Ep. 32 How to Achieve High-Volume Talent Recruiting Success

Modern Recruitment Strategies Rely on Artificial Intelligence for High-Volume Talent Recruiting

This week’s guest is Max Armbruster. Max is an expert in talent acquisition in high volumes. He is the founder and CEO of Talkpush, a leading conversational CRM for recruitment that utilizes automation to help businesses focus on finding the right talent. When utilizing modern recruitment strategies for recruiting in high volumes, it’s best to treat candidates like consumers–monitoring their changes over time and adapting the recruiting process to their evolving behaviors. Max offers best practices for how to achieve high-volume talent recruiting success at scale.

Building Software to Support Talent Acquisition

When Max began his recruiting career he quickly identified the challenges recruiters faced and began developing ways to increase efficiencies and success rates throughout the hiring process. He first purchased human resources recruiting software 15 years ago, utilizing technology to assist in his recruiting strategy. Building on his experiences with that platform, three years later he began developing his own recruiting software for internal use. Eventually, after tweaking and improving the system, his entrepreneurial journey began when he started selling the recruitment program. He is committed to building software to help recruiters use intuitive tools to improve outcomes and expand their talent acquisition pool. This organic evolution from recruiter to talent management software developer is grounded in Max’s own experiences and knowledge enabling him to address the needs recruiters face in an ever-evolving hiring world.

 What is High-Volume Recruiting?

In years past, high-volume recruiting used to focus on hourly workers and temp workers–think food and beverage sector, transportation workers, and the like. In recent years, however, an under-looked part of the talent acquisition space has gained prominence through the use of high-volume recruiting technologies to address a variety of hiring situations. High-volume recruiting exists in many companies through graduate hiring, retail and hospitality, seasonal staffing, the BPO sector, and other service industries that manage high numbers of candidates. Companies that hire more than 1,000 people for the same job or job type on an annual basis experience this type of high-volume recruiting.

The Evolution of High-Volume Recruiting Over the Past Decade

High-volume recruiting has experienced significant growth over the past 10 years, especially from process and technology standpoints. With so many options in the marketplace, there are myriad opportunities for companies to evolve beyond Excel spreadsheets and a multitude of staffing providers to help fill their hiring funnel. Many companies have embraced their roles as digital marketers and own the digital recruiting journey from acquisition to onboarding. They employ digital tools to manage everything from the very first ad displayed on a job board or on social media to communicating with new employees throughout the onboarding process. Candidate behaviors are changing and digital tools help recruiters adapt with data-driven processes for assessing and improving hiring metrics. Efficient and strategic high-volume hiring processes can exponentially increase outcomes when screening and shortlisting candidates.

Modern Digital-Marketing Approach to High-Volume Recruiting

Recruiters looking to fill positions ideally want to follow the shortest path to a qualified candidate. To put it simply, recruiters look for candidates who have the right qualifications and are available now, so they can make an offer. Marketers, thinking in larger numbers, can have a funnel with a high ratio of 1,000 leads to 1, and the technologies in place offer methodologies that empower them to handle these large volumes in more efficient ways than if they were operating everything manually.

Looking at recruiting from a marketing standpoint can also mean talking to candidates who don’t know they’re candidates yet. They’re individuals who are browsing and considering options, looking to be inspired. Recruiters as marketers can embrace these opportunities and inspire potential job seekers to consider a career with their company. Digital marketing automation tools can help encourage candidates to consider careers and companies they may not otherwise have pursued.

Technology Platforms That Support Personalized High-Volume Hiring

There is a changing landscape of technology platforms to aide in digital marketing recruitment campaigns. Traditionally, job boards were a key component of reaching job seekers in high numbers. Twenty years ago, Monster dominated the field, 10 years ago it was Indeed. Now social media is the place to go to reach a large audience. The new technology integration platforms of today are dominated by Indeed, LinkedIn, Google Talent Cloud, Facebook, and the rising prominence of TikTok.

Indeed and LinkedIn offer large audiences, but Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are particularly effective among the younger portion of the population with innovative offerings such as TikTok’s video resumes. Recruiters that activate these channels find a gold mine for talent. 

Utilizing Tools to Personalize the Message

One of the pillars of digital marketing today is a personalized approach to messaging. This approach extends to recruiting, enabling recruiters to create a personalized experience that connects potential candidates with businesses.

The platforms allow users to target the message to certain populations through demographic segmentation, location, and preferences. Through this type of persona marketing, recruiters can, for example, design an ad for mothers that focuses on the benefits for working mothers at their company. Or they can tailor their messaging to students or individuals in the middle of their career looking for a career change. The key is to assess the talent pool and identify a handful of personas that can be targeted at scale. Then build high-volume hiring campaigns around those personas, addressing them with personalized messages as if talking one-on-one with them but actually talking to thousands of people through Messenger, SMS, etc.

It’s essential to have appropriate technology and tools like an applicant tracking system in place so that after these conversations are started recruiters know the names of potential candidates and their other details within the context of what was discussed.

After utilizing persona marketing strategies, recruiters can segment their audiences into multiple personas to begin personalized conversations with potential candidates. Once those leads are generated and the conversations have begun, conversational AI (or chatbot) is beneficial for sending personalized messages and conversations that take on human personalities. Using conversational AI, recruiters can talk to candidates based on where they’re at in their job-seeking journey. Have they decided what they want? Have they completed a first interview? Are they at the onboarding stage? To use conversational AI with impact, it’s important to recognize the candidate’s status, read their intentions, and deliver the information they want through well-designed, simulated human conversations. There are also hybrid options in which candidates interact partly with a chatbot and partly with a human, converting to a phone conversation with a recruiter after the process is initiated through conversational AI.

Engaging candidates through modern digital marketing techniques can be playful and can communicate selling points along with screening questions. Chatbots that live on messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and the likes deliver more than just text, supplementing words with gifs, images, and videos to enrich the experience. Conversational AI can create text and video at a speed beyond what a human is capable of, making for high-volume interactions.

For example, in the days leading up to a candidate’s first day on the job, conversational AI can provide them personalized messages about facilities, work life, and other insights into what life will be like when they begin working. This would be challenging for a recruiter to provide in high volumes without the use of digital solutions.

High Volume Recruitment in Action

iQor’s chatbot, named Qori, offers a great example of how to use conversational AI with a personality to engage in productive conversations with candidates. A number of individuals have shared their journeys through #iQorianStories on Facebook and other social media outlets. They discuss their experiences coming into the BPO sector from a variety of backgrounds. Some were motivated financially in an effort to help their families, some left industries with slowed growth.

Digital marketing and high-volume recruiting can inspire people through stories that prompt them to follow a page, listen to a voice and then remember those stories when they are deciding on their next career move. iQor’s #iQorianStories highlight individuals seeking quality employment in a professional services environment and how these opportunities helped transform their lives. This is a good example of using social media to generate a larger talent pool than you would have access to simply by posting a job announcement on a talent board.

What Max Does for Fun

Pandemic life has rooted Max in front of the webcam for hours on end. As soon as he switches off the camera, he likes to go out and exercise in the fresh air. He used to exercise two to three times a week. As COVID changed the nature of his work environment, he ramped up his exercise routine and now participates in sports every day. When he’s not swimming, he’s playing squash which better equips him for ongoing video calls. Squash is his favorite–providing an outlet for him to scream, hit balls, and let it all out!

Learn more about iQor’s digital customer experience capabilities.