game of cat-and-mouse. 

Once you have your candidate on board for one date, the hiring manager is no longer available to interview them. Or vice versa. 

Many emails can be exchanged before you’re able to lock down a time and date for the interview. By then your candidate could be interviewing elsewhere.

Scheduling interviews is one of the more painful manual tasks in recruitment. Additionally, with its manual nature, placing the meeting in everyone’s calendars leaves room for human error.

Even having a scheduling assistant outside of your own ATS can lead to miscommunications. 

Missing an interview or delaying it because it was placed in the incorrect timeslot can mean missing out on great talent or creating a negative candidate experience.

Can you sense a pattern? Manual tasks consistently mean that recruiters risk losing out on great talent.

Scheduling interviews goes beyond keeping your recruitment processes in order. It also shows your company’s commitment to technology-driven efficiency and convenience. This is especially important when targeting a workforce that is predominantly made up of millennials and Gen Zers, who attach great importance to the technological sophistication of an organization. 

It would be incredibly difficult to attract them without automated recruiting software in place.

When scheduling interviews, it’s always worth keeping in mind that the ATS you use to automate this function should have the capability of working on mobile. According to the 2018 Global Web Index, Generation Z averages up to 4 hours a day on their mobile phones, over 20 mins more than their millennial counterparts. They also attach great importance to the technological sophistication of an organization. Almost 90% of them said this would directly impact their decision of whether to work for a company.

The solution:

Here at Recruitee, we pride ourselves on our Recruitee scheduler, specifically designed to enhance and streamline your interview process. Not only does it speak directly to the younger generation who value technological advancement by offering remote, digital interviews, but it also makes organization much easier. 

On our platform, you can easily navigate through your digital office space with our ‘Meeting Rooms’ feature, and use the ‘scheduling’ tool to arrange a time that suits everyone. No more back and forth with emails suggesting times and dates. 

Manual recruitment task 7: Creating talent pipelines

Recruiters should always be thinking about future positions to fill, especially in a candidate-driven market. 

Therefore, it's important to build a long-term professional relationship with both active and passive candidates for future roles. This is known as talent pipelining

Building a talent pipeline is a long-term strategy that relies on sourcing and nurturing candidates. Doing this manually often involves creating a spreadsheet which you’re constantly editing, growing, and fiddling with. Again, there’s large scope for human error here. Trying to stay on top of multiple talent pipelines when they’ll likely need changing daily alongside all the other tasks recruiters need to complete is nearly impossible. 

The solution:

There's no better way to keep on top of a growing talent pipeline than with our effective recruiting software platform, where you can easily access your talent pipeline database and keep the lines of communication open with prospective candidates.

Once you receive an application, you can add it to your database and track applicants for your current job openings. The database retains all applicants' information, which is essential for meeting long-term staffing needs. You can also share information about your talent pipeline easily with your team.

Automating your talent pipeline can help you stay on top of your company's hiring needs and locate quality candidates faster. Forward-thinking companies use it as a way to nurture candidates and stay on top of their hiring process.

The solution to manual tasks in recruitment: Tooling & automation

Recruiters are busy people because they are tasked with so many responsibilities in the hiring process. 

Traditionally, many of these responsibilities have involved manual tasks in recruitment. Today, there are so many alternatives to this with the help of tech-driven solutions. 

A Talent Acquisition Platform like Recruitee helps you automate these tasks in order to save you time and lost candidates. From our sourcing extension that automatically pulls profiles from various platforms to our scheduling feature that finds mutual times across agendas and syncs with candidate records, we’re committed to helping you attract the best talent, automate your process, and predict your next strategic move.

Additionally, there are a number of tools you can use to work around manual tasks and speed up your hiring. Make sure you use all the technology available to you to make sure you’re not missing out on the talent you need!

A quick example: Automate screening questions

When sifting through hundreds of CVs, it can be difficult to keep on top of all the applicants and whether they truly meet your job requirements. 

This is where automating screening questions can help. You can automatically narrow down your list to easily select applicants who match your criteria, from skillset, location, education requirements, whether they’re authorized to work where your company is based, etc. The list goes on!

Pre-screening can go beyond just asking candidates questions. With an ATS, you can also send out questionnaires and tests to assess whether applicants are a fit for the role. These tests can be used to determine a number of things, including work aptitude, personality traits, and scenario-based situations. If a candidate spends the time to fill out these tests, then that is also an indicator that they’re willing to make an effort to pursue a career at your company.

Keyword testing is also becoming more common as part of the pre-screening process. For example, if you require a candidate with impeccable SEO knowledge, then you can easily filter through applications by searching for the term ‘SEO specialist’ in your ATS. However, keep in mind that applicants are also becoming savvier and know that employers are on the lookout for specific keywords, so this isn’t always the most reliable way of finding the candidates you want and need. It should be used in conjunction with traditional sourcing methods, rather than replacing them. 

Typically, the pre-screening stage of applications can slow down the hiring process. The main benefit of automated pre-screening is that it shortens the time-to-hire and can help you find higher-quality employees faster. 

So, if you haven’t already automated your pre-screening process, give it a go and see how well it works for you in filtering out the best candidates for your roles.


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