Automating Employee Recruitment and other HR processes in Bitrix24

Ordering and streamlining day-to-day operations is a necessity, and sometimes the basis for the survival of companies.

Bitrix24 is not only a CRM for the sales department, it is a powerful tool for different departments of a company. 

In this article, we will reveal the formula for carrying out successful recruitment, show you techniques to simplify the adoption/ adaptation process for new recruits, and also provide you with ready-made templates.

Why do you need this?

To light up your imagination, let's examine a typical situation. 

The HR department is assigned the task of recruiting new employees from your company’s management

You (the HR specialist) hastily publish a vacancy on Indeed, Glassdoor, or even LinkedIn. You make a couple of calls to friends and friends of friends who might be job hunting, you write posts on Facebook, and so on. You also make agreements with some candidates via email, and others via your personal WhatsApp. 

With many interested candidates, I’m sure you can imagine the chaos:

• candidates do not complete their trial task, and there is little or nothing you can do about it, other than remind them of this (since you haven't got much of a choice amongst those who completed the task),

• You reply to one candidate immediately, and completely forget about another 

• someone was scheduled for an interview, but something went wrong - for example, you didn’t have enough time to meet with management, so as to plan an interview. As a result, you forget to meet with the candidate,

• You are unable to get in touch with and interview enough candidates to meet your deadline 

On the side of the management, it’s usually not clear how to measure the KPI of HR specialists - You don’t understand what and how to assess, so you just leave them with a constant basic salary!

Organizing and managing HR duties in Bitrix24 will prevent all these issues.

It will greatly improve the results of the recruitment process and the work of the HR department will be more efficient. 

INTERVOLGA  developed the first complete HR platform for Bitrix24 - RAE. RAE automates recruiting, Adaptation (Onboarding) and Education( staff training and development)

How to start automating HR processes

The goals of automating HR duties in Bitrix24 are to

1. reduce the time spent on hiring personnel, 

2. introduce the “single-window” system for HR personnel, 

3. make the processes of adaptation and training of employees more technological and enjoyable.
   

INTERVOLGA has vast experience in automating business processes. We are ready to help assess your company, identify the pain points and implement a solution

To organize the work of the HR department in the Bitrix24 portal, our recommendations are as follows:

1. create a landing page with a form dedicated to recruiting. Every form submission on this page will automatically go into a special HR pipeline in the CRM;

2. set up integrations of your CRM with the vacancy boards/platform you use

3. set up automated letters, SMS, instant messages, to be sent depending on the progress of the candidate;

4. book interviews for participants on time, using the “activities” functionality so as not to forget anything;

5. send bulk messages to filtered candidates (for example, an invitation to all candidates who passed a preliminary interview);

6. monitor the results of the pipeline and constantly improve them, create a KPI system for HR employees;

7. create, send and save job offers and details of communication with candidates.

1. Create a template with a checklist for employee recruitment  so that you don't accidentally miss a point, for example, sign the employment contract within 3 days;

2. provide a warm welcome to the candidate even if you are not at your workstation when he/she resumes using automatic tasks with attached videos, brochures, links to the knowledge base. Nothing demotivates a specialist more than a lack of understanding of what to do and who to contact in the first days of his work.

3. and in the future motivate and train staff using Bitrix24  tools

" Bitrix24 CRM, almost without any modifications, is already a helpful ready-to-use for hr-specialists. Take a CRM element such as DEALS. We set up a new HR pipeline with several stages.
We have a base of candidates, stages for tracking their development, activities for scheduling interviews, several channels of communication with candidates (all of which will be saved and displayed on the candidate card (deal card).
HR will have all this at hand when using CRM Bitrix24.

Bitrix24 can replace the functions of recruitment sites, but do not forget that not all candidates are comfortable with direct contact. It is also important to put up vacancies on recruitment boards, which you can integrate with your B24"

(c) Alena Yandulina, manager of internal projects INTERVOLGA

Recruitment automation in Bitrix24

First, let's start by acquainting ourselves with the entities of the system.

The contact card in the CRM is usually used to fill out customer data. But in this case, it will represent the candidate's profile/questionnaire. You can add any fields to the card manually or they can be pulled from somewhere automatically. In addition to text, you can insert links in the card, attach files and keep the entire history of the future employee. 

Deal This is usually an order from a customer, but here, we’ll be using it as the process (the different stages) of considering a candidate for a particular vacancy. 

Screenshot of a candidate card in our Bitrix24

Of course, you can discuss with experienced integrators and find your optimal scope of work. But let me give you a proven scheme. 

Below is a step-by-step instruction on how to optimize personnel processes in a company.

Step 1 - organizing applications acceptance from candidates

Companies often post job vacancies on their website and even use online ads to drive candidate traffic. We have set up lead generation of job seekers for our clients on several platforms including Instagram.

We usually suggest making a landing page for these purposes embedding a Bitrix24 CRM form in it, Or creating a landing page on the Bitrix24 constructor.

If you don't like the designs available on Bitrix24, it's okay - you can connect B24 CRM with other sites and forms, Tilda,  and the likes of it.

For quick responses, candidates are advised to place “open lines” on the landing page. Open lines are Bitrix24's version of modern online consultants and chatbots. 

There you can:

• set up a response queue for specific employees, 

• forward applications to a specific colleague,

• create an application directly from the dialogue with the upload of the entire correspondence history, 

• set automatic responses depending on the scenarios,

• create templates of typical answers to reduce routine operations. 

Here is an example of our landing page for hiring programmers.

We tried to prepare a universal template, you can take a closer look and download it from the link below:

The full version is available here.

Step 2 - integration with job listing websites (in our case hh.ru) 

You can integrate with hh.ru using the dev.hh.ru API (access to it is paid) or ready-made applications for Bitrix24. 

With the help of applications, you can save and view current vacancies, candidate profiles, as well as automate the processing of responses and receive accurate statistics for each employee from the HR department.

Step 3 - setting up a funnel in Bitrix24

An example of a funnel in Bitrix24 that clearly signals a problem

An example of a funnel in Bitrix24 of a well-functioning HR service

It is important to create a new deal pipeline in Bitrix24 CRM.

The HR pipeline should align with your actual hiring processes. And ideally - improve it :)

To achieve this, we recommend interviewing your company's HR specialists to understand their work process and help you give an accurate assignment to the developer. 

Believe me, during such a joint interview, we sometimes hear very interesting insights from employees who do not even work in the HR department! 

Make people who will work in the new system part of your solution and you will be surprised how easy the integration will be!

We will not go into details too much, we will just show the implementation options. Consider two options for the appearance (choose what is clearer for you).

displaying HR deals at different stages in the form of a list

displaying HR deals at different stages in the form of a Kanban board

In my opinion, kanban is clearer and especially convenient: it is easy to drag-and-drop a candidate in the required stage. 

The candidate card, as well as the transaction fields, can be made to fit an existing questionnaire template so that HR specialists can easily and fill in the data.

Step 4 - automating HR processes

The possibilities for automating and optimizing the work of the HR department are limited only by your Bitrix24 license plan and your imagination.

Here are some standard case studies:

• the system will set an automatic task or notification to an HR employee. We set 3 notifications, for example: "process a candidate's application", "invite for an interview", "get a manager's decision" 

• the system will send an automatic letter or SMS to the candidate, depending on the stage of the transaction, we set 3 of such. You must have a connected SMS service. payment will be charged per SMS, the text should be a fairly simple format, an example below:

Let's give an example, in {brackets} what can be pulled into a template to personalize a job offer:

{Candidate's name}, good afternoon! 

Based on the results of your interview, we are pleased to give you the following information

1. You have been accepted for the position of {name of the position} 

2. Your responsibilities include: {the description of duties is pulled from a special section of the CRM, which was previously implemented into Bitrix24} 

3. Expected resumption date {date and time pulled from the deal card} 

4. You will be welcomed, given an orientation and shown around by {name and phone number of the responsible employee}

5. Here is a link to a document with general work guidelines {login routine, dress code, working hours, lunch}.

6. Do not forget to come along with  {link to the list of documents for employment} 

7. Conditions of your position {employment with a probationary period or without}

8. Salary during the probationary period {figure pulled from the deal card}, after the probationary period, your salary will be - {figure or data pulled from deal card}.

9. Your immediate supervisor is {name and contacts of the mentor during the trial period} 

10. Login data to our system {access to work mail and portal (if any)} 

11. We have everything needed for comfortable work: {goodies in the office} 

Congratulations and welcome to our team!

What else can you do:

• connect telephony- all calls with the candidate will be recorded and added to the contact or deal card , 

• create new entities, for example, a job offer using the company's letterhead that will be generated automatically when the deal reaches a particular stage (data from the deal card is pulled into the template).

Make your job offer as concise and understandable as possible - avoid ambiguous wording. It is in your best interest for the candidate to understand each point correctly.

Are you ready to improve your business? Let's automate your processes!

Step 5 - corporate university and beyond

As you understand, in Bitrix24 you can implement not only hiring, but other processes.

Usually, this 5th step comes after employees test and work in the portal for about (1-2 months).

In essence, Improving your corporate portal can be a life-long activity. The aim is to optimize your work processes and reduce the effort employees spend on tasks. 

Bitrix24 has everything you need (except CRM for the sales department which we also implemented). For instance:

• implementation of a transparent KPI system,

• intangible motivation,

• interaction with remote partners,

• storing an interactive online knowledge base,

• organization of corporate training, etc. 

You can read a little more in our article about the automation of the HR department in Bitrix24. There is about the coordination of absences, vacations, and overtime of employees.

We write in detail about the corporate university and show examples here. Our implementation for Desan is about a corporate university.

We also have a solution for employee assessment within Bitrix24 - "360-degree feedback assessment"

How much does it cost?

Creation of necessary deal pipelines and their automation - $700 only!

• We will conduct interviews, prepare a concept and plan;

• creation of an HR funnel, setting up stages (including 1-3 negative stages for further analysis - for example, how many candidates themselves refused, how many you lost contact with during the process, how many your company rejected, among other things - analytics will be standard in stages);

• instructions for an HR employee with screenshots, 1 webinar with a recording;

Automation:

• the system will set automatic tasks or notifications for HR employees - we set 3. For example: "process a candidate's application", "invite for an interview", "get the decision of a department head";

• the system will send an automatic email or SMS to the candidate, depending on the stage of the transaction, we set 3 such emails. You need to connect to an SMS service, you will be charged for each SMS, emails are simpler to set up.

Bonus:
We will set up a routine for inviting a new employee to the portal if you haven’t configured this yet.

We can also create a recruitment landing page specifically for HR employees with 

1. an embedded CRM form,

2. open lines with customization

The cost is approximately $1300 only!

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