Wading through a tsunami of applicants?
It’s all over the news…layoffs are happening, unemployment is rising, and now increasing inflation and uncertainty in the job market are causing people that were part of the “great resignation” to rethink their decision in what is being called the “Great Remorse” (great article in Fortune about this here: Click here).
So what does all this mean?
Over the past year, companies have been struggling with not getting enough applicants to apply. Talent acquisition teams would be thrilled to have more applicants, right? However, we may very likely see the pendulum swing harder than expected from having too few applicants to having too many applicants. While this seems like a great problem to have, it actually creates a whole new set of problems:
1. Many talent acquisition teams were recently reduced in size, which means now they have to process 3x, 5x, or maybe 10x the amount of applicants with a smaller team
2. Exacerbated by problem number one above, most talent acquisition teams are still using the same old tools of reviewing résumés one-by-one in a traditional ATS, that takes up a lot of time
3. Applicants are going to be more desperate to get a job, which means recruiters and hiring managers need to screen job applicants with even more precision or they risk missing important qualifications and ultimately hiring the wrong person. In fact, “over half (51%) of seekers agree that, as it stands, they would take any job offer that comes along”
4. Hiring applicants based on “hoping” rather than “knowing” they have the exact qualifications for a role can lead to bigger long-term repercussions such as higher turnover, lower productivity, and higher costs
Without proper automation tools, talent acquisition teams are going to get burned out for different reasons. Companies should really be focusing, RIGHT NOW, on what technology and process changes they can implement to head off the impending tsunami of applicants and prepare for when the market recovers and hiring goes through the roof again.
