Effective talent acquisition plays a crucial role in the success of business verticals in organisations, especially in industries such as Manufacturing, Logistics & Supply Chain, Retail, FMCG, BFSI, and BPO. This growing importance of Talent Acquisition as a vital and strategic HR function is particularly evident for non-IT talent, aligning with the business objectives of organisations. The fast-growing challenges in non-IT frontline recruitment, coupled with the widespread adoption of smartphones among the masses in India, present a unique opportunity for digital communication in the non-IT recruitment function, addressing inefficiencies.
This blog explores the potential of text-based recruitment in solving some of the most pressing challenges in volume hiring in India.
The Landscape of Recruitment in India
India's job market offers both growth opportunities and challenges for recruiters. Leading HR consultancies highlight a significant increase in the number of interviews conducted per successful hire in recent years. This trend can be attributed to the prevailing skill gap and the mismatch between talent availability and required skills. To conquer these challenges, recruiters must adopt efficient and effective recruitment methods that streamline the hiring process.
Talent acquisition in India poses unique complexities due to its vast population, diverse skill sets, and varied job market demands. Recruiters often struggle to identify suitable candidates from a massive talent pool and manage high volumes of applications. Traditional recruitment methods, such as manual processing and individual candidate assessment calls, prove to be time-consuming and inefficient. These approaches result in delayed hiring, missed turnaround time (TAT) targets, and negative impacts on key performance indicators (KPIs). Moreover, the cost per hire for non-IT talent has significantly increased, with a rise of 50% over the past 3-4 years. This surge poses a significant challenge for organisations heavily reliant on frontline manpower.
Text-Based Recruitment: A Potential Solution for Efficient Volume Recruitment in Non-IT Sectors?
Before delving into the details of leveraging text-based recruitment for volume hiring in India, let's grasp the concept of text-based recruitment and its significance in today's recruitment landscape.
Text-based recruitment offers numerous advantages for volume hiring in India. Its streamlined and real-time nature enhances communication and candidate engagement. Recruiters can quickly reach a larger pool of candidates, efficiently screen them, and swiftly move them through the hiring stages, instead of relying solely on traditional methods such as phone calls or emails. This enables faster turnaround times, reducing time-to-fill and ensuring a competitive edge in securing top talent. Additionally, the mobile-centric nature of text-based recruitment aligns well with the digital-savvy population in India, enabling recruiters to tap into a broader talent pool.
Why Text-Based Recruitment never found its way fully in India?
Text or SMSes for communication has been losing its relevance for masses owing to the exponential increase in spam SMSes in India. This surge in unsolicited messages has resulted in a decline in the effectiveness of traditional text-based engagement methods, particularly in the recruitment context. Recruiters have come to recognize the adverse impact of inundating candidates with excessive messages, leading to frustration and a negative perception of their organisation. The consequences of spamming extend beyond tarnishing the brand image, ultimately undermining the overall effectiveness of recruitment efforts.
How can Text-Based Recruitment be modified to suit the requirements of Indian recruiters?
India stands out in terms of WhatsApp adoption with close to 500 million active users as of date, and its widespread adoption led to an idea of building text-based recruitment on top of WhatsApp. Recognizing its immense potential, leading brands in India have harnessed the power of WhatsApp for Business to drive engagement and fuel business growth. The versatility of WhatsApp for Business is evident in its applications across various industries. For example, prominent food delivery platforms have seamlessly integrated WhatsApp into their operations, enabling efficient communication between customers and restaurants. E-commerce giants like JioMart have leveraged WhatsApp to offer customers an end-to-end shopping experience, from placing orders to receiving real-time updates.
WhatsApp's popularity among recruiters is driven by its user-friendly interface and powerful instant messaging capabilities. This versatile platform serves as an attractive solution, particularly for volume hiring use-cases in non-IT sectors. Recruiters can leverage WhatsApp to conduct large-scale engagements, capturing high-intent and highly relevant candidates in their recruitment funnel.
The unique selling proposition (USP) lies in leveraging hyper-personalised chatbots that operate on WhatsApp, revolutionising the entire recruitment lifecycle. From initial interest checking to candidate qualification, interview scheduling, reminders, and continuous candidate engagement, recruitment chatbots on WhatsApp offer unparalleled functionality. These chatbots can be configured to run in various Indian languages, ensuring seamless and convenient engagement for candidates. By harnessing the power of text-based recruitment, recruiters can optimise their recruitment funnels and focus on highly qualified and high-intent candidates for further processing. Another hidden advantage of using this will be to make your talent acquisition process become more self-sufficient. A big challenge in the industry is the lack of structured and labelled information about candidates which the text-based recruitment helps in solving. As you engage with thousands of candidates, you also end up building a large ecosystem of candidates with structured information available in your candidate databases for leveraging current and upcoming requirements. The recruitment funnel optimization using Text-Based Recruitment helps recruiters in focusing on highly qualified and high-intent candidates for further processing. A highly engaging CRM with inbuilt text-based recruitment functionality can give recruiters and hiring managers a lot of insights into the depth of engagement with candidates, channel and source tracking, ability to trigger engagements manually depending on the candidate status in the recruitment funnel.
In conclusion, text-based recruitment powered by recruitment chatbots and WhatsApp offers significant advantages for talent acquisition in India. With its efficiency, effectiveness, and the ability to connect with candidates directly, organisations can overcome recruitment challenges and streamline their hiring processes. By embracing text-based recruitment methods, organisations can tap into India's extensive talent pool, efficiently identify and engage with the right candidates more efficiently, filter their recruitment funnel, and become more self-sufficient in their recruitment operations.
If you are a non-IT volume recruiter in India, I encourage you to explore text-based recruitment with WhatsApp for Business. It is a powerful tool that can help you to overcome recruitment challenges, streamline the hiring process, and connect with candidates effectively.
