Hiring teams | What lessons can be learnt from Future Talent teams?

Rewind to January 2020. The majority of Experienced Hire opportunities were posted on a selection of relevant job boards alongside the company website in the hope that enough applicants would put their names in the hat.

It was a process which was open to subjectivity and bias, but which worked well when managing small numbers of applications. Only a handful of organisations had started to introduce a more holistic, immersive, objective and consistent recruitment process for their lateral hiring.

We are now operating in a very different world. As unemployment rises, huge numbers of people are applying for each opportunity, which in themselves are few and far between. The result – organisations are experiencing unprecedented volumes of applications. Assessing each one fairly and providing a first-class candidate experience is proving difficult. According to jobs website CV library, a single paralegal vacancy in August attracted 4,298 applications; typically, the recruiters would have expected no more than a handful. This is one example but there are many many more across all sectors and geographies.

Experienced hire recruiters are increasingly looking to Future Talent teams to better understand how to deal with high levels of applications. They need to feel confident and fully accountable to the decisions that they are making, and so processes need to be more scientific and robust. As experts in Future Talent recruitment for the past 20 years, we have some strong recommendations that we believe could be adopted by lateral hiring teams to support with some of these issues.