Companies are realizing that traditional recruiting models aren't capable of handling the rapid shifts in talent supply and demand that are occurring across industries and geographies. Those that embrace the quick changes occurring in staffing and recruiting and are willing to leverage new platforms and models will have an edge now and in the future.
How do you empower your staffing pros and recruiters during uncertain times? By overcoming one of the fundamental challenges every recruiter faces: not having enough time to sufficiently source talent and engage high-quality, interested candidates. The truth is, that without the right technology solutions, recruiters will continue to use their time unproductively and fall behind a tech-enabled competitor.
In this blog, we discuss the challenges that hinder recruiters' ability to make hires along with a solution PSG has developed that combines people, processes, and technology. With our support, our clients have significantly increased their number of quality hires. Take a look:
Challenges of Traditional Recruiting Models
The inherent design of traditional recruiting models limits a recruiter's ability to maximize the productivity of their sourcing efforts, connect with candidates, and, ultimately, submit enough interested and qualified candidates to meet their monthly hiring targets.
With traditional models, recruiters start by building a list of leads typically composed of applicants and candidates sourced out of their ATS and job boards. Once they have a list of leads, they develop a call plan to help them contact the highest value candidates according to their skillsets, experience, and interest in the position (typically prioritizing applicants). Prior to executing their call plan, recruiters often manually type up and send out email and text inquiries. As recruiters call their list of leads, they will continue to receive responses to their original inquiries this requires real-time prioritization of incoming replies while still screening and qualifying candidates over the phone.
Historically, candidate prioritization has been determined by a recruiters' intuition, leveraging expert observations of the characteristics that result in candidate hires. Yet personal bias and anecdotal evidence shape their judgment and reduce the objectivity of their prioritization especially when their attention is already split between ongoing candidate interactions and evaluating candidate responses.
Moreover, the response of recruiters juggling these different responsibilities is often sluggish or reactive. When an interested candidate responds to an email or text communication, there is a 15 to 30-minute window in which that candidate will remain at their maximum level of receptiveness. Candidates reached during this time frame are twice as likely to be submitted while those permitted to wait in a vague holding pattern tend to be more difficult to connect with and rapidly lose interest.
Even the best recruiters struggle with this hurdle because they often lack the technology, processes, and additional support to deliver consistent submittals and hires.
New Challenges Introduced with Point Solutions
In response to the challenges of traditional staffing models, many organizations have adopted new point solutions to solve parts of the problem, including the following popular technology point solutions:
- Resume and CV parsing Applications designed to automate the process of gathering, analyzing, and sorting resumes.
- Text and email automation Specialized applications designed to engage a list of candidates that is part of, or can be integrated into, an organization's ATS.
- Bots These are typically automation programs that scan the web for candidate information to aide with basic screening and scheduling tasks, or replicate simple text-based conversations with candidates.
- Machine learning Algorithms are being deployed to help prioritize requisitions, candidates sourced, and interaction strategies by leveraging historical data.
Though some of these point solutions have improved efficiency and effectiveness for pieces of the recruitment process, the complexity of integrating all the pieces together into an existing recruitment operation often limits the ability to address the comprehensive problem. In piecing together the point solutions above, recruiters typically have to manage multiple complex solutions, resulting in frustration and low user adoption.
Surprisingly, in addition to the added complexity and confusion, these point solutions do not address a major challenge for recruiters knowing how much time to spend sourcing and who to contact after they have a list of candidates. With point solutions, many recruiters have to use dual monitors to watch their inbound text and email traffic while trying to also call and log interactions with candidates on another monitor. In pilot programs conducted by PSG, we have found that if a candidate responds to a text or email indicating they are interested in a role, the likelihood of connecting with that candidate if you call them within 15 minutes can be as high as 50% versus standard connect rates of 15%. Even with dual monitors and the best-in-class point solutions available today, managing all the inbound email and chat messages while calling and sourcing makes it difficult to consistently call candidates in this critical 15 to 30-minute window of opportunity.
PSG's Solution to Address These Challenges
PSG has spent the last several years studying the challenges above and building a platform that fully integrates high-powered point solutions into a single tool that also solves the problem of prioritizing which candidate to call in real-time. To make the solution work, we designed a streamlined process, training program, and performance management module. The overall platform is called Compass and our unique cutting-edge candidate engagement capabilities are included in a module called Automated Candidate Engagement, or ACE.
After leveraging Compass' parsing technology to batch leads from multiple job boards and other proprietary candidate sources, PSG's ACE platform automates communications with these leads to streamline the process and rapidly identify interested candidates. Each candidate contacted through email or text messages is scored based on their overall interest in the position, qualifications, and a wealth of other data points. The candidates with the highest score are moved to the top of a dynamic calling queue enabling the recruiter to engage qualified and interested candidates quickly. Candidates with a lower score fall to the bottom of the calling queue and once the recruiter encounters a candidate with a score below a specified level, the recruiter will not contact the candidate but instead be triggered to start sourcing again for the role and feed a new batch of leads into ACE.
PSG has implemented ACE across over 60% of our recruiting accounts with outstanding results as shown below. Not only has our connect rate increased by over 80%, but we are also delivering 80% more hires a month per recruiter with this new solution.
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