RecruitMilitary automates job matching to increase veteran employment.
“Like everybody else, the pandemic came very quickly and snuck up on us. We needed to pivot all of our logistics for our clients to be able to move to a virtual career fair.”
What started as a decision to streamline the registration process for veterans attending virtual career fairs grew into a larger effort, as RecruitMilitary turned to intelligent automation — a combination of automation and AI — to match employers with the best career fairs and the best candidates.
Here are five steps Josh Dayment, Salesforce Platform Manager at RecruitMilitary, and the wider RecruitMilitary team took to automate job matching, all with the underlying mission to better serve employers and veterans.
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1. Assess your business automation opportunities.
With only a week to transition from in-person career fairs to virtual events and so much to be done, RecruitMilitary couldn’t afford delays from inefficient business processes. Josh knew automation could help, but where to start?
He turned to the client experience team because he knew they would be the most impacted by the shift to virtual events and had the most insight into how that would impact employers. They would be able to assess which processes were taking the longest, and within those, where there were bottlenecks. Through this process, the team identified the need to reduce the time spent on registration as an urgent priority.
“We were able to cut down the entire process from 30 minutes to a mere 30 seconds for each exhibitor.”
2. Put employee experience at the forefront of every automation decision.
2021 Trends in Workflow Automation report, Salesforce
3. Bolster your workflows with decision assistance.
To that end, RecruitMilitary rolled out Einstein Recommendation Builder to create a workflow that helped sales reps recommend the best career fair for employers to attend to get access to the best candidates for their open role and industry. The Einstein Next Best Action feature provides personalized recommendations based on the employer’s past attendance history as well as data points like company size, industry, and location.
Sales reps now have personalized actions on each account page that enable them to offer helpful insights and create a smooth process for employers. This has become a game changer for RecruitMilitary’s customers who have shared they haven’t experienced such a smooth process and this level of service at any other career fair.
“Salesforce Flow helped us work much faster and be more efficient, but adding Einstein makes it just that much more powerful, because it gives us insights we can act on in context.”
4. Create a feedback loop.
As with any workflow automation project, it’s critical to build in feedback loops. When Covid forced a quick pivot to virtual career fairs, Josh had to move so quickly that he had to build the automation with little to no end user input. The workflow worked, but over time it became clear there were limitations. In meeting with end users to discuss how they expected it to work, he gained valuable insight that helped him improve the workflow and make it what it is today.
Using Salesforce Flow, Josh included a form to capture end user feedback and determine how well the recommendations are working. Based on whether each recommendation was a good (or bad) fit, he can then make tweaks to improve it.
Now that he’s able to involve end users earlier in the process, they’ve helped improve the end result by taking on a quality assurance (QA) role. As a small business without a dedicated QA department, these employees play a vital role in testing new processes and workflows before they’re moved into production. Along with providing a way to effectively monitor and improve recommendation quality, a feedback loop is also a critical step to drive user engagement and trust.
5. Build a collaborative environment to scale automation across business processes.
As Josh found out when he implemented a feedback loop, employees are more than eager to drive the conversation around how to expand the use of automation and AI, approaching him daily with questions about solving additional business challenges.
There are so many incoming requests that Josh created a project request process to identify what problem employees are trying to solve, what their current workflow looks like, and what “right” would look like.
“I never want to decide what ‘right’ looks like. I want the end users to decide.”
Some of those ideas have even evolved into future projects. For instance, RecruitMilitary plans to use Einstein Bots to help veterans get details about upcoming career fairs. And with the return of in-person events, they’re also looking to automate additional steps in the registration process and provide contactless check-in.
Additionally, Josh plans to use Einstein Recommendation Builder to build a similar workflow to the one he created to match employers to the right career fairs to also recommend candidates for specific roles. When a recruiter or hiring manager logs in, they will immediately see a list of recommended candidates for individual job postings and internships. This is a big leap forward in automating job matching — not only does it place veterans in meaningful roles more quickly, but it saves employers hours of manual work sourcing the perfect candidate.
Don’t let automation intimidate you.
“During my time in the military, I could see the positive impact of what I was doing every day. It’s almost the same feeling with Salesforce, because I'm seeing how end users are being directly impacted by something that I did.”
For RecruitMilitary, Josh’s story is exactly what they want other veterans to experience. By investing in tools to bridge the gap between employers and veterans, they’re not only bringing their mission to life, but doing it better and faster every day.
Learn more about how you can automate everything from the simplest tasks to your most ambitious processes in the Einstein Automate: Flow Playbook.
About the Author
Salesforce Platform Manager
RecruitMilitary
More resources
How to Innovate Fast with Enterprise-Scale Automation Using Salesforce Flow
Change the speed of work with Einstein Automate.
