A Day in Mass Recruiting

Another week goes by on the recruitment team's schedule. The payroll is still at 40%, with no ability to complete it faster. Recruiters review all 200 candidate applications, dedicating up to two hours a day. It is followed by calls, reminders, follow-ups and the high percentage of absences at the first interview. Of those who showed up for the interview, some forgot their documentation, leading to sending them home and asking them to return with their documents. If they return, hopefully everything will be in order and you can begin the hiring and onboarding process.

Sit at your desk preparing the report on the KPIs of the hiring process to share with other leaders. You look at your recruiters, all busy and overburdened with manual filtering, scheduling, reminders and interviewing tasks. Not today, not this week. Hopefully, next month will be a better time for those improvements that are sure to bring 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. Competition for front-line workers has increased, making it difficult to reach the best candidates quickly enough. Teams add overtime to their workload and still seem to reach candidates after the competition has already offered them a job. Meanwhile, the application forms are left empty because they prefer to opt for another, simpler application.

The problem isn't just not getting to your candidates quickly enough, but also stressing and overloading your team with unnecessary manual work. This wastes the valuable time of professionals who could be adding more value to the company and improving the process at a high level instead of simply surviving.

The waste of resources in the HR process

The average team spends an excessive amount of time on operational, manual, and repetitive tasks. Not only the selection, but also answering candidates' repetitive questions, reminding them of interviews, sending emails back and forth to schedule appointments. In addition, for many teams, the work schedule is not enough and they need to use overtime to cover the entire workload. As the weekend rolls around, the workload will double with more applicants.

HR efficiency and the impact on the company's KPIs

When we think about the impact of manual tasks, maybe we're just considering exhaustion on recruitment teams. Something that is already a warning sign in our resource management. However, the impacts of manual tasks can be multiple: increased hours spent by recruiters on a single candidate, long hiring cycles, lack of metrics, and more. This eventually influences the business, as incomplete payrolls could result in fewer waiters at one of the stores, or no cashier. This reduces the number of products you can sell or the slowness with which you can serve a customer, resulting in dissatisfied customers and a lower sale or a bad review. In the end, you lose revenue and customers.

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

How are companies dealing with efficiency and the specific use of their limited resources?

The good thing is that it's a pervasive problem among recruitment teams. Which means we can see and learn from how others have solved the same problem and learn from their solutions. In companies that do mass hiring of front-line workers such as Heineken, Oxxo and Nemak in Mexico, the problem has been addressed primarily by:

• Automation
• Updating application forms for more efficient technology
• Standardization of processes and updating of your technology.

These companies have chosen to look for the tool that allows them to optimize and improve their process. Instead of compartmentalizing improvements into specific parts or adding tools with partial solutions, they chose to find a solution that would streamline their end-to-end process. Let's see their results:

Automation in Heineken

Through automation, recruiters from Heineken They saved more than 10,000 hours. Heineken was struggling to keep up with the flow of high-volume hiring needs due to labor reforms in Mexico in recent years. They focused on adopting a tool that could automate the pre-selection of candidates. This allowed them to focus on building the employer brand and acting on their talent acquisition strategy.

Automation impacted not only on equipment efficiency, but also on the reduction of process time and costs. The benefit of a faster process not only has an economic impact on the company, but it also increases the likelihood of reaching the best candidates and hiring them. In the Guide to attracting and retaining talent in competitive markets, it was found that the average hiring time is 34 days, but the best candidates are out of the market in 10 days. Therefore, immediate response and filtering are a valuable asset for companies looking to hire the best candidates.

Upgrading forms to simple applications in Oxxo and Nemak

In the Guide to attracting and retaining talent in competitive markets, it was found that for those who work on an hourly basis, the abandonment of applicants usually occurs within the first 3-5 minutes. Therefore, if a job takes longer than 5 minutes to complete, the candidate's abandonment rate increases to 50%-75%; requests with more than 25 questions have a 25%-50% abandonment rate. Also, it should be taken into consideration that most candidates who apply tend to prefer faster and simpler application processes. Therefore, if you're currently using forms, lengthy questions, or requesting a resume that candidates may not have updated, you may want to consider upgrading to a more user-friendly, faster and more efficient form of pre-selection. In the case of Heineken, Emi's AI chatbot was designed to select and classify candidates and program them in a matter of minutes.

OXXO adopted automation with AI to replace its old application methods. Nowadays, candidates apply to Oxxo through a WhatsApp link that has a 24/7 automated AI pre-selection to filter the applicants and schedule the first interview with them. By incorporating the Emi tool into their teams, they have managed to reduce stores with a critical reduction in employees by 86%, reduce their available vacancies by 26% and reduce the time it took them to complete their payroll by 33%.

Nemak it also used automation and AI in its recruitment processes. They were trying to reduce manual tasks and increase productivity and efficiency in their HR teams. Mainly by improving profile filtering, response time and documentation capture. They managed to increase their hiring of operational positions by 54%, contact 100% of candidates and reduce their outsourcing costs by 75%.

How to integrate automation into your recruitment process

Identify major pain points and define KPIs and objectives

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

In addition, identifying your current greatest pain points will help you initiate progressive innovation that ensures that priorities are met first.

Progressive Innovations

Big changes are achieved through small actions. Once you identify the biggest improvement points and company priorities, you can start implementing specific improvements. It's important to keep in mind that changes will take time and will require good communication and alignment between teams. It can be progressively improved, adopting a piecemeal solution that can help us to be able to progressively approach the recruitment we are looking for.

Automating talent acquisition

There are many ways to improve recruitment processes. For those companies looking to have a direct impact on their KPIs, in addition to helping their HR teams work more efficiently, I would recommend exploring complete solutions where automation and the use of AI can maximize results. As was the case in leading companies such as Walmart, Heineken, Oxxo and Nemak. You can read their success stories complete and request a demo with Emi if you are looking to explore the potential impact that automation can have on your company.

For those who seek to solve the problem superficially until improvements can be made at the root, I would suggest gradual implementations in the areas mentioned (candidate filters, automation of manual tasks and collection of documentation). In small operations, where they handle volumes of less than 200 recruited annually, a chatbot and tools specific to their needs can serve as an initial solution. But if we are talking about massive volumes or above 1000, it is convenient to use complete platforms with comprehensive solutions.

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