This Week, In Recruiting

Open Kitchen: The 4M Framework Applied to Talent Acquisition (Part Three) - 10 x Examples of Recruiting Efficiency

The past two weeks we've been using the 4M Framework to help us better understand the driving forces that impact the world at different units of analysis, going first from global (Mega) in Part One, then to sectoral (Macro) in Part Two and now to organisational (Meso) in Part Three. It's probably a good moment to contextualise the abstractions that have dominated the discussion in Parts One and Two and offer some concrete examples of how organisations have responded to these pressures. It's been a tough couple of years for us recruiters but some of us have been doing some very impressive work.

In each case, one KPI was isolated as the key target to improve. This was a common characteristic of organisations who had managed to 'do more with less' - breaking down problems into smaller targets which can each individually be tackled.

NB: I just realised that I may need to disguise the names of some of these organisations, so will do this unless the case study itself is public.

Here goes:

1. Candidate Time Per Stage

How long do your candidates spend per stage?

We all know that 'time kills all deals' so it might be surprising to learn that few organisations collect this data much less understand it as a metric which could be improved. The longer a candidate spends on each stage, the greater risk of drop out, and the more work required by every stakeholder to keep the process going. This KPI was targeted for improved by OLX, who found that one of the main issues was candidates spending way too much time post HM interview.

Problem: Candidate scorecards post interview were inconsistent and untimely. Turns out hiring managers who were episodic users of recruiting software found it difficult to consistently fill in score cards. Additionally, HM's often did not buffer interview slots, so were doing back-to-back-to-back interviews further leading to difficulties score carding candidates, who could not move to next stage without this artefact

Solution: Auto-generated scorecard from Interview Intelligence software + Auto-buffer in HM calendar after every interview.

Outcome: 98% scorecard completion rate, as well as 78% (!) reduction in TTH

2. Reduce Recruiter / HM Application Screening Time

In 2024, every recruiter would be keen to manage down this KPI.

The past two years have seen such a surge of job applications that the max assessment load for recruiters has regularly been exceeded leading to unprocessed applications, loss of potentially great candidates and damage to employer brand. Few organisations have been surged out more than those in retail - traditionally high volume hirers - who found themselves with 20-30% increase in applicant flow. There are multiple ways to 'suppress hiring flow' (detailed in a previous Open Kitchen here), but the example we\re going to discuss today was the most humane, effective and positive for talent acquisition and candidate experience.

Problem: Multi-national retailer with 4,000 retail stores, across 70 countries, with more than a dozen languages, overwhelmed by applicant surge in every category. Needed to hire so could not just turn off advertising, but was literally blocked by never ending stream of ad responses.

Solution: Implement Immersive assessment tech, offered as an optional stage for job applicants who wanted to expedite their application. The assessment simulated work scenarios and asked applicants 'what they would do if' scenario questions. Report on applicant performance immediately provided after completion - declined candidates with recommendations for improvement, alternative path to other roles and invitation to re-apply in 6 months time. Approved candidates moved automatically to hiring manager interview.

Outcome: Scalable assessment solution can now handle any number of applications. CX improved - provision of the option of doing the test gave agency back to applicant - and delivered on the promise of immediate assessment, feedback and result - were critical factors for improving CX despite the inclusion of an additional step in process.

3. Increase Demand + Reduced Capacity

The past two years have seen a radical streamlining of the TA function.

Every organisations is carrying less recruiters in 2024 than they were in 2022. Now if this is in-line with a commensurate slow down in hiring requirements overall, there may not be a problem but sometimes hiring unexpectedly scales up again, now with a denuded team.

Problem: This one scale up had exactly this challenge - TA being cut by 80% (!), and then suddenly x2 hiring demand. Simply not enough people to do the job, under the existing modus operandi. It was one of those situations where 'working harder' obviously wasn't going to solve the problem.

Solution: Implementation of leading edge AI Screening Assistant technology to conduct the CV / application screening part of the process. We've been used to 'debunking the myth' at recruiters have automated screening software, but in 2024 we are indeed seeing these technologies in production - tech which can read CV's, enrich the data with publicly available data, compare against job requirements and sort order candidates based on best fit.

Outcome: 12,711 applicants screened, across 30 diverse jobs, with 300+ candidates moved forward into the hiring process.

4. Speed Offer for Pre-Vetted

Do you differentiate your hiring funnel based on your history with the candidate?

We've been reluctant to do this for fear of injecting bias into the hiring decision but we can see that it is often counter intuitive to push all candidates down the same hiring funnel, especially if they have been pre-vetted and either narrowly missed out on an offer (silver medalists) or dropped out of process for reasons other than job match or interest. Candidates like these have already passed many of the qualifying processes, so putting them back to the start the funnel is classic duplication of effort. One multinational company took a radical striu

Problem: Company wide pressure to 'do more with less'. Needed to fill jobs more quickly, with higher quality candidates, with fewer recruiters on the task. Given the scale of the organisation (100,000), the number of applicants who narrowly missed out on job offers was not insubstantial - something like 2,000 a year.

Solution: Restructure organisation to create a small team of recruiters focused solely on re-routing and handling silver medallist candidates. These recruiters who be candidate focused, worked with them to identify other opportunities in the company which would be best fit and dropped them directly into final stage if such matches were found.

Outcome: CX shoots through the roof, high quality candidates get hired into the organisation which might have otherwise lost them.

5. Increase Organisational Interview Capacity

It's fitting that Metaview is the sponsor of today's newsletter!

One of the understated benefits of introducing interview intelligence software is that it enables the mass up skilling of your organisation to become more effective interviewers. By recording every interview and using AI to derive insights on what happening during those interviews, it is possible to monitor interview quality of the HM's and put into place training plans to improve the capability of your roster of interviewers. Using this approach, you can also increase the number of interviewers in your business. Having more people in the company trusted to conduct interviews, means greater capability to absorb surges in applicant flow, increases in hiring demand, or expediting time to hire by always having available interviewers to drop into place.

Problem: This was a problem one scale up organisation faced. TTH was too long and the company was losing elite talent to competition because they were overly dependent on a few key overstretched hiring managers to do a critical part of the candidate vetting.

Solution: Make more interviewers - increasing the interviewing capacity of the organisation from 10% to 30% of the workforce meant many more candidates could be more quickly pipelined through the interview stage. The company went for relying on a small cohort of overstretched hiring managers to a much larger percentage of the organisation trusted with doing interviews.

Outcome: 25% reduction of TTH on technical roles

6. Reduce Candidate Prep Time

How much time do you spend preparing candidates for interview?

It's an important part of the shift to a 'selecting in' rather than 'selecting out' hiring approach, provides the candidate with a sense of their participation being highly valued and at the end might just produce the best possible outcomes - that the right candidates get hired because they accurately demonstrated their capability at assessment. Yet effective candidate preparation takes time and no one is on hand to do it other than already overstretched recruiters. It's one of those components of the hiring process which we inevitably backslide on when we reach over capacity.

Problem: One scale up had a long term commitment to candidate prep which worked until they scaled up their hiring volume, such they could no longer provide the 1-2-1 concierge over service to every candidate. However they were unwilling to let this pro candidate value go.

Solution: Implement candidate portal which provided each candidate with a unique webpage upon which they can find interview prep support, bio detail on hiring managers, information on what they will be assessed up and how they can best support.

Outcome: CX improved by 23% whilst recruiters freed hundreds of hours of capacity per month.

7. Enable Every Recruiter

If you could improve the capability of every recruiter in your team by 20%, what would the hiring outcomes be for your organisation?

Personal development or hiring more skilled / more experienced recruiters have been the two ways to do it, but now there may be a third - the provision of 'recruiter enablement' tools which reduces the time / effort required by individual recruiters to produce great output - the great outreach message for a senior exec candidate, an RFP template for a public sector prospect, nurture content for a specific candidate community etc. Up levelling your entire recruitment team by providing such a platform has the benefit of maintaining existing structure and minimising switching costs involved in more radical changes.

Problem: Major manufacturing organisation needed increase recruitment efficiency but structure and organisational change were not on the cards. TA team had to find a way of improving output without radically changing the modus operandi

Solution: Implement recruiter enablement software, which provides all team members with necessary recruitment resources through a single interface. Shared collab spaces meant team members would have a constantly updating set of artefacts with which to better perform in role.

Outcome: Too early to say - but reducing the 'time it takes to get better' makes

8. Reduce Interview Logistics Overhead

Anyone who has ever tried to coordinate a multi-person meeting will know what we mean by 'interview logistics'. It's hard enough for two people to agree on time / date as neither as real time visibility of changing calendars, nor awareness of the nuances on what ostensibly available spaces might mean. Recruitment co-ordinators emerged as a separate function as a result of this, as the interview scheduling software - most of us might be most familiar with Calendly at consumer grade, but also tools like GoodTime and Cronofy at Enterprise grade.

There can sometimes be simply solutions to reducing interview logistics overhead - the implementation of interview 'superdays' pre-booked into the HM schedules such that entire effort of finding the appropriate time is solved by simply stating 'Friday afternoons are interview time'

Problem: Global organisation spending time coordinating every HM interview on a 1-2-1 basis, employing a department of 50 recruitment coordinators to do the task. Decentralised process lead to unpredictability on speed of hiring, as well as excessive time / energy spent on coordination

Solution: Separation of all job types into 'episodic' vs 'evergreen' - with evergreen being the types of candidate which the organisation would always be interested in hiring for. TA team organised bi-weekly interview super days with the HM, to concentrate all the interviewing to pre-booked slots.

Outcome: Coordination time goes to zero - it's all already in the diary. HM experience improves, interview velocity (number of interviews of time) increases, number of new hires increases.

9. Differentiate EB from CB

Sometimes your B2C brand can overwhelm your Employer Brand. This can be a problem, especially if you want to attract a different type of candidate to the workforce. A budget high street retailer might actually be a billion dollar turnover business with very sophisticated back and middle office operations but all of that is obscured by the high street brand - a problem if you wanted to draw the attention of elite talent in those areas. How do you handle this - how to do you differentiate CB with EB - what are the most effective ways to do this?

Problem: International company had an EB problem with a key new division where they were losing out to competition. Feedback from candidates was that the company was known as a player in this division and thus was perceived as a high risk option for candidates who could go to more established organisations.

Solution: Train company existing employees on how to use LinkedIn. Turns out most normal people don't know how to use this platform, as they are rarely ever on it! We recruiters forget that civilians only log into the LinkedIn when looking for work and may not be aware of basic features such as the newsfeed or the ability of users to post jobs. By training the team on how to use LinkedIn, increase in activity on the platform by these non-recruiters helped change image of the key division - peer to peer group messaging was making a difference.

Outcome: Increase applicant rate to key division via the indirect approach of making existing team members more visible on LinkedIn

10. Increase Quality of Hire (w/o Tech)

You know the story. TA team is reduced in headcount so pass through rate increases but quality of submission decreases as recruiter screening filters start to fail. Hiring managers become upset because they are spending more time interviewing candidates who they deem as unsuitable. Pressure returned to TA to improve quality control, in spite of having less resources to do so! Hiring process at this stage will be well on its way to breakdown.

Problem: Digital Design company continue to grow head, but TA + HM heading towards a breakdown!

Solution: Culture change with a reset of roles and responsibilities between TA and HM. TA agreed to strengthen filter, but this meant that HM would see less candidates because that is the expected outcome of increasing the recruiter responsibility for quality control. TA would perform this extra due diligence, but only in return for HM guarantee of interview slots. Creation of an internal hiring manifesto with all the hiring stakeholders jointly create in order to have a source of escalation in case of dispute

Outcome: Quality of Submission PTR increased from 21% to 76%.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024

Updated folks. We're well into Q4 now and we already have some spectacular events to go - not least Unleashed Paris, one of the signature events of the year. Anyone going to be there? I will be MIA as I'll extend my stay out in APAC for the next month, but I hope to make up for it with mini events and meetups whilst I'm out over here.

Hiring Success 2024 APAC, Melbourne 9th October

You know an event is going to be success when you don't have to do any promotion for it, and it still sells out. Looking forward to reconnecting with the all of the community in Australia, especially the likes of Gareth Flynn, Rich Lewis-Jones, Stefan Wellack, Lauren Sharp and more. It's going to be a barn stormer of an event - just need to put together an outfit for it now!. Worth putting yourself on the waitlist - if you are attending, please do make sure you come up and say hello. Cheers!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep276 - Hiring in Australia in 2024 & Beyond

Can't visit Australia and not do a Brainfood Live from here. It's a unique economy with a unique recruitment eco-system here and I very much look forward to learning what has been happening on the recruitment sector in 2024, and what the prospects are going forward in 2025. If you're in Australia, plan to be in Australia or are hiring for roles based in Australia, this show is for you. We're on Friday 11th Oct, 12pm AEST. Register here

ERE Recruiting Conference, November 12-14, Anaheim, CA, USA

I'm out in California for the first time in a few years - this time to SoCal and visiting Anaheim where I'll be attending the multiday ERE conference. Looking forward to seeing the good and the great, including the likes of Jim Stroud, who I do not believe I've seen since Copehagen in the before times..... See you in Anaheim: register here

NB: if you want a discount code, comment "ERE" below and I will DM you the code for the discount.

Tec Rec 2024, TITANIC Chaussee Hotel, Berlin, November 24th–26th, 2024

I am back in Berlin folks, first time at Rec Tec since before Covid. Looking forward to sharing thoughts on the state of tech hiring, learning from local employers as to how the changing circumstances have impacted hiring posture, diversity and inclusion, state of remote, state of outsourcing. I have a 50% discount on tickets so make sure you get them here rather than elsewhere!

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter, comment below with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

Whose Story?

Daen Fox, Head of Talent - now open to opportunity (when not DJ-ing 🤣)

I suspect I've known Daen for long time but we've never really had the chance to properly get to know each other. One of the great things about Recruiting Brainfood is the opportunity to do just that. We did some work together in Recfest for Scotty AI and took the opportunity to work on Brainfood Tribune. I asked Daen 20 Questions - here are his answers

If you are interested in doing 20 Questions, comment below 'TRIBUNE' and I will be in touch to do a profile.

End Notes

So I am back in Australia - last time I was here I immediate saw an Echidna, which I consider to be a sign of good fortune! Hope to see more of the flora and fauna of this amazing country whilst I'm here. Conference on Wednesday, then catch up with mates for the rest of the week. Might do a mini-meetup if anyone is up for it, on Friday - let me know!

Have a great week everybody.

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.

This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 185

Hung Lee

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