Modernizing Talent Acquisition: Enhancing Efficiency and the Applicant Experience

For any given job opening, an employer will receive hundreds of applications. Multiply that by the number of open recs at any given time, which could be dozens or even hundreds, and you have an impossible task. Use this number for reference: In 2024, the global power management company Eaton Corporation hired 9,000 new employees across the US and Canada alone.

Recruiting teams are doing more with less, says Steve Bartel, founder and CEO of recruiting platform GEM. “Thousands of GEM customers and teams are a lot smaller than they were a few years ago. Recruiters are managing 56% more recs. Recruiting teams are getting about 3x the applicants compared to a few years ago. In fact, 20% of our customers see thousands of applicants for a single role,” he said.

With too much to do and not enough people to do it, HR teams are looking to automation and artificial intelligence to help. “For a lot of administrative tasks, AI is going to be great,” said Rob Kumengi, who leads North American talent acquisition at Eaton. By automating routine parts of the job, both recruiters and candidates will have more time for human interaction. While Eaton has replaced the back-and-forth of scheduling a phone screening with a tool that lets candidates pick a time that works for them, it doesn’t replace the interview itself—that meeting is still with a human being.

Recruiters are aware that job seekers are frustrated, and that many believe their applications are sent into a void, never to be considered. With that in mind, these companies are modernizing recruitment not only in terms of the technology they use, but also in the way they facilitate human interaction with candidates.

This was the topic of discussion for a panel of senior TA leaders. During From Day One’s February virtual conference, panelists spoke about how they’re modernizing recruiting with efficiency and experience.

The last handful of years have demonstrated the importance of empathy in the workplace, and some employers are resisting the pull to sever friendly contact with applicants in the name of efficiency. For these panelists, feedback for candidates is where they were finding ways to improve connection while preserving efficiency.

Employers Asked and Applicants Answered: We Want Feedback

At telecom company Comcast, where 84% of their applicants are also customers, the candidate experience is also a matter of customer experience, says Shelly Gross, VP of talent acquisition and experience.

Comcast centralized its global talent acquisition function in the last two years, and Gross says it’s been a boon to efficiency: more agreement, less redundancy. “We’ve allowed the candidates to tell us where we could get the most experience lift for our buck,” she said, and candidates told them they want feedback.

“When we provided feedback after an interview, we were seeing overall [Net Promoter Score] swings of up to 50 points,” Gross said. “That’s just an amazing and unheard of opportunity to take advantage of.” The inverse was also true: “Where we weren’t delivering feedback, we were seeing swings into the negative 50 range.” Turns out they were providing candidate feedback just 40% of the time, so that’s where they put automation to work first, “implementing some feedback capture and delivery mechanisms for our leaders and recruiters in our ATS.”

At professional services firm Avanade, Paul Phillips, who leads global HR and talent acquisition, was having a similar experience. Given the flood of applicants, Avanade wasn’t able to respond to each one. “At a minimum, you have to be able to reply to a candidate, and it was clear that many candidates were falling by the wayside,” he said. So, he ran an engagement survey of both successful and unsuccessful candidates. “My scores were horrible,” he said, and it was because they weren’t getting any feedback.

OK, but easier said than done, right? When you have hundreds or thousands of applicants, recruiters can’t spend all their time giving notes.

Scaling Candidate Feedback

“Especially in our world,” said Kumengi. “Feedback is gold.”

And employers are finding ways to offer it. Andy Nelesen, global solutions director at talent assessment firm SHL, is one of them. “If we were going to design a hiring program for the candidate that wasn’t hired, what would that look like?”

By conducting so many psychometric evaluations, SHL learns a lot about job seekers, “and historically, we’ve only used that insight to help hiring managers and recruiters to make smarter, faster decisions on who to move forward,” Nelesen said. But SHL was forfeiting an opportunity to provide feedback to the ones who didn’t advance, “so we rolled out personalized video-based feedback for all candidates based on the results of the assessments.”

Some start the feedback early. At Avanade, Phillips is working on “social talent training,” where candidates can improve their interview technique, whether they get the job or not. “How to answer and ask great questions, how to prepare for an interview, how do you get ready for day one?”

Of course, all panelists emphasized the importance of modernizing for augmentation, not substitution. Even when AI is used to review and stack-rank applications, humans need to be heavily involved, Bartel said. “I think companies should be a little bit wary of anything that claims to replace recruiters. The technology is just not there, and I’m not sure if it’s ever going to be there, because that human touch is so, so important.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.

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