How we cut applicant screening from 1 week to less than 24 hours

Before 2021 we processed every application by hand as soon as it came in, and for a decade that was never a problem.

It became one when we started getting around 40 employee and internship applications a month, while onboarding around 2 employees and 15 interns a month on scattered dates. We are a small team, so our admin officer either spent every day of the week on it or let it slip.

We could have hired more people to hand the work to, or restricted start dates and become more rigid about how we do things. Before taking either of those easier routes, we agreed as a team to find unnecessary work and eliminate it, and that led us to automate parts of our workflow.

Now our admin officer needs less than a day to process applications and onboarding, where it used to take the whole week.

How we decided what to automate

Some things can be automated directly, like short repetitive tasks that interrupt your workflow. Bigger processes like employee onboarding are less straightforward.

Before we automated applications and onboarding, and every time we update them since, we do 3 things. We outline, we optimize and we outsource.

1. Outline the work being done

We already had documentation on the work, but we had to check whether it still matched what we were doing and figure out how long each set of tasks took.

At this stage we are not looking for solutions or pointing fingers. We look realistically at what we do and how much of the day it takes, and we ask ourselves plainly where our time goes.

Outlining the tasks step by step lets everyone see them before we start optimizing.

2. Optimize the process

Two things happen here. We eliminate some of the outlined tasks, or we improve the way a specific one is done.

After outlining, we brainstorm and talk through which parts of the process to eliminate, as a team. It is easier to cut tasks with the people doing the work, because they are the ones feeling the pain.

In the day-to-day of getting things done, people rarely get to see the complete picture, so this is a chance to examine it and look back on how things have gone. It is also easier to agree when everyone knows what we are optimizing for as a team.

3. Outsource some of the work

Before and while we automate, we remind ourselves of a few things.

Not all work can be automated. Some of it needs people outside the team to step in.

Not all work needs to be automated. We made a point of leaving alone the tasks that build connection, because doing meaningful work and building meaningful relationships is still core to us as a team.

There will always be more work to automate. We already have automation in place and we still look for new ways of doing things, so the automated processes don't stop us from optimizing.

For this kind of work, we use automation to trigger the next step and the people in charge do the work. For example, as soon as a new hire specifies a start date, we automatically send a calendar invite for their onboarding call.

How we automated it

We are a team full of developers and designers, but we automated this workflow without any development work.

We used off-the-shelf tools, automate.io and Zapier, and they became the way all our other tools talk to each other. Automating tasks is now part of how we get more done, and eventually this workflow will move into the systems we have custom-built for ourselves.

Figure 1. The automated message the admin gets every time an intern applies.

Figure 2. The automation commands that send an acceptance email to a qualified intern as soon as the admin accepts them.

Our takeaways

• Always look for ways to eliminate waste in the process.
• Technology lets us focus on high-impact work.
• We can use technology to make the process more efficient, and our process does not have to be limited by technology.

Story by Jarrhey De la Peña, Symph's COO

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