Recruitment teams everywhere are fighting their way through a snowstorm of AI-enabled, poor-fit applications that make hiring great people harder than ever. Here are six ideas to manage sky-high application volumes and keep your recruitment on-track.
We all knew AI would change how we hire. But candidate behaviour is changing faster than most of us predicted.
A new report from Arctic Shores finds that 58% of professionals have already or plan to use AI to boost their chances of landing the perfect role within the next 12-months, for instance.
Powered by AI, candidates can now submit to hundreds of roles in moments. And recruiters are racing to catch-up, beleaguered by mountains of poor-fit CVs that snarl up your time and bury the diamonds even further in the rough. The Tetris game is speeding up.
So what do you do about it? Keep reading, for six ways to help manage your applicant flow – to keep unearthing high-quality hires, even when you’re buried under applications.
6 practical ways to manage high application volumes
Tighten your job requirements
Talking about ever-increasing job applications, Hung Lee says hardening your job requirements is “the most obvious way of managing down excessive applicant flow”. It’s low cost, low effort, and easy to do.
Instead of asking for three years’ experience, you ask for five, for example.
It’s a pretty good blunt-force method to deter applications, if you’re totally swamped. But it also presents issues.
As Hung points out, your “newly beefed up criteria” are essentially “irrational”. So you risk missing out on great candidates who no longer meet your requirements.
On the surface, that might not seem like an issue. You miss, say, 30% of otherwise-great candidates who have only three years’ experience. But if the remaining funnel is good, you’ve whittled-down numbers, increased team efficiency, and hired successfully.
But there are deeper problems.
- If you rule out those 30% now, you’re missing an opportunity to pull them into talent pools to nurture for later. It’s wasteful and myopic to let great candidates who’re engaged with your brand fade away.
- Various research has found that men typically apply for jobs when they meet most of the requirements, while women only if they meet all of the requirements. So tightening your JD might ultimately mean reducing applicant flow disproportionately – counter to your ED&I goals.
- It’s an arbitrary reduction that puts huge weight on the criteria you’ve chosen to reduce applications by. How different might your application pool look if you dial-up your experience requirements versus your qualification requirements, for example? Maybe you’re not only missing great candidates but missing better candidates.
If you’re buried under CVs and can’t see your way out, tightening requirements might be a good short-term fix. But approach with caution, so decisions you make now don’t derail your strategic goals in the future.
Screen with automated video interview
A good way to handle increased application volume without artificially narrowing the application funnel is by switching up recruiter screening.
Video interviewing has been a favourite tactic among volume recruiters for years, to replace phone or zoom screening. Video interviews give you a deeper picture of candidates earlier in your process, for a fraction of the time investment.
Tribepad Video Interviewing has been a game changer. It’s allowed us to meet our fill rate targets for high volume roles: we’re now consistently at 99% and time-to-hire has decreased by 50%.
If the AI-enabled candidate is turning us all into volume recruiters, it makes sense to start reading from the volume recruitment playbook.
But are there any downsides? There’s for sure an ED&I consideration around video interviewing. Ultimately, we believe video interviews are a net-plus for diversity. They:
- Ensure consistency
- Create space for conscious evaluation
- Expand accountability
- Reduce hiring manager bias
- Increase accessibility
- Give more candidates an opportunity to shine
- Improve visibility
But you do need to consider how you’ll mitigate possible negatives too. For example, if you currently anonymise applications you might want to choose video interviewing software that can also anonymise video interviews.
It’s also important to think about ease and efficiency. Look for software that makes it super simple to build and review candidates at scale – so video interviewing is a short-cut, not an extra step.
Integrate candidate assessments
Like VI, candidate assessments are a great tactic to manage high application volumes without narrowing the entrance to your funnel.
Adding assessments into your process means you can winnow down candidates based on criteria that actually correlate to job success, rather than an arbitrary tightening of the JD.
Read more: 8 reasons to use candidate assessments to hire
So you still slice off the bottom, say, 60%, before interview.
But rather than choosing 60% who happen to have three years’ experience not five, you choose 40% who struggle with collaborative problem-solving and 20% who aren’t engaged or committed enough to complete a short assessment.
One pointer, though. For candidate assessments to be a positive addition, you also need to balance candidate experience. Avoid long, boring, generic, irrelevant tests that deliver no feedback. There’s no excuse now, given the rapid-fire development of the candidate assessment industry over recent years.
Tribepad comes with easy-to-add, easy-to-customise candidate questionnaires – plus a thriving ecosystem of leading assessment partners. So you can build the process you’re imagining.
Optimise ad spend
There’s no point spending a fortune with the big boards if you’re already inundated with huge volumes of applications. Especially low quality applications. Optimising your advertising makes sense to manage applicant flow, so you’re not endlessly paying to attract applications you don’t need.
But optimising doesn’t just mean reducing. Slashing spend is crude compared to fine-tuning – but fine-tuning does depend on your current levels of visibility.
In an ideal world, you’ll have recruitment software that helps you understand job board effectiveness – so you can spend where that’s delivering value, and not where it’s not. (Revolutionary idea, huh…!)
Hung Lee recommends switching from duration-based ads to performance-based ads too, so you control applicant flow (and advertising costs) based on what’s actually working.
Tribepad Job Booster lets you promote ads from one place, on an as-you-need basis. Job Booster uses programmatic functionality to help you get smarter about where you advertise and optimise spend.
Strengthen your employer brand
Employer brand is often mentioned as a candidate attraction strategy. But we’ve said plenty of times before – EB isn’t just about attracting the right people, but about dissuading the wrong ones.
Good employer branding doesn’t just beat the “our brand is brilliant” drum. It gets right under the skin of what makes you, you.
Your working culture, for example. Will autonomous, big-picture problem-solvers thrive with you? Or do you prefer team-players who’re happy immersed in granular project detail?
When your employer branding efforts do a good job here, you’ll find you’re both increasing high-quality applications and decreasing low-quality applications.
Read more: 5 tips for employer branding on a budget for SMEs
Choose efficiency-boosting recruitment software
Yes, the rise of AI is powering an increase in application volume for many roles and industries. And yes, that creates pressure for recruiters. But truthfully? Many businesses have been handling enormous volumes effectively for years.
It’s not really about heaps of new strategies. It’s about getting the basics right, ensuring you’ve got the right talent acquisition technology, processes, and team to support efficient screening and assessment at scale.
Does your recruitment software automate everything? Are your workflows standardised, fast, and streamlined? Is your recruitment interface intuitive and low-click?
Getting your recruitment process right – with the right tech to support you – diffuses the problem – high application volumes aren’t an issue if you can take them in your stride.
Read more: How Tribepad helps you manage soaring application volumes
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, Video Interviewing, and Onboarding, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.
Trusted by organisations like Tesco, NHS Professionals, and Subway, 25-million people in 16 languages use Tribepad.
