How do you ramp up hiring quickly when it takes weeks — sometimes months — to find, interview and hire qualified candidates? How do you improve candidate experiences when recruiters still spend so much of their time on manual tasks, toggling between disjointed tools?
These questions remain top of mind for many enterprise HR and TA leaders as they navigate the pandemic and plan for recovery. In my role as Indeed’s General Manager of Enterprise, I’ve had many candid conversations with enterprise leaders to better understand their challenges in this unprecedented time and how Indeed might help.
Here are the three most common themes I’ve heard over the last year, and how Indeed’s evolved to help employers address these challenges with our new offering, Indeed Hiring Events.
How can I get qualified candidates into interviews faster?
With TA resources cut in some areas and hiring ramping up quickly in others, many enterprise leaders have expressed a need to reduce the time required to get to quality interviews.
It’s no wonder: Manual tasks — such as screening candidates and scheduling interviews — account for 80% of time spent on talent acquisition, according to Indeed data.
For example, a senior leader at a global employer in the restaurant industry told me that, despite its overall size, the company has an extremely small TA team. They wanted to keep the team small while hiring aggressively. Their biggest challenge was that this approach meant individual restaurant managers had to spend time manually scheduling interviews with candidates, rather than focusing on activities that drive the business.
Another enterprise leader in retail shared his recruiting team’s frustrations about the time spent setting up interviews for warehouse positions.
What’s more, given how competitive the market for warehouse workers has become, more candidates than ever aren’t showing up for scheduled interviews, further wasting recruiters’ time. In fact, recent Indeed research finds that 28% of jobseekers say they’ve “ghosted” an employer recently, up from 18% in 2019.
To be sure, improving efficiency is an ongoing quest for TA teams. But the pandemic has amplified frustration about time-consuming tasks required to get candidates to the interview.
How can I create more positive, inclusive candidate experiences?
The need to improve candidate experiences is another concern I’ve frequently heard from TA leaders. These leaders know the importance of empathy and focusing on the human side of hiring, given the challenging times we’re facing.
But there are only so many hours in the day. And when recruiters spend so many hours on repetitive tasks, they have less time, energy and mindshare to spend engaging with candidates.
It’s no wonder, then, that about 60% of jobseekers say they have had a poor candidate experience — and 72% of candidates share their negative experiences with others.
On the other hand, providing a positive candidate experience can help you attract top talent and, by extension, a more diverse workforce. The many benefits of a diverse workforce include a stronger employer reputation and enhanced employee engagement and retention.
A diverse workforce can also help a company’s bottom line. A 2019 McKinsey study found that companies ranking in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 25% more likely to have above-average profitability compared to organisations in the fourth quartile.
How do I embrace the shift to virtual interviewing?
The pandemic created an entirely new challenge for employers: the need to quickly adopt video interviewing wherever possible to limit in-person meetings and the potential spread of the virus.
According to Gartner, 86% of organisations had to suddenly shift to remote interviewing early in the pandemic. What’s more, the need for virtual or remote interviewing is here to stay. Going forward, 80% of company leaders plan to permit remote work at least part-time.
We see the same trend in our Indeed data — with an increase of more than 1,000% in employers requesting the ability to conduct interviews over video over the last year.
How Indeed innovated
To help our enterprise partners navigate these challenges, we recently launched an entirely new solution, Indeed Hiring Events. The goal is simple: Deliver quality interviews, fast.
Indeed Hiring Events automates the process of sourcing, screening and scheduling candidates into virtual or phone interviews, all in one integrated experience on Indeed. This approach means recruiters get to spend less time on manual tasks and more time engaging with quality candidates, starting with the first interview.
By connecting the dots from job search through to the interview, we’re also delivering a faster, easier experience for jobseekers. For instance, when a jobseeker expresses interest and has the required qualifications, they can immediately schedule an interview. Our research shows they appreciate it, too, with 95% favourably rating their interview experience on Indeed.
With Indeed Hiring Events, employers fill interview slates from a broad talent pool — reaching 80% of U.S. jobseekers through the combined networks of Indeed and Glassdoor. Across more than 300,000 interviews on our platform so far, employers have favourably rated over 75% of candidates interviewed.
Helping people get jobs
It’s been quite a year, to say the least. And while there’s still much uncertainty, there’s also much to look forward to as vaccinations expand and the labour market starts to rebound — which Indeed data shows is already happening in some sectors.
We’re excited to expand Indeed Hiring Events outside the U.S. this quarter and look forward to helping enterprises around the world approach hiring in an entirely new way.
Most of all, in this moment and after such a challenging year, we’re excited to offer a better way to deliver on Indeed’s long-held mission: to help people get jobs.
