Strategies for overcoming high volume hiring challenges
“The organisation is only as good as its employees,” is an oft-repeated quote. Hiring the right people can never be over-emphasised and is not a cakewalk. High volume hiring, the recruitment of a large number of employees within a limited period, is often needed in scenarios like setting up a new business or branch, post-pandemic scale-up, a rapid expansion for a new product, or the ramp-up for a significant global event. Mass recruitment magnifies the hiring process’s arduousness and comes with unique challenges.
Challenges
Increased competition: Due to the technology revolution, specialists in AI and machine learning, data analysis, IoT, and robotics are in great demand. Climate change is leading to growth in renewable energy and other environment-related sectors, creating a talent supply gap. Organisations are vying with each other to acquire talent with these in-demand skills, making it tough to recruit them.
Time constraint: When hiring at scale, the need for quick deployment is a given. The demand for speed strains the whole recruitment process leading to shortcuts. These shortcuts cause lapses like incomplete verifications, personality and role mismatches, expensive hires, and unmet expectations. The long-term detrimental impact of poor recruitment practices is recruitment debt which leads to skill gaps, attrition, rehiring expenses, decreased productivity, and damaged employer brand.
Applicant volume: Resume screening, even for a limited number of positions, can get tedious if the response to the job posting elicits a whopping response, as might happen in the case of highly valued employer brands. So, when it comes to mass recruitment, thorough scrutiny of a deluge of resumes can get so overwhelming that errors and omissions seem inevitable. Ensuring a meticulous and quality screening might be prohibitively expensive.
Decentralised hiring: When there are many positions across departments and levels to be filled, the recruitment is bound to be a multi-team and multi-location exercise. This apportionment in the execution risks inconsistency in evaluation, selection, and duplication of effort. There is a greater chance of teams getting their lines crossed, leading to delays and mix-ups. The consequence will be an erratic candidate experience and an erosion of employer brand value.
Some other challenges faced are quality of hire, inefficient use of resources, and candidate ghosting and drop-off.
Strategies
Process guidelines: Chalking out guidelines lends structure, consistency, and a roadmap to be followed by everyone involved in the recruitment process. It is essential for multi-location, multi-team, or decentralised hiring initiatives. It ensures a stable and uniform candidate experience through standardisation and streamlining of the process, improving the employer brand value.
AI-enabled assessments: Any delay in conducting assessments is bound to have a domino effect when it comes to mass recruitment. An AI-embedded, intelligent assessment solution is the optimal method to conduct an effective, efficient, and comprehensive evaluation with a quick grading turnaround time. These solutions can be customised as per role, industry, expertise, or type – functional, aptitude, technical, or behavioural. Different types of questions like MCQs, audio, video, reference to context, and psychometrics are available. Automated and intelligent proctoring is another helpful feature. Smart proctoring can detect frauds such as impersonation, candidate change, cross-conversations, and blocked cameras through image verification, and continuous audio, video, and image monitoring. Browser monitoring is used to check for switching of tabs and inactive test windows and to block screen sharing or mirroring.
Automated resume screening: When done manually, resume screening is tiresome, repetitive, and time-consuming. Manual screening can monopolise scarce resources and is the perfect use case for intelligent automation. AI-enabled resume screening solutions scrutinise resumes contextually and learn from past hiring history to optimise the matching of candidates to vacant positions. Quicker and error-free processing and better precision over time is the highlight of these self-learning systems.
Candidate experience and employer brand: Automated solutions facilitate candidate re-discovery, programmatic advertising of jobs, recording and analysis of recruitment process metrics, and communication with candidates via email and Whatsapp. Thoughtful application of technology enhances post-offer engagement with candidates improving their experience and leading to a stronger employer brand.
HirePro offers one of the leading, cutting-edge AI-enabled recruitment platforms. We are an invaluable partner in your effort to put together exceptional and outperforming teams. Please write to us at sales@hirepro.in for a presentation.
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