We pay our bills automatically every month, program coffee makers to brew a fresh pot of coffee each morning and record TV shows from an app on our phones. In our personal lives, automating daily tasks helps us save time and streamline busy days. So, why do we still conduct so many recruitment functions manually?

When the hiring pipeline is stalled by time-intensive administrative tasks, candidates will seek opportunities elsewhere. Talent acquisition software automates recruiting operations to help you beat the competition and hire top talent. Accelerate time-to-hire with recruiting technology by storing all career fair information in a single system, collecting resumes digitally at events and reporting metrics to easily identify the hiring events that generate the greatest return. Read below for the top ways recruiting software automates manual processes and speeds hiring.

At the Career Fair

Manual process: Career fair logistics are scattered

Your team uses spreadsheets and disparate systems to plan hiring events. Volunteer schedules, collateral information and campus contacts are all stored in different locations or shared among several team members. Without visibility, planning for events is haphazard; recruiters and staff are often unclear on event expectations, resulting in a chaotic career fair experience.

Recruiting software solution: Bring planning to one place and provide all stakeholders key logistical information with event management software. Create a central repository where every recruiter can collaborate to execute successful career fairs. By maintaining all team knowledge in one platform, avoid losing information due to turnover, and run hundreds of recruiting events with unmatched consistency.

Find out how BP created a single repository of all event information and optimized their event-recruiting process.

Manual process: Long lines at candidate check-in

At hiring events, candidates wait in line to check in and speak with a recruiter. When lines are long, some leave to visit another employer’s booth before providing their resume. Without contact information, these ghost candidates — candidates who visit your booth, but vanish without sharing their information or resume — are unreachable.

Recruiting software solution: With mobile recruiting apps, candidates can sign in while they wait in line to speak with a recruiter. Even if they leave before learning about your company, send a text or email to encourage them to apply for a position or schedule an interview.

Manual process: Collecting stacks of paper resumes

You collect paper resumes at career fairs and return to the office with stacks of paper to scan and upload. Candidates who visit your booth see manilla folders stuffed full of resumes and wonder if theirs will receive consideration, or be lost in a black hole.

Recruiting software solution: Never return to the office with piles of paper again. Use mobile recruiting apps to capture a digital resume copy or give candidates the option to upload it from Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. Reduce time spent uploading or sorting through candidate information post-event, and provide candidates peace of mind that their resume will be reviewed — not stuffed in a manila folder.

To streamline recruiting operations, Johnson & Johnson stopped accepting paper resumes at career events. Learn more.

Manual process: Evaluating candidates with notes on paper resumes

After speaking with a candidate at a career fair and learning about their background, you jot down notes on the candidate’s resume. When determining who to advance in the hiring process, you can’t read your own notes, and you certainly can’t decipher your colleague’s.

Recruiting software solution: Don’t spend hours sifting through illegible notes or trying to understand your co-worker’s feedback. Leverage evaluation management software to evaluate candidates on-the-spot. Through customized forms, create a consistent and compliant feedback process every staff member can follow. After the event, easily find out how many candidates the team evaluated and how many should advance.

After the Career Fair

Manual process: Sorting through hundreds of paper resumes to find a candidate

You meet candidates at the career fair and return to the office to scan resumes into your system. As this data isn’t easily searchable, you manually comb through hundreds of resumes to identify candidates who are a fit for a position.

Recruiting software solution: Quickly build a pipeline for a requisition by using candidate relationship management software to filter based on tags or folders, and search thousands of candidates in seconds. Narrow your selection based on role requirements, qualifications or interests, to easily identify candidates who are a fit for the position.

Manual process: Playing phone or email tag to schedule an interview

Post-event, you return to the office to schedule interviews. With back-and-forth emails and calls to hiring managers and interview team members, it takes several days to schedule an interview, delaying the hiring process and giving the candidate time to explore opportunities at other organizations.

Recruiting software solution: Speed is crucial to hire top talent. Prevent scheduling delays by eliminating logistical emails and calls. Instead, use interview scheduling software to let the candidate select and immediately confirm their interview slot. Reduce the hiring timeline to beat the competition and reduce time-to-fill.

Manual process: Event ROI is tracked haphazardly

Multiple team members track event expenses. With invoices in different hands, total event costs are difficult to determine and calculating event ROI is nearly impossible.

Recruiting software solution: Use event management software to track all event-related costs in a single platform. After the event, quickly calculate event ROI and automatically run key reports. With metrics for every career fair, identify high-return events to better allocate resources and only attend events that prove valuable for your organization.

Enterprise Holdings brought insight to event ROI, to understand exactly how many candidates they met, how many became applicants and how many became hires.

Leverage talent acquisition software to spend more time recruiting and engaging with candidates, and less time on administrative processes. Speed can be the determining factor between a new hire and a rejected offer, so automate manual tasks and don’t let slow systems hinder hiring objectives.

Learn how athenahealth eliminated manual processes to reduce time-to-fill and move in-demand candidates through the hiring process, faster.