How did Cisco shortlist from over 5,000 candidates in just 2 and a half days?

4,129, 27.5 and 200

Do you know what these numbers are? Well, it is the cost to hire- 4,129 (in dollars), number of days to close a position- 27.5, and the average number of applications- 200 a recruiter has to screen through for- JUST ONE JOB POST!

So, let’s take a minute and all of us agree that recruiting is a long, long, long process. Every step involves its own challenge right from planning to the final step of onboarding. It’s not just like, but actually finding the needle in the haystack. As the mismatch between supply and demand of the jobs keeps increasing and the number of applications continue to pile up, the job becomes tougher and tougher. But what’s the way out? With great power comes great responsibility, doesn’t it! Well, there is a solution, and that is to rely on the one thing that is solving our problem in all other fields. Technology. Now, before you get baffled with how technology can replace a human, we are not saying that. We will never say that but, then who said you can’t use technology to reduce your burden?

Checkout how these companies are using technology to aid and smoothen their recruitment process at different stages!

Scanning online applications & Hilton

On an average a company receives 250 resumes on a daily basis and imagine going through them all. The number is way higher for big corporations. Now isn’t that challenging and may we say, extremely exhausting! But you also don’t want to overlook any candidate just because there are a lot of them, wouldn’t you? But what can be done to ensure that each candidate gets an equal shot of getting hired? If only there was something that would take care of your day-to-day task and help you ensure that you find the perfect candidate fast. Well, guess what just like Hilton you can automate the process and focus on what requires your attention way more- candidate experience.

Hilton uses AllyO, a software that addresses the traditional inefficiencies of overburdening administrative tasks on hiring teams, for the day-to-day activities. AllyO goes through the thousands of applications received by Hilton on a daily basis. The company uses AI to conduct follow-up interviews for call center job applicants, scheduling the final offer call for successful candidates. This has helped them enhance their candidate experience as none of the applications get lost and the recruitment for mass number of job roles fast which often takes months to close.

Candidate engagement & ThredUp

Failing to provide a great candidate experience can have a harmful impact on your employer branding. A candidate starts anticipating the company’s response as soon as they send their resume. But unfortunately companies forget to pay attention to it as much as they should. More often than not candidates don’t even receive any response for months and months after applying for a job. In fact, 69% of candidates would prefer to have a faster response from the employers. But honestly, it is difficult to respond to every single candidate about their status in the process. So, what can be done?

ThredUp too faced high turnover rate and slow email responses creating a loophole in providing the top candidate experience. So, how did they fix it? ThredUp started their journey with TextRecruit and started sending mass text messages to the candidates. “One night we pulled about 500 applications from our ATS, uploaded a CSV, and reached out to all of them. We had about 150 responses in about 15 minutes. Within the course of an hour our recruiter had interacted with close to 200 candidates!” – Natalie Breece, Director of Talent Acquisition at ThredUp. Guess what automating the process made their response rate go up to 75% and the new hires were extremely happy with the candidate engagement process as well.

Interview by Bots & Ikea

Finding the right candidate for your company requires rigorous grilling and questioning of each candidate that looks promising. And no matter how much you try to make it a quick interview, it never ends up being quick, does it? An average interview can last anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour. Even if you schedule it for 15 minutes you only realise it has crossed the allotted time when it has already been 30 minutes, doesn’t it? But it is not in our control, ensuring a candidate’s true potential and intention does take that long. So, what can be done to ensure that all questions are asked but it’s not as time consuming. Well, we can take some notes from Ikea’s recruitment process.

Imagine the time that a large corporation like Ikea would require if they had to interview each candidate whose resume they liked! A company of 150,000 employees and growing exponentially, expanding into different countries, had to resort to modern technology for the same. Ikea partnered with XOR and had a chatbot installed directly to the job kiosks. The chatbot filtered the applications based on qualifications and sent an on-demand video interview link to the shortlisted candidates. The on-demand video interview did the job of the first round of interviews, which we generally do to get to know the candidates. The immediate impact- enhanced candidate engagement and decreased drop-off rates.

Testing and Assessment Tools & Cisco

One of the toughest tasks in the whole recruitment process is testing the candidate’s capabilities and assessment of the assignments. And is the one task that recruiters definitely need assistance from the hiring managers or the team leads which often causes a certain amount of delay in the process. But it is one of the best ways to assess whether the candidate does possess the potential to be part of the company. A research done by Talent Board’s Candidate Experience showed that 82% companies use some sort of pre-employment assessment to gauge if the candidates are a perfect fit for the profile. So, how do you speed up the process and shortlist the right candidates? Take a look at how Cisco managed to shortlist from over 5,000 candidates in just 2 and a half days!

Cisco partnered with HackerRank and ran a CodeSprint that pulled over 6,500 engineering candidates who held expertise in software and security from across the globe within 2.5 days. HackerRank is a place where programmers from all over the world come together to solve problems in a wide range of Computer Science domains. Cisco’s CodeSprint competition not only attracted candidates on its own but HackerRank helped them filter out the candidates by removing the one who had plagiarized or were a mismatch for the company. And voila, target achieved!

Recruitment is not an easy process to master in the ever changing world but it surely is a vital one and will continue to remain so. However, technology is a great boon that will ensure that you stay at the top of your game and select the best talent for your company. There’s a reason why over 98% of fortune 500 companies use recruitment software. So, start your planning with technology aiding every step of your recruitment process and ace your goals as a recruiter!