From healthcare providers to grocery store/supermarket chains and even online shopping sites to delivery companies, a number of employers are experiencing a surge in high volume recruiting, despite the economic downturn. With high rates of unemployed or furloughed workers, these employers are not just trying to fill more positions faster than ever before, they are also dealing with a deluge of applicants to sift through.
At times like this, speed and candidate experience need to be top of mind. Nothing can damage your employer brand like a poor candidate experience: A study by Future Workplace revealed that 72% of those candidates who have a poor experience will share it online. And that, in turn, can impact your corporate brand.
Here are six key steps that can help you hire rapidly, while still delivering a positive candidate experience.
Key #1: Tailor your recruiting processes to the candidate and role type
Hiring delivery drivers will require different steps than hiring store clerks. For the first, you may want to take a “lights out” approach, and structure the recruiting process so candidates go through background checks and online assessments, but no interviews. For the second, you will likely want to include some virtual and possible interviews. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach, and tailor recruiting workflows to the role and candidate type.
Key #2: Automate and accelerate
Gaining efficiencies in hiring isn’t just about making your processes streamlined. It is also about looking to new tools and technologies to automate and accelerate parts of the hiring process. Recruiting software can be used to automate and speed up tasks like candidate screening, assessments, and background and reference checks, to name just a few. As an example, British retail giant Marks & Spencer (M&S) uses Oleeo to hire in 3 days using a simple 2-touch process as illustrated below.
Key #3: Embrace bulk processing
Just like you’re hiring in bulk, set your processes in bulk. The right recruiting technology for High Volume Hiring will allow recruiters to perform tasks in bulk. Whether applied to candidate selection, moving candidates to a new step, scheduling interviews, converting in person interviews to virtual interviews, or something else, your tech should let you do this in one step vs many. M&S has some rules attached to its Oleeo application process to ensure efficiencies including only accepting one application per candidate for any role to avoid store conflicts with duplicate checks in place to make sure candidates are never processed more than once. The flow of the application is built to ensure no break in activity. Within an hour of applying assessments take place, ensuring greater conversions.
Key #4: Make data your friend and ally
As the famous adage goes, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” Metrics are the “what” and analytics are the “Why” and “Now What.” Metrics are the single data points that you can measure to see what’s going on — your critical metrics being your Key Performance Indicators. For instance, turnover, time-to-hire, and cost-to-hire. When measuring these, consider them by role, location, hiring manager, or other groups important to your business.
Analytics, on the other hand, bring together multiple data points to answer questions about “why” something is happening, or “now what” you should be doing. Analytics implies analysis, which implies decision making. While metrics are interesting, it’s hard to make a decision based on them. Analytics. om the other hand, should give you the insights needed to make better decisions. For example, consider Quality-of-hire. To understand Quality-of-hire you need to look at at data from multiple sources, like resumes, assessments, hiring success, future turnover, promotion, job performance, and so on. This answers the question, what comprises our best hires, and can be used to automatically score and select candidates.
Key #5: Consider your attraction strategies
Attracting the right candidates remains the number one concern of recruiting leaders, even in a “buyer’s market” for talent. Today you can leverage tools to automate and optimise job board posting for the best results, as well as to de-bias job postings to attract more diverse candidates. Hardwiring these sorts of capabilities into your processes will drive both efficiencies and results.
Key #6: Engage with candidates in the right way, at scale
A system with bulk processing will enable you to send emails to large volumes of candidates with one click. Keeping the candidate experience top of mind can make routine communications something where your employer brand shines through. The job opening may be one of hundreds to you, but someone out there is very excited about it! Even when communicating in bulk, you can personalise it to the role or candidate type, give additional information, be very clear about next steps, and show off some of that mission, vision, values flavor that makes your company special.
Remember staying in constant communication with potential hires is important so you don’t lose them along the way. Automation in your hiring process will mean less administration work for your hiring team and a lowered chance of leaving your applicants in the dark.
Consider this for the interview process too: leverage technology that allows candidates to select their interview time, based on your settings for what is available. Automate the collection of interviewer feedback. When running virtual interviews, ensure the video link is included in the invite, and the candidate knows what to expect.
I hope these steps are useful. In a nutshell, my advice is: Keep a tight talent acquisition process, automate what you can, narrow your recruiting data to attract talent that matters, and schedule your days out in bulk.
