{"id":47847,"date":"2023-10-20T07:35:43","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T11:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/?p=47847"},"modified":"2023-10-20T07:39:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T11:39:00","slug":"rpa-in-recruiting-with-microsoft-power-platform-automation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/blog\/rpa-in-recruiting-with-microsoft-power-platform-automation\/","title":{"rendered":"RPA in Recruiting With Microsoft Power Platform Automation"},"content":{"rendered":"
Robotic process automation (RPA) has the potential to transform human resources. HR is filled with repetitive, reusable and rules-based tasks that teams can easily automate. The departments\u2019 biggest culprit? Interview invitations.<\/p>\n
Recruiting teams are essential to any company. They\u2019re the first people to talk to potential new team members, and they\u2019re the first impression your organization has of any new hires. They need to be refreshed and prepared to talk to prospective employees every day, but that becomes difficult when there are also other time-consuming tasks to address.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where RPA can come in. In this post, we will explore one of the biggest process challenges within recruiting and how automation can help. We\u2019ll also review the exact technologies in this case, Microsoft Power Platform you can use to build the automation solution<\/a>, so your recruiting team can get back to what they\u2019re best at: talking to potential team members and helping to build the future of your organization.<\/strong><\/p>\n As part of our RPA center of excellence team, we have a general practice of looking out for automation capabilities within our internal organization. While reviewing the capabilities to help our HR team, we came across a recruiting process that involved doing the manual work of sending out interview invites to candidates.<\/p>\n During our research, we found that almost 25 percent of a recruiter\u2019s time is spent on sending out interview invites. On average, it takes three to four minutes to send one interview invite. That means that if our company wants to send 150 Interview invites each week, our recruiters would need around seven-and-a-half to 10 hours to complete this task in one week.<\/strong><\/p>\n We studied this process to determine if it would be a good RPA candidate. Our criteria, as briefly mentioned above, is whether the task is:<\/p>\n Sending interview invites met these criteria. On top of that, we concluded we could save the recruiting team eight to 10 hours each week with an automation solution for this process.<\/p>\n Once we reached this conclusion, we had to determine the technology we would use and how it would help.<\/p>\n Microsoft Power Platform<\/a> is a suite of products that helps businesses develop and build complex solutions, examine and create data visualizations, automate their business processes, and construct virtual agents to ease communication.<\/p>\n These products offer a platform in the form of a simple graphical user interface (GUI) in which no code is required to build the applications, and it can be used by developers or any business user. Power Platform automation<\/a> helps organizations reduce the need to take IT away from larger or client- and customer-focused projects.<\/p>\n Microsoft Power Platform consists of four products:<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n To create automation for our recruiting team, we determined a combination of Power Automate and Power Virtual Agent would be the best way to go.<\/p>\n Power Automate, formerly known as Microsoft Flow, is one of the major components of the Microsoft Power Platform that allows business users to automate workflows within organizations without writing any code<\/a>.<\/p>\n These days, companies want to adopt faster, automated environments to handle various manual and repetitive tasks. A few examples include:<\/strong><\/p>\n Power Automate already contains various templates to choose a workflow and start working with automation<\/a>.<\/strong> Teams can use these pre-built templates to speed up the automation, or users can start developing their workflows from scratch.<\/p>\n Three main types of Power Automate workflows:<\/p>\n Power Virtual Agents helps to create no-code, powerful virtual chat agents from scratch without taking time away from core developers. This app is available to use both in Microsoft Teams and the Power Virtual Agents web portal.<\/p>\n Example Use cases include:<\/strong><\/p>\n Power Virtual Agents provides a graphical interface to handle the bot development life cycle, customized according to user demand and deployed to various channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more. Power Virtual Agents can also be created for various departments, such as HR, Sales, Finance, IT, or wherever customers need to be engaged.<\/p>\n It can be easily integrated with other Power Platform automation products, such as Power Automate and PowerApps. Based on the users\u2019 replies, the virtual agents can also trigger any workflow from Power Automate and get the job done as intended.<\/p>\n Using both Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents, we started working on the RPA in recruiting solution. As part of this RPA, Microsoft Teams was tightly coupled with the recruiter\u2019s manual tasks, and we had to schedule all the interviews on Teams. This further made Power Automate a perfect fit for this automation because of its easy plug-and-play features with other Microsoft products, including Outlook and SharePoint, as well as Teams.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Before we started working on this project, each individual recruiter had to manually look for candidates, review their r\u00e9sum\u00e9, determine if they want to interview them, and then send an email to that candidate.<\/p>\n While technology and innovation are the main impetus behind RPA, a proactive people-oriented strategy<\/a> defines the success of your RPA initiative.<\/strong> As a result, we aren\u2019t removing the important step of reviewing the r\u00e9sum\u00e9, but our new automation is stepping in to help fill in interview details, schedule the interviews, and update candidate tracking spreadsheets.<\/p>\n The RPA solution now grabs the interview details from Excel, makes sure the recruiter has access to the candidate\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9, and communicates with the recruiter via a bot in Teams. Once the recruiter triggers the bot to schedule the interview, the bot completes that task and updates the tracking sheet.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\nChallenges in Recruiting: RPA to the Rescue<\/h2>\n
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Power Platform for Recruiting<\/h2>\n
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Power Automate<\/h3>\n
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Power Virtual Agents<\/h3>\n
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Bringing It All Together: Automation in Recruiting<\/h2>\n
Power Platform Automation for Recruiting: The Results<\/h3>\n
Personal Assistant for Recruiters In Action<\/h3>\n