Recruiting Autonomously, Can It Be Done?

Automation is everywhere. You read the headlines all the time, “Autonomous vehicles,” and “Fully robotic factories.” Well, recruitment is no different, we have the capability to automate and innovate and with the ever-evolving power of technology.

Pontoon’s Emerging Tech team have been working with the top HR tech vendors in the market. Together we have been building our vision; a scalable Automated Recruitment Product.

Earlier this year, a global technology and supply chain company tasked us with building a technology-focused solution – and we delivered what we had been envisioning all along. A fully automated recruitment process for both client and candidate that ensures a best-in-class experience whilst improving speed to hire and reducing complexity for our client.

Doesn’t sound possible, does it? Well, we did it. The task wasn’t easy – with a potential of close to 10,000 hires to be made over 3 months and across two countries.

Our team partnered with several different tech providers, ranging from chatbots to programmatic advertising all with an aim to ultimately build our own automated product that uses technology throughout the entire recruitment cycle.

I was the Tech Lead responsible for making the impossible possible. The fun part was organising all our vendors to communicate to each other through very geeky methods such as web feeds and API calls whilst also building our back-end workflows and data feed sets for the product. Collaborating together, I was able to conduct all our partners to work simultaneously, communicate instantly and create a clean uninterrupted flow for both manager and candidate.

So, how does it work?

1. Hiring managers place an order on their online portal
2. The system sanity checks the order for errors
3. This then feeds to back end technology and in turn feeds to our career sites to be displayed with specific details captured at order placement stage
4. Which in turn feeds to our programmatic advertising vendor – sharing our roles to the world across multiple channels
5. Candidates are then greeted with a chatbot to help advise and qualify them on the role within 5 minutes
6. Their application is captured, and sanity checked automatically
7. Successful candidates are sent the opportunity to record an online video interview
8. Once completed the candidates land into the hiring mangers inbox and on their candidate portal workflow ready to review
9. Successful candidates are invited to meet the hiring manager and engage in person around their new career opportunity.

Launching the first-ever Automated RXO solution has been a huge achievement for Pontoon and especially our team and client. A huge well done to the entire team involved from our Ops teams, Project management teams, Tech team and all our vendors!

Our own Tim Meehan, Head of Emerging Tech, stated “This is not only disruptive for our client, but for the industry as a whole. We at Pontoon believe this is only the tip of the iceberg as to what we plan to deliver in regard to recruiterless solutions moving forward. The ability for us to hire thousands of people without a single recruiter is truly ground-breaking and a first of its kind in our market.”