The quantity versus quality debate rages on in recruitment. Should you post your job advert everywhere, in the vain hope that it might be chanced upon by the person you actually want in your company, or do you carefully craft a LinkedIn invite message to the candidate you actually want? Do you bring everyone in for assessment, hoping that a few stars make their way through, or do you only invite a small percentage of all applicants to the interview and testing stage. In both instances, it can be tempting to do the former, thinking that volume is the best way to go as it will eventually throw up the needed hire – right? Additionally, for huge firms that require an influx of new talent each year, recruiting at volume is often inescapable so it can be tempting to case the net as wide as possible in order to get the best incoming talent.

However, this brings a plethora of problems with it. Dr. Alan Bourne, CEO and Founder of Sova Assessment understands this. “Volume recruiting has historically been problematic,” he says. “[Some of the biggest issues are] applicant numbers exceeding way beyond capacity, clunky and fragmented assessment techniques plagued with the potential for inherent bias, as well as a lack of measurable markers to assess the success of a hire in relation to delivering back against business objectives.”

It begs the question, about what can be done to ensure that just because you’re recruiting en masse top talent isn’t put off because you don’t offer the correct, or a poor, candidate experience? In Hays’ What Workers Want Report 2018, research, from almost 15,000 responses, found that almost two-thirds of applicants had been deterred from completing their application because of a poor recruitment experience. Indeed, almost half of candidates say they didn’t go after a role because of a negative first impression. One of the best ways to mitigate against this is, according to Bourne, is to understand the importance of the employee and see the recruitment process as an extension of the employee offering. “It is crucial that employer brand is central, not incidental to the recruitment process,” he explains.

Yet, in the modern recruitment landscape – where contracting, gig economy and temporary arrangements are increasing in use – ensuring that all candidates get a positive experience and are properly assessed, regardless of how they might engage with your organisation, is difficult. This can impact an organisation’s long-term standing with top talent. Peter Cheese, Chief Executive at CIPD, the UK’s largest HR body, notes that when a business has an acute need for talent it can often turn to procurement to fill the gaps – which means critical parts of the traditional recruitment process are bypassed altogether.

“In the past, if we had a gap we might’ve thought ‘let’s get a contractor in and bring them in via procurement’,” Cheese says. Yet, he believes this indents on an individuals experience – “If I’m a contractor for six months at a company and am treated badly and never included in anything, no induction and no one cares what I do; of course I’m going to reflect that to other people,”- as the Hays’ survey notes, could turn them off in the long run. He believes HR, and resourcing, need to think about the candidate experience that those on non-full-time contracts will be getting. The implication being that top talent is deterred from potentially applying for future work at the firm because it wasn’t treated well. “We have to think about this stuff more strategically and more holistically. These are strategic issues that have to change today and how we understand these different models within organisations,” he adds.