In today’s competitive frontline job market, recruiters are constantly searching for effective ways to identify and attract top talent. Surprisingly, a significant portion of potential candidates, up to 40%, can already be found within the recruiter’s or organisation’s existing candidate ecosystem, sourced from popular job boards like Naukri.com, Indeed, and Foundit.
However, recruiters often fail to utilise this valuable resource due to a lack of suitable tools and misaligned incentives. In this blog post, we will delve into the root causes of this issue and present potential solutions to empower recruiters, enabling them to harness the power of their existing candidate ecosystem fully. By addressing this recruitment gap, organisations can streamline their talent acquisition efforts and gain a competitive edge in the frontline job market.
Challenges Faced by Frontline Recruiters
As Founder and CEO at Hunar.AI, I have met and interviewed over 500+ Talent Acquisition professionals in the last year. Below is a summary of why recruitment professionals do not leverage their candidate ecosystem.
A. Manual Processes and High Effort for Certain Job Roles:
Specific job roles like Delivery and Field Sales Executives often entail a laborious manual recruitment process. Recruiters need to make numerous calls to find suitable candidates. The recruiters are sometimes referred to as “Telecallers” in specific organisations due to the similarity between the recruitment function and Tele-calling activities.
However, the perception that investing time in historical data may not yield fruitful results can discourage recruiters (read tele callers) from effectively leveraging their existing candidate ecosystem. This reluctance to tap into the potential of their candidate database leads to missed opportunities and inefficient recruitment practices.
B. Time-Pressure and Resume-Based Hiring for Skilled and Semi-Skilled Jobs:
Recruiters often encounter time pressure and challenges related to resume-based hiring when filling skilled and semi-skilled positions. These roles demand candidates with specific skills and experience, creating a sense of urgency to fill these positions promptly. As a result, recruiters face high Time-to-Fill (TAT) pressure, necessitating a swift hiring process.
To meet TAT expectations, recruiters often prioritise candidates actively seeking jobs on platforms like Naukri.com or Indeed. This approach offers the convenience of quickly lining up interviews and advancing the recruitment process with candidates actively engaged in the job search. However, this resume-based hiring approach may overlook qualified candidates not actively seeking job opportunities.
Searching within the existing candidate ecosystem of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSes) yields disappointing results due to text-based searches that generate a plethora of irrelevant candidate profiles. This overwhelming number of profiles makes it challenging for recruiters to identify the right candidates, increasing the overall Time-to-Fill. As a result, recruiters frequently opt for alternative methods and avoid relying solely on ATS searches. However, this approach can hinder the full utilisation of the existing candidate ecosystem and overlook potential talent that may already be within reach.
C. Limited Access to Technology:
Recruiters often face limitations in accessing advanced technology tools that can help them effectively leverage historical data for candidate sourcing and engagement.
The absence of smart and scalable outreach methods to engage with the substantial portion of passive job seekers, who constitute over 70% of the candidate pool, hampers effective candidate engagement. Without efficient channels to reach and engage with these passive candidates, recruiters miss out on valuable talent. Furthermore, the unavailability of robust recruitment chatbots for personalised interactions with candidates adds to the challenge of engaging with passive candidates.
D. Misaligned Incentives:
Recruiters are primarily motivated by achieving successful hires and may inadvertently disregard the costs associated with data acquisition from job boards.
The misalignment between recruiters’ incentives and the expenses tied to data acquisition hinders their ability to leverage their existing candidate ecosystem’s potential fully.
Potential Solutions to Overcome Frontline Recruiting Challenges
A. Recruitment Chatbots and Communication Channels:
High-volume hiring agencies can optimise their recruitment process by leveraging recruitment chatbots and communication channels such as WhatsApp for Business. These tools offer programmatic outreach capabilities, allowing high-volume hiring agencies to reach out to relevant candidates at scale. By utilising historical data and advanced algorithms, recruiters can identify and engage with passive candidates, converting them into active and high-intent leads. This targeted approach improves conversion rates and enhances the overall hiring process. By engaging with passive candidates and converting them into active and high-intent leads, recruiters can achieve efficient and high-volume hiring, surpassing industry benchmarks with a significantly reduced Time-to-Fill.
B. Contextual Search instead of Text-Based Search:
Shifting from text-based searches within Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSes) to contextual search is a game-changer. By leveraging contextual search, recruiters can match candidates with job opportunities based on their experience, skills, and potential, going beyond simple keyword matching.
Contextual search revolutionises the effectiveness of recruiters’ candidate ecosystems. It enables recruiters to efficiently extract highly relevant CVs from their candidate pool, improving the overall quality of candidate matching. With advancements in language learning models, contextual matching between candidates and jobs becomes even more accurate and seamless. If you would like to know how contextual search is different from search built on traditional resume parsing, here’s another article on it.
When combined with Recruitment Chatbots and communication channels like WhatsApp for Business, the contextual search takes candidate engagement to the next level. Recruiters can proactively engage with relevant candidates, leveraging the power of personalised interactions. Recruitment Chatbots facilitate initial screenings, gather candidate information, and provide a seamless experience throughout the recruitment process. Recruiters can then readily pick up these leads and drive them towards successful closures.
Benefits of Optimising the Existing Candidate Ecosystem:
Recruiters now have access to powerful tools that can revolutionise their recruitment process by tapping into the potential of their existing candidate ecosystem. By adopting recruitment chatbots, contextual search, and language learning models, recruiters can address challenges related to manual processes, inefficient search methods, and misaligned incentives. Unlocking the potential of the existing candidate ecosystem enhances sourcing capabilities, drives recruitment efficiency, improves candidate quality, and reduces costs for organisations hiring frontline talent in India. By embracing these advancements, recruiters can navigate the dynamic frontline talent landscape in India with confidence and achieve exceptional results. If you wish to know more about frontline talent acquisition solutions, please contact Hunar.AI.
