If you are currently using the ADP (Automatic Data Processing) system in your company for recruiting, you will know what a fantastic platform this is for payroll, benefits, and HR compliance. Recruiting didn’t serve any purpose; it was an add-on to the HCM software, that was much bigger. Here are four ways in while the lack of focus on recruitment shows: candidates leave before they have even completed the application; resumes are not entered correctly, everyone remains silent for weeks, and the recruiters are busy with other candidates.
All four of these issues multiply with each other. You first have a candidate overcoming the sign-up barrier, only to face resume parsing. If they manage to get through that as well, they have to wait. The recruiter who could have picked all good people by now is stuck screening resumes instead of reaching out to the candidates.
In this article, we’ll review the four biggest hassle factors, and how Rebecca AI, the artificial intelligence interview tool created by Peterson Technology Partners (PTP) and its AI initiative, Pete & Gabi, helps break the cycle without requiring changes to your existing software.
Pain Point #1: Candidates hit a login wall before they can apply
ADP’s own user manuals are clear on this matter: applicants using the application process for the first time are required to sign up and complete all identity information like their username, password, and CAPTCHA code prior to submitting the application, not after.
That’s the sort of obstacle that people studying candidate experience kills conversion numbers. An estimated 73% of job applicants give up an application process when it takes longer than 15 minutes, while one-third of people decide to withdraw from the application if they find it cumbersome or repetitive.
How Rebecca AI helps: Rebecca AI conducts the interview and evaluates candidates during the application process. A separate middle layer manages the application flow, connecting Easy Apply, Rebecca AI, and ADP to move candidates through each stage.
- Create a job in ADP just as your team creates the requisition.
- Publish through Easy Apply allowing applicants to apply through a streamlined process without completing ADP’s entire registration process.
- The middle layer manages the candidate’s flow; keeping track of the applications and candidate’s details, progress, and passages throughout the hiring procedure.
- Rebecca AI interviews and assesses the candidate once it reaches the interview step. Rebecca AI performs a job-specific interview and comes up with the assessment results.
- Approved candidates are reviewed by a human before being forwarded to ADP. Only candidates who pass the initial selection are sent to the next stage.
In short: ADP Job → Easy Apply → Middle Layer → Rebecca AI Interview + Evaluation → Human Review → ADP.
Rebecca AI concentrates solely on interviews and candidate intelligence, whereas the middle layer oversees the entire process from start to finish so that applicants never face the problem of ADP’s registration wall, which will only commence once they clear Rebecca AI’s and a real person’s scrutiny.
Candidates who would have bounced away by ADP’s introduction screen will be engaged instantly without entering any information manually and only those who have been scanned by Rebecca AI and are worth chasing will reach ADP having already gone through the interview and scoring process.
Pain Point #2: Resumes go in fine and come out scrambled
The parsing technology used in ADP is widely criticized for being excessively literal. Tables, headers, columns, and unusual date formats can make a resume look fine in its PDF form before rendering empty or garbled when input into the system. For instance, job seekers who should have ranked highly for “5 years; Java” may find themselves not appearing in the results because ADP’s parsing software has sorted their credentials incorrectly.
How Rebecca AI helps: Rebecca AI begins with dissecting both the resume and the job description before fashioning the interview questions based on what it finds as opposed to relying on ADP’s mapping system to provide it with relevant data. This means that applicants who may be accorded a bad rating by ADP will still go through the interview process that takes into account their true qualifications. The result is a report produced by Rebecca AI that reflects the communication skills and technical competency of the candidate and gives a definitive answer on whether a candidate is a good, fair, or poor fit for the required position.
Pain Point #3: Candidates apply, then hear nothing for weeks
This is known as the “resume black hole,” and it’s perhaps the most prevalent complaint amongst candidates about ATS-based hiring. The applicant submits their application and gets an automated acknowledgment but never hears anything else. The “resume black hole” means that applicants remain completely in the dark as to whether they were rejected, whether their resumes are still being looked at, or whether botched parsing resulted in their resumes getting lost. Over one-third of workers in the U.S. complain that the lack of feedback from employers is their biggest frustration in job hunting, and companies do suffer from it since frustrated candidates talk about it on Glassdoor and social media, which discourages the next group of job seekers who consider applying.
How Rebecca AI Helps: By making the first-round loop within a day rather than weeks, Rebecca AI changes everything. With a fast and effective process, the candidate goes from submitting a resume to finishing a scored interview within hours rather than weeks. Because both activities happen on the same day, candidates can stop worrying about whether anybody has reviewed their application. In real applications, the hiring period went from 27 days to zero.
Pain Point #4: Recruiters are too overloaded to give candidates a fair look
Recruiters who are using RPO solutions and recruitment software report that they are stuck in a situation where work intended for two people is given to just one person. Workweeks of 50-70 are quite commonly seen where managers are focused on hitting their numbers rather than working with the candidates properly. When a recruiter is overburdened with so many positions to fill, first-round screening is the first thing to get eliminated- meaning that interview number one will always be of higher quality than interview number fifty.
How Rebecca AI helps: Rebecca AI administers the first-round interviews virtually and in some cases, there is no recruiter on the call who conducts the interviews. With just one implementation, first-round screening time was reduced from 3-4 hours down to just under 30 minutes. The candidates are evaluated by the same criteria, so no two candidates will be evaluated differently.
The net effect: more candidates make it through, and the good ones don’t wait
ADP’s capabilities can be extended through four complementary solutions without requiring its replacement. Rather, they complement it. Rebecca AI serves as a quick, low-friction front end, bringing forward candidates who might otherwise be lost at ADP’s registration and parsing stages, while providing a scored evaluation on the same day instead of leaving applications without visibility. Recruiters receive a ranked list of qualified candidates rather than a pile of applications that must be manually reviewed.
For companies already using ADP for payroll and HR, this is a viable approach: utilizing ADP for its core functions and relying on Rebecca AI for those few days of the funnel when decisions about candidates’ success are made.