Tight budgets and downsized staff pools have left many HR teams struggling to screen the blizzard of resumes that they receive. HR Magazine investigates the challenges currently faced by hiring managers and shares advice on what HR can do to improve volume recruitment.
Current market situation—challenges for HR
HR managers adopt numerous strategies for attracting and retaining the right talent, and few would argue that selecting the right people in the first place is the most important among these.
Volume recruitment challenges have always existed in HR, but recently they have been amplified due to advances in technology. Traditionally, companies have deployed three main strategies for recruitment of new staff: assessment and screening of the existing talent pool within their organisation; advertising positions to solicit new talent; and outsourcing the above functions to recruitment companies to find new talent. With the high costs and inefficiency of traditional candidate sourcing methods, hiring managers have more recently been adopting more proactive approaches to reach candidates. Online social networks such as LinkedIn and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are being increasingly used as free alternatives to job boards, advertisements and recruitment consultants to source suitable new hires. This technology has obvious benefits in terms of reaching potential hires and allows employers to recruit globally much more easily. However, this convenience is a double-edged sword and the same companies are now facing a large increase in the number of applicants thy have to deal with each round. Jobseekers can now ‘carpet bombing’ their resumes: applying for many jobs, at any time, and with great ease. From a HR perspective this is not time efficient as it is difficult to guarantee all applications are genuine. Moreover, over reliance on automated systems also runs the risk of alienating HR and hiring managers.
Following the period of economic contraction, many organisations recruited less new hires and this has left HR and recruitment functions as easy targets for cost reduction. The rationale being that if there are fewer positions to fill then hiring budgets can be reduced. In fact, HR now faces the challenge of an increasing number of jobseekers applying for the same, or in some cases a smaller, number of positions.
Kendrew Yu, Marketing and Operations Manager, SHL summed up the plight for HR managers,
“The mouth has got bigger but the funnel has got smaller, so there’s an even more sever bottleneck…a lot of people are trying to get through, with very few coming out the other side."
These problems are exacerbated in sectors that experience relatively high staff turnover, such as retail, hospitality and F&B outlets. All of this leaves HR with several challenges including:
- Getting swamped with resumes from too many applicants
- Inability to fairly and consistently evaluate candidate quality
- Longer time-to-hire required—to properly evaluate applicants
- Lack of data on effectiveness of hiring decisions
If HR, working under pressure, gets these recruitment decisions wrong, this brings both direct and indirect costs to the organisation. Direct costs of wrong hires include time wasted: sifting through applications; interviewing inappropriate candidates; preparing and terminating contracts. There may also be wastage in terms of unutilised training and development efforts and candidates leave with a negative impression of the company.
Indirect costs of inconsistent hiring decisions go much deeper and last much longer. The resultant difference in ability from people at the same level throughout the organisation can have a dramatic effect on morale, performance and productivity.
When recruiting, HR has to be able to effectively screen and manage a huge pool of candidates without compromising the candidate and hiring manager experience, and do this accurately, fairly and within tight timeframes and cost constraints.
With so much talent currently available in the current market and ease of resume submission, HR should have no trouble in accessing top quality hires. However, the reality is that HR is getting snowed under by the sheer volume of applicants they have to deal with.
Volume recruitment best practice
Companies can help overcome such challenges by adopting a system that is able to automatically screen out unqualified people, who do not match their requirements. In doing so, they can reduce the volume of applicants they have to deal with to more manageable levels. In reference to such tools provided by SHL, Yu explained, “Each person reviewed or interviewed has a cost, so we want to make sure [HR is] interviewing the right people rather than people who are only mildly interested. We want them to devote resources to the right people.”
Defining requirements and outcomes
Defining the requirements and desired outcomes of volume recruitment is critical for HR practitioners. Helen Fung a senior consultant at SHL highlighted three key elements that HR managers should consider when planning recruitment strategies—define, measure and realise.
1. Define
It is vital for HR to specify exactly what kind and quality of applicant they want. To achieve this, HR must decide and outline the necessary requirements and competencies, such as education, personal characteristics, abilities and motivation. It is important for HR to review the internal recruitment process to help clarify several elements:
- where resources are currently stretched
- current business needs
- timescale available
- whether the process will be intensive and/or continuous
- when the process is likely to peak
- whether the process will utilise an in-house platform or be outsourced
- technology requirements e.g. temporary or new technology may need to be adopted, such as an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
After this, HR can then define desired outcomes to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Fung also stressed the importance of branding. HR must consider what impression or experience they want candidates to have, and whether they are expected to go through the whole screening process, or just the first stage.
It is important for HR teams to realise that different jobs will not only require different types of people, but will also require different recruitment strategies. With this in mind, they should allocate time to understand which particular target recruiting strategy works best for specific positions or lines of business. In doing so, this enables hiring teams to bring the best talent to the table in the shortest amount of time. Moreover, it allows HR to leverage their recruiting functions directly into specific business lines, rather than just being seen as a ‘support function’.
2. Measure
After HR has clearly identified exactly what they want in a candidate ahead of time, they then need to work out how they are going to quantify and measure this in order to effectively realise their hiring goals. HR should be aware of what volume recruitment tools are available to help them do this. Fung advised, “Select tools that will help sift and select applicants. The key point is using valid tools, appropriate to the differing stages.” She added, “Volume recruitment often take place in different locations and it’s advisable to maintain consistency, so measure consistency, objectivity and validity.”
Technology and tools can be combined, for example within in-house platforms such as SAP, to allow HR to conduct testing and tracking. HR should determine whether current in-house capabilities are able to meet demands. If not, the organisation may need to purchase a suitable system or outsource this function altogether.
3. Realise
There are several points that hiring managers should be looking for to ensure the success of their hiring process and tools they use to help them within this framework.
An obvious consideration is does the system in place realise hiring objectives i.e. does it provide qualified new employees? Another consideration, particularly from a long-term branding perspective, is to find out if the job applicants themselves had a good experience—regardless of what stage they reached. Hiring systems must be able to demonstrate ROI. Hiring is an expensive process, so HR should adopt systems that help reduce both costs and hiring times. Meeting demands is often difficult, and HR may be able to get new hires on board, but they may not be suitably qualified and unable to meet the business demands. Adoption of a properly structured system will help foster closer relationships with business partners and enable them to find the right people.
With fluctuations in the market, there may at times be a sudden inflow of applications, creating a lot of work for HR, for example during the graduate recruitment season. Therefore, HR managers must anticipate business needs in relation to recruiting new staff. For graduate recruitment this process needs to be in place well before the sudden rush of applicants. For companies recruiting throughout the year this is an ongoing process. “It’s about putting a system in place rather than reacting constantly to shifting sands,” said Fung.
Three-stage approach to volume recruitment
To avoid missing good candidates, the validity and consistency of hiring tools is very important. Yu pointed out, “If the tools are unstructured, the risks are higher; therefore, objectivity rather than subjectivity is required. Assessment tools are for selecting in but also screening and sifting out unsuitable candidates.”
Stage 1: pre-screening
Before embarking on any new recruitment, it is important to create a barrier to sift out unsuitable candidates. At this initial screening it is not about how good candidates are, but simply about if they meet the criteria and have the right competencies. A tool that can help achieve this is a pre-application ‘realistic job review’. Yu explained that the tool comprised, “A self-selection process, asking questions such as, do you like to deal with people. If candidates do not then they can immediately stop applying.” If candidates like the job, the system will then invite them to continue with the application and enter their data, followed by a series of specifically designed competency based questions, from very general to very specific. This initial screening not only helps reduce workload for HR, but also reduces the number of unsuitable applicants ‘getting bored’ during unnecessarily protracted screening processes.
Stage 2: ability assessment
Once HR has candidates that potentially meet requirements, the second stage of the hiring process should be ability assessment—for example numerical or verbal ability. In this way, any candidates who do not reach minimum requirements can be eliminated. Candidates should also be assessed to determine if they are a suitable fit for the company culture in terms of their personality, motivations and capabilities.
Stage 3: interview and on-boarding
The interview stage is very labour intensive, involving HR and line managers, and so should be limited to highly possible candidates. Then the selected candidate is hired. All the information from the recruitment system should then be kept in one place, from the sifting stage to the on-boarding stage, so that it can be readily accessed and used for future development.
Case Study
Marks & Spencer, the UK’s leading retailer of clothing, foods and home wares, employs 69,000 employees and trades in 30 countries world-wide. Delivery of great customer service is a core element of the company’s brand and getting the right talent in the right place at the right time is crucial to this.
Store managers wanted a more efficient recruitment process which would identify candidates early on with the potential to ‘delight customers’ and work effectively in a team. However, there were two issues that needed to be resolved. Firstly, the recruitment process was too expensive and inefficient and secondly, the need to improve the calibre of new hires to gain competitive advantage.
The company has a ‘Talent Philosophy’ which sees talents as innate qualities possessed by people which cannot be explained by training or experience. These are consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours leading to predictable, beneficial, actions that people take. These traits can be identified and measured thorough the use of psychometrics. Building on this foundation, Marks & Spencer wanted to move towards a strengths-based organisation and get the right people in the right place at the right time. This required a process that could identify the right talents relevant for each role, recruit people with those talents, train for specific skills and knowledge and then deploy employees according to their strengths.
This philosophy was put into action at an early stage in the recruitment process in a manner that would save time and money. The initial focus was on selecting shop-floor staff, a process that previously had seen only a very low interview to hire ratio as many applicants interviewed were unsuitable for the roles and a significant proportion did not even attend interviews. The organisation, therefore, identified the need for a sifting tool that would ensure that those invited for interview had the right skills and attitudes to succeed.
Key stakeholders and representative groups of high, average and poorer performing individuals within the jobs were identified and invited to participate in focus groups and interview sessions. Based on the information gathered, SHL worked with Marks & Spencer to develop a screening tool comprising a series of job relevant, scenarios-based and attitudinal questions that could measure the innate talents identified as critical for success in the role.
“We worked very closely with SHL on the development of these questions to ensure that they were relevant and psychometrically sound as well as fair and providing valid indications of potential performance,” commented Mark Thomas, Organisational Development Consultant at Marks & Spencer.
All applicants are now pre-screened over the telephone, using the screening tool, prior to being invited for a full interview. The process involves speaking to one of Marks & Spencer’s recruitment specialists and answering one of a number of parallel screeners, each with twelve scripted questions. These questions serve to highlight the behavioural traits likely to be exhibited by the candidate. This interim step not only means that far more applicants can be assessed in a cost effective manner, but it also ensures that all are rated against a consistent framework.
The whole process has already delivered savings though a more efficient process. There has been a 33% increase in applicants screened out early in the process meaning that Marks & Spencer now interviews fewer candidates, but they are of higher quality. This is demonstrated by an increase in interview success rate, with 45% more interviewees being offered a job. There has also been an 18% reduction in applicants failing to attend interview, and overall these improvements have led to a 61% reduction in cost per applicant contracted. So far this has saved Marks & Spencer over £1.5 million in recruitment costs. The use of the screening tool has also had an impact on the quality of recruits. In an internal review of the process and its results, 75% of line managers rated the performance of employees selected using the new process as ‘better’.
Conclusion
Many in HR view volume recruitment as something extremely daunting, but it can be tackled with fore planning and thinking out of the box. Fung assured HR managers, “It’s not unmanageable and can be improved. It’s similar to payroll, it’s not sexy, and is very labour intensive, so often companies outsource it. However, there’s room for it to be done better and free up time for HR to work more productively, in areas such as development.”
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
