How High-Volume Hiring Will Change In 2024

Impersonal, transactional processes will evolve into personalized experiences to enhance candidate conversion

It’s hard to see eye-to-eye on most issues these days, but there is one topic that rallies and unifies people like no other: the candidate experience. The process feels hopelessly broken, and hasn’t worked like it should for a long time. A recent survey showed that as many as 49% of candidates declined an offer because of a poor experience.

Frustration with the hiring process goes for both employers and job seekers. Neither is happy with the status quo.

Sage advice came from a recruiter in a Reddit post: “You don't need to roll out the red carpet or have a limo waiting at the airport to offer an exceptional candidate experience. You just need to treat candidates like people.”

Well put. And the best way to do that is to end the one-size-fits-all hiring approach for both knowledge workers and hourly employees. Plugging a new solution into an existing workflow doesn’t work. Think, instead, about the little details that impact the candidate experience, such as the information employers are asking applicants to provide. Are answers really required from the candidate early on in the process, or could they wait till later?

Hiring for a role in retail is very different from hiring a candidate in an enterprise setting, and it is well known that organizations can’t fill high-volume roles the same way they do for the corporate office. A well-formed high-volume strategy doesn’t treat all locations the same.

A retail site that is far from a bustling urban area may attract a handful of applicants a year, whereas a city location may be flooded with job seekers. Organizations need to treat those talent pools differently, in a way that goes beyond what your average Applicant Tracking System (ATS) would do. Deeply defining and catering to those audiences is the direction that high-volume hiring is going.

It’s time to take a hyper-localized approach by creating a process for talent acquisition professionals to become workflow orchestrators. The future state is one where recruiters can leverage automated workflows that are designed for specific roles, affording much-needed flexibility that was not easily achievable just a few years ago.

That would be a marked improvement from the type of process that candidates have to go through now. Regardless of the role they are applying for, candidates are all too often treated the same. They have to go through a drawn-out job search and discovery process — which is painfully repeated once they get to the application step.

If a pre-employment assessment is involved, it’s typically long, tedious and disconnected from the hiring workflow. After all that effort, it still may take as long as two weeks to hear back from the company.

Now imagine that process turned on its ear. AI and automation have become a powerful combination, enhancing both efficiency and personalization. Automation tools exist today that empower talent acquisition teams to tailor and optimize certain workflows based on each role type.

Adding AI and automation is not an all-or-nothing decision, nor does it replace that all-important human touch of the HR function. Rather, AI is weaved into the places where it does the most good for the candidate and recruiting team.

To fill warehouse or store associate roles, AI-based tools carry a job seeker from personalized job recommendations on a career site right to a conditional job offer via chatbot, shortening the time to offer. For other roles, AI helps with initial screening and aligning available candidates to the most important jobs to fill — with personal interviews, credential checks and assessments to follow.

The ability to pull those functionalities (i.e. screening and interview scheduling) into one user interface was once a pipe dream because of the technical challenges. But a solution is now out there in the market and it works.

TA teams can make a workflow that’s optimized for a specific role as opposed to a separate workflow for their contact center roles. Instead of forcing everybody through one funnel, TA teams support multiple parallel candidate experiences that are optimized for that particular candidate population.

The evolution from AI as copilots (think chatbots) to AI as agents that can do a particular set of tasks marks a significant shift. The aim is to create an AI experience that can automatically distinguish between job types and then determine where automation or the human touch should be used to fill certain roles. A big advantage for employers is it’s an entirely self-directed process that can be overseen by the human-in-the-loop but not necessarily started by that human.

For example, an AI agent with the ability to look at workflows, see how they’re performing, and then make intelligent recommendations on how to improve the workflow is a big-bang moment for sure.

Nothing will be changed without an administrator’s approval, but the level of suggestion will be heightened in the future with AI agents.

Recent research from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce shows that the leisure and hospitality industry lost 837,000 workers in September 2023, but 1.1 million people were hired into the industry that same month.

Looking back a little further, since November 2020, leisure and hospitality has posted the highest hiring rate among all industries, ranging between 6% to nearly 19%. That’s significantly higher than the national average, which stood at 3.7 percent in September 2023.

How are forward-looking companies tackling high-volume hiring? With a new way of thinking.

They’re taking a programmatic approach to job management, where jobs can be posted automatically on the correct job boards and the right amount of money is spent to generate the right amount of pipeline. Long-term thinking TA teams would be well-advised to adopt a programmatic approach to their jobs based on actual hiring needs and recruitment pipeline.

Many companies facing a seasonal or surprise influx of applications are even able to reduce time to hire and improve quality of hire and candidate experience by applying new programmatic, automated tools.

Down the road, high-volume hiring will be compatible with the most common use cases in industries such as retail, hospitality, healthcare and finance. But instead of a multi-tool, it will be customized and specifically created for each type of organization to fill critical roles, with speed and at scale.

The key to its success: Collecting millions of data points and marrying them with an automation engine. It will automatically generate a template recommendation for, say, a generic commercial driver's license (CDL) driver. But it can also hone in and tailor a recommendation, such as a CDL driver in a particular location.

The future of high-volume hiring is not just about filling positions quickly. It’s about a journey where each candidate feels valued and each employer finds the right talent. This new era of hiring, powered by data, AI, and personalization, points to a vastly improved experience for both the employer and the candidate. So while we may still have disagreements over hot-button issues, a job search that leaves people wanting for more won’t be one of them.