A Day in Mass Recruitment

Another week ticks away, yet staffing levels remain stagnant at 40%. The recruitment team is buried in work with no capacity to raise them faster. The recruiters sift through 200 candidate applications, spending up to two hours a day on this task. Then come the calls, the reminders, the follow-ups, and the high percentage of no-shows for the first interview. Of those who do show up, some forget their documents, which means sending them back home and asking them to return with them. If they do come back, hopefully everything will be in order, and you can start the hiring and onboarding process.

You sit at your desk to prepare the report on the hiring process KPIs to share it with other leaders. You look at your recruiters, all busy and overwhelmed with the manual tasks of screening, scheduling, sending reminders, and interviewing. Not today; not this week. If we’re lucky, next month will be a better time for those improvements that will surely add value. However, you're still stuck on what’s urgent instead of what’s important.

Common Problems in HR Teams

This is the reality for many teams. The competition for frontline workers has gotten more intense, making it harder to reach the best candidates quickly enough. Teams add extra hours to their workload and still seem to reach candidates only after the competition has already made them an offer. Meanwhile, application forms remain empty because candidates prefer to fill out simpler applications elsewhere.

The problem isn’t just about not reaching your candidates fast enough; it's also about stressing and overloading your team with unnecessary manual work. This squanders the valuable time of professionals who could be adding more value to the company and improving the process at a high level rather than just surviving.

The Waste of Resources in the HR Process

The average team spends an excessive amount of time on operational, manual, and repetitive tasks. It’s not just about screening but also about answering candidates’ repetitive questions, reminding them of interviews, and sending emails back and forth to schedule appointments. Moreover, for many teams, regular working hours aren't enough, and they need to work overtime to get through the entire workload. By the end of the week, the workload will eventually double with more applicants.

HR Efficiency and the Impact on Company KPIs

When we think about the impact of manual tasks, we might only consider the burnout experienced by recruitment teams. This is already a red flag for our resource management. However, the impacts of manual tasks are multifaceted: increased hours recruiters spend on a single candidate, long hiring cycles, a lack of metrics, and more. This eventually affects the business, as incomplete staffing could mean fewer waiters in one of the establishments or no cashiers at all. This reduces the number of products you can sell or slows down customer service, resulting in dissatisfied customers, lost sales, and bad reviews. In the end, you lose revenue and customers.

With this in mind, we can understand that by focusing on high-value tasks througout the recruitment process and ensuring our resources are used wisely, we can have a direct impact on revenue, candidate experience, and brand perception.

How Companies Are Figuring Out Efficiency and the Specific Use of Their Limited Resources

The good news is that this is a widespread problem among recruitment teams. This means we can observe and analyze how others have solved the same problem and implement their solutions. In companies that conduct mass hiring of frontline workers like Heineken, Oxxo, and Nemak in Mexico, the problem has been primarily addressed by:

• Implementing automation
• Updating application forms with more efficient technology
• Standardizing processes and upgrading their technology

These companies have chosen to seek out tools that allow them to optimize and improve their entire process. Instead of compartmentalizing improvements for specific parts or adding tools with partial solutions, they chose to find a solution that streamlines their end-to-end process. Let's take a look at their results:

Automation at Heineken

Through automation, Heineken's recruiters saved over 10,000 hours. The company was struggling to keep up with the high volume of hiring needs due to labor reforms in Mexico in recent years and decided to focus on adopting a tool that could automate candidate pre-screening. This allowed Heineken to concentrate on building their employer brand and executing its talent acquisition strategy.

Automation not only impacted the team's efficiency but also reduced the time and costs of the process. The benefit of a faster process not only has an economic impact on the company, but also increases the likelihood of reaching and hiring the best candidates. According to the guide for attracting and retaining talent in competitive markets, the average hiring time is 34 days, but the best candidates are off the market in 10 days. Therefore, immediate responsiveness and filtering are a valuable asset for companies seeking to hire top talent.

The Updating of Forms To Simple Applications at Oxxo and Nemak

The guide for attracting and retaining talent in competitive markets states that for hourly workers, applicant drop-off often occurs within the first 3-5 minutes. Therefore, if a job application takes longer than 5 minutes to complete, the candidate drop-off rate increases to 50%-75%; applications with more than 25 questions have a drop-off rate of 25%-50%. It's also noted that most candidates prefer quicker and simpler application processes. So, if you're currently using long forms, lengthy questions, or requiring a resume that candidates may not have updated, you might want to consider switching to a more user-friendly, faster, and more efficient pre-screening method. Heineken used Emi's AI chatbot to screen, classify, and schedule candidate interviews in minutes.

Oxxo adopted AI automation to replace old job application methods. Nowadays, candidates apply to Oxxo through a WhatsApp link that features 24/7 automated AI pre-screening to filter applicants and schedule the first interview with them. By incorporating Emi's tool into the teams, Oxxo managed to reduce the number of critically understaffed stores by 86%, decrease their vacancies by 26%, and cut down the time to complete their staffing by 33%.

Nemak also used automation and AI in recruitment processes. It aims to reduce manual tasks and boost productivity and efficiency in the HR teams, primarily by improving profile screening, response time, and document collection. Nemak achieved a 54% increase in hiring for operational positions, contacted 100% of candidates, and reduced their outsourcing costs by 75%.

How to Integrate Automation into Your Recruitment Process

Identifying Major Pain Points and Defining KPIs and Objectives

Identifying the KPIs and objectives that are in line with your company and recruitment team will help you focus on finding the right tools and solutions to achieve them. Research, explore, and visualize the results you aim to achieve within a year. This will help you stay focused and identify the first steps more clearly.

Additionally, identifying your current major pain points will help you implement progressive innovation that ensures you address your priorities first.

Implementing Progressive Innovations

Big changes are achieved through small actions. Once you identify the major areas for improvement and the company's priorities, you can start implementing specific improvements. It's important to remember that changes will take time and require good communication and alignment between teams. Improvements can be made progressively, adopting a solution step by step, where each step can help you to gradually move closer to the recruitment process you aim for.

Automating Talent Acquisition 

There are many ways to improve recruitment processes. For companies looking to have a direct impact on their KPIs and help their HR teams work more efficiently, I would recommend exploring comprehensive solutions where automation and AI can maximize results. This is the case with leading companies like Walmart, Heineken, Oxxo, and Nemak. You can read all of those success stories and request a demo with Emi if you wish to explore the potential impact that automation can have on your company.

For those looking to address the problem superficially until root improvements can be made, I would suggest gradual implementations in the aforementioned areas (candidate screening, automating manual tasks, and document collection). In small operations, handling volumes of less than 200 recruits annually, a chatbot and specific tools for their needs can serve as an initial solution. But if we're talking about massive volumes or over 1,000 recruits, it's advisable to use comprehensive platforms with integrated solutions.

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