E-learning companies face significant challenges that impact student outcomes (placements). One key issue is that manual processes consume 75% of the career service team's time. The bulk of this time is spent on administrative tasks like managing job postings, resume matching, and employer outreach. This leaves little time for core placement efforts.

Automating these repetitive manual tasks could free up valuable hours for the career services team. Taking a closer look at this fundamental problem and exploring automation solutions could be an impactful way to address this pain point.

What tasks do career services teams commonly perform?

1. Data Entry: This extremely tedious task consumes around 2 hours daily (16.5% of a placement officer's time) as they collect and update entries for thousands of students by using Google Sheets. This manual process results in data entry errors and challenges in managing multiple sheets.

2. Job Sourcing: Manually visiting career sites to find relevant openings takes 5 hours daily (41.67% of their time)—that too for just 5-7 sites while we have close to 40 job sites available; this results in missing out on 60% of available job opportunities across countless other portals.

3. Follow-ups: Sending daily reminders to encourage students to apply, updating resumes, and preparing for interviews consume 3 hours, which is 25% of their time.

4. Sharing Candidate Profiles: Creating Excel sheets, matching resumes to job descriptions, and sharing this data in a structured way via endless email threads takes 2 hours daily (16.5% of their time).

5. Providing Feedback: Conveying feedback takes 2 hours daily to candidates on their interview status (shortlisted, selected, or rejected), which takes 16.5% of their time.

All these administrative tasks accumulate to a massive 75% of placement officers', amounting to around 80–85 hours on a weekly basis. This workload can potentially be automated and reduced by over 50% to just 40–45 hours per week.

There's a way out of this relentless cycle of manual administrative tasks through the power of automation and AI. Leveraging these technologies can streamline and accelerate processes at every stage, as follows:

1. AI Parsing: Manually entering data for each candidate takes around 2 hours daily, which takes close to 5–10 minutes per candidate, whereas AI parsing can accomplish the same in just seconds. This shows a reduction of close to 95% in time, from 2 hours to just 10 minutes.

2. AI Job Sourcing: Deploying AI bots eliminates the daily manual effort of 5 hours spent visiting countless career sites manually. Once configured, these bots continuously scour unlimited job portals, instantly fetching new relevant openings as they are posted. This reduces the daily time from 5 hours to 30 minutes, which is a 90% reduction in time, while enabling teams to uncover 10X more opportunities.

3. Automated Follow-ups: By setting a rule that candidates must fill in their details before applying to jobs, or else they won't be allowed to proceed, placement teams can save around 98% of the time previously spent on follow-ups. This reduces the daily follow-up time from around 3 hours down to just 15-20 minutes. Automatic reminders and pop-up notifications can further streamline this process.

4. Equipping Trackers for Automation: Sharing entire candidate pools with hiring partners via a single link boosts employer response rates dramatically compared to endless email threads. In cases where the response rate was a dismal 5%, trackers have increased this crucial metric to 20–25%.

5. Candidate Panel: The time-consuming task of constantly providing feedback to candidates, which takes around 2 hours daily, can be automated by using a candidate panel. This increases transparency on application status, resulting in a 50% reduction in student query tickets related to feedback.

All these free up 75% of time for your career services teams by simply automating repetitive manual tasks, enabling them to focus on more high-impact activities like nurturing valuable employer relationships, preparing in-depth assessments, and driving excellent placement outcomes.