For you who work in HR and recruitment, this means you can discover many digital tools that support and make your day-to-day work more efficient. Today we’ll focus on high-volume recruitment and how you, by investing in digital tools, can enhance your hiring process immensely and thus exchange stress and faulty hires with financial gains and well-qualified candidates for the job at hand.
One issue with high-volume recruitment is tough competition e.g. the best candidates tend to be absorbed by the market in no time. Therefore it would be wise to try and keep them as close as possible by leveraging the initial contact you’ve had with them. With that in mind, let’s begin with what is too often overlooked - your existing talent pool. Depending on what type of ATS you’re using you might find it too time-consuming to sift through all of those candidates from years back simply because the ATS is not up to date nor does it have features that make it easy to find candidates. Therefore you find it easier to just look at the new applications that you receive.
So, on that note, what type of ATS are you using today? Is it that old system that your company has worked with for ages that acts more as a pile of paper than a helpful tool that helps you keep track of your talents? The least you can ask of your ATS is that you’re able to filter candidates based on education and location. In a dream world, you’d be able to type in exactly what kind of qualities, experiences, skills, and education you’re looking for in a person and the ATS would provide you with the candidates that fulfill those parameters. Well, guess what? This exists and it goes under the term “talent rediscovery.”
What a waste it would be to have a large talent pool but not be able to find the candidates you want to get a hold of. A talent rediscovery tool often uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to sift through the ATS and find candidates that have already applied for a similar job at some point in time. When you’ve found them you can easily press a button to reconnect with them via mail or text to let them know that you have an open position.
There are several benefits of this, one being that you save some time by reconnecting with candidates that you’ve already got a good idea of who they are and what they’re good at. The other is that it makes the candidates feel seen and taken care of, which is a plus for your company as a whole (a bad candidate experience can be a dealbreaker for many candidates).
During high-volume processes, one of the most time-consuming endeavors is screening candidates via interviews, either on the phone or face-to-face. These types of interviews usually come with some issues. For example, if you don’t have a proper time-slot scheduling tool in place you risk having to spend a lot of time chasing applicants who don’t pick up. Phone interviews and face-to-face interviews can easily override the allotted time, and on top of that, you might not receive the most necessary information that you want to get out of a person.
The opposite to this is using an automated interview tool for the initial screening of candidates, such as Hubert. We already spoke a little bit about AI, and the premise of Hubert is similar - an AI recruiting platform for high-volume recruiting. How does it work? As the applications start to come in, an automated email is sent out to each and every candidate with a link that leads to a chat-based interview. You on your end have told the AI what you’re looking for in terms of skills, experience, and education. Based on these non-negotiables, the AI conducts interviews only to, in the end, leave you with a shortlist of the top candidates.
You will also receive information as to why Hubert thinks you should move forward with a particular candidate and what the AI has based its decisions on. As you understand, conducting automated interviews like these takes away a lot of pressure from you in the sense that you don’t have to talk to every candidate yourself.
Say you’re either about to connect with candidates for the first time to schedule interviews, or you’ve already conducted automated interviews and would like to book phone calls with the shortlisted candidates. Do you have a digital calendar tool in place that can support you with this, or do you reach out via email to everyone asking when they’re available for a call/face-to-face interview? The latter option can result in miscommunication, no-shows, and overall confusion on your end as to who you’re talking to when. To mitigate the risk, you can integrate a digital calendar onto your website or send out an email containing time-slots for the upcoming week or so. By doing this, the candidates can pick and choose a suitable time without unnecessary back-and-forths.
The fact that the candidate is communicated to frequently and quickly increases their incentive to actually book a time. It’s also a good way for you to see who is truly interested, contrary to someone who just applied for the sake of applying.
Albeit, you might think it’s unnecessary to spend money on either one of these strategies because you’ve managed to complete great quality hires without them. But in a fast-moving world where technological solutions are implemented where they can be implemented, you might want to reconsider in order to be someone your competitors can look up to, and your candidates continue to connect with.
