Quality Over Quantity – The Problem with High-Volume Recruiting
By Connor Norton
The ultimate goal of recruiting is to hire the best candidate possible. However, the best applicant can be difficult to identify with current conditions. Not only is unemployment the highest it’s been in years, there’s also a growing skills gap between the skills applicants have and the skills businesses need. That means it’s especially important to utilize recruiting tools to identify highly trainable candidates that can quickly learn the skills necessary for the job. Being able to identify smart, trainable candidates is one of the best strategies to deal with a high number of applicants.
Challenges Associated with Volume-Based Recruiting
As the number of applicants for your job openings grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. A congested recruiting pipeline slows you down throughout the hiring process and can cause you to miss out on the best person for the job. Here’s a look at some of the most pressing issues that hiring managers face associated with a high volume of applicants.
Harder to Identify Top Talent
If you’re sorting through hundreds of applicants for a single job posting, then it’s nearly impossible to review each candidate effectively. That means you could be missing out on the best person for the job. Blasting your job opening on every popular job board is sure to get you more applicants, but it only increases the need for an objective evaluation tool.
Time Consuming Recruiting Process
High-Volume Recruiting presents a number of challenges, but no challenge is as noticeable as the sheer amount of time that it takes for candidate review. More applicants mean more resumes to review, more screening calls, and more interviews. This ultimately leads to a longer time to hire.
Issues with a Subjective Candidate Review Process
A high volume of applicants can result in a subjective review process due to implicit biases surrounding age, gender, and education to name a few. Utilizing an objective evaluation process that only highlights the most relevant criterion removes these biases. Therefore, an objective review process makes it easier to identify the top candidates in your applicant pool.
Longer Time to Hire
A volume-based recruiting strategy greatly lengthens the candidate evaluation step in the hiring process. Each application and resume takes time to review and a higher number of applicants makes it even more difficult to determine which ones to advance to phone screening. In all likelihood, that means more screening calls too. Overall, receiving and filtering through a high number of applicants can take weeks or even months.
Poor User Experience for Candidates
It’s not just recruiters and hiring managers that must deal with challenges presented by volume-based recruiting. It is much more difficult for companies to provide a positive experience to job seekers when they’re dealing with a larger quantity of applicants. That means that job seekers can be left hanging for weeks waiting for a response. Not only is a bad user experience a bad look for your business, it also can result in job seekers looking elsewhere for employment.
Recruiting for Quality Over Quantity
A high-volume of applicants for your job posting is better than not enough applicants. However, having the right applicants is what really matters. In fact, a high number of applicants for a position isn’t even an issue if you have a strategy to efficiently narrow the field and identify top candidates.
The Use of Aptitude Testing in Recruitment
One of the best ways to deal with an overwhelmingly large applicant pool is to send them a pre-employment test. One strategy is to determine a certain test score threshold for the role and then cut candidates that scored below.
If you decide to implement pre-employment testing into your hiring process, make sure to include an assessment that tests for cognitive aptitude, like JobFlare’s brain game assessments. These tests are especially helpful in the candidate review process because cognitive aptitude is the most predictive indicator of employee success. Cognitive aptitude is actually about twice as predictive as interviews and three times as predictive as prior job experience!
Objective Candidate Review
The use of objective evaluation is the most effective way to narrow down your applicant pool to only the best candidates for the job. Plus, by eliminating subjective perspectives and relying on only data you remove all biases from your review process. Some examples of objective data that can be used in the evaluation process include skills certifications and cognitive aptitude test scores.
Identifying Top Job Candidates Using Cognitive Aptitude
Cognitive aptitude reveals details on important workplace traits like problem-solving ability, attention to detail, and communication skills, making it a powerful predictor of job success. That’s why cognitive aptitude date is so helpful in determining which candidates to advance to the next step in the hiring process. This advantage makes cognitive aptitude data especially valuable early in the recruitment process. The issue with this is that waiting for all of your applicants to complete an assessment that you’ve sent them can take weeks.
About the Author
JobFlare is an objective talent marketplace and recruiting platform that helps employers connect with high-potential job seekers using scientifically validated game-based assessments that measure candidate aptitude, the #1 indicator of job success.
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