A High Volume Hiring Case Study: Improving Hiring Speed, Quality and Cost

By Linda Brenner | September 12, 2018

The Background:
This Fortune 100 organization hires over 1,000 front line, customer-facing roles each year. Unlike typical customer service roles, these incumbents are required to handle complex and unpredictable customer situations that require skills ranging from rapid problem solving to safety management. As a regular on Fortune Magazine’s “Best Place to Work”, the company attracts a great many candidates for these positions. Many, however, do not have the skills and experiences necessary to successfully complete either the comprehensive final hiring assessment or the rigorous extended training program.

The company engaged Talent Growth Advisors to provide objective expert guidance to help them:

Attract higher quality candidates
Speed and improve the screening process
Improve the percentage of those who successfully complete training
Reduce the cost of the overall effort by achieving the hiring goal sooner

Highlights of the Solution:

Analyzed candidate drop-off data throughout the on-line apply process to streamline the application and reduce drop-off.

Conducted a rapid research effort, led by an I/O PhD, to identify and validate “preferred” qualifications for the role to supplement the existing “minimum” qualifications.

Using the new and robust “preferred” qualifications:

Worked with subject matter experts to reimagine the description of the role and dramatically improve the job ad
Provided candidates with easy-to-access critical information about - and a realistic preview of - the job
Developed and inserted job-specific (scored and weighted) screening questions for candidates to complete as part of the on-line apply process. This enabled the ATS to rank candidates by most- to least-qualified, eliminating the manual work completed in the past by recruiting resources.
Improved the existing initial screening assessment.
Inserted an additional phone screen before candidates were invited to the final hiring assessment.

Results Over Prior Year – the Headlines:

Number of on-line apply fields candidates were required to complete was reduced by 75%
Number of candidates who dropped-off during the on-line apply was reduced by 44%
Number of applicants who completed the online apply process increased by 92%
Number of applicants screened automatically by the technology increased by 100%
Offer rate after the hiring event increased by 59%
Attrition during training decreased by 71%
Overall hiring process costs decreased by 17%

Client Testimonial:

“You helped us make tremendous progress in TA. The TGA team’s skills and knowledge were a huge part in getting us where we are today.”

How We Got Here:

Talent Growth Advisors was engaged by the company to conduct an end-to-end Talent Acquisition Audit across the enterprise – for high volume, hourly, professional, college and executive roles. Deliverables from that effort included recommendations that would deliver what the business needed – higher quality, faster hires. Highlights of our recommendations included differentiated hiring processes, dramatically revamped TA org design, improved technology, metrics and investment modeling.

Part of our recommendations included highlighting the opportunity to drive rapid improvements targeting this particular group of mission critical, high volume hires in advance of their next major hiring push. The company subsequently engaged TGA to design and implement those improvements, the results of which are outlined above. In addition, TGA was engaged to design the future state process design for professional hiring, the new and detailed org design for TA (including structure, role profiles, performance measures, recruiting competencies, comp ranges) and simulation-based recruiting assessments for evaluating the skills of those who wished to be part of the newly-designed organization.

Interested in learning more? Contact us and get an immediate response. You may also want to read The Market for Hourly Workers: How to Manage Decreased Supply.