Is “high touch” recruiting really high touch if it takes weeks to personally engage a candidate?

The High Touch Recruitment Process

In a world where candidates have an increasing number of jobs available at their fingertips, a company’s brand becomes a determining factor in attracting the best talent. For a staffing firm, establishing a recruitment brand becomes even more complex and they must rely on a “high touch” approach to meet their clients’ hiring needs.

The goal of a high touch and people-focused approach is to yield a competitive advantage in engaging and ultimately hiring the best candidates.  At its core, high touch is defined as establishing a relationship with a client to understand their needs while simultaneously engaging candidates to better understand who they are. This methodology allows staffing firms to build strong relationships and place quality people in the jobs where they can excel.

The Problem: As the volume of applicants per job post continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult for staffing firms to maintain a high touch candidate approach. As a result, firms can miss deadlines, place candidates in ill-suited positions, and lose out on future contracts.

Common Concerns with Automation

There will always be reservations when technology is perceived to be replacing human interaction. In recruitment, these reservations are exacerbated by the need to maintain a people-focused and nurturing candidate experience. It is a common concern in the staffing industry that asking candidates to engage with technology before direct interaction will be a deterrent to the application process.  This concern is well-reasoned as burdening candidates upfront can lead to a significant drop-off in completed applications and may harm the brand of the firm.

Candidate Focused Automation

Despite common concerns, automation is not the enemy of high touch recruitment when implemented correctly. When a recruiter supplements their personalized approach with an automated interview tool focused on candidate experience, it allows a recruiter to communicate with a greater number qualified candidates in less time. Further, the use of automation can:

• Eliminate scheduling conflicts
• Reduce interviewer fatigue
• Promote an unbiased review process
• Facilitate collaborative review

Assessing a technology’s candidate experience means considering how candidates are initially engaged, the simplicity of the process, and most importantly the time burden, especially when implemented as a pre-screening tool.

If a candidate understands that the automated process is not there to replace human interaction, but rather to help facilitate the process; their perception of automation changes.

High Touch Automation Process

A high touch process cannot be replaced by technology, but it can be significantly improved. High touch automation does not mean the candidate is only engaging with technology. Rather, it means that a staffing firm is using technology to better understand each candidate and their specific employment needs.

With insight into a candidate’s soft skills and directly-related job experiences at the first stage of the hiring process, recruiters can review candidates more quickly. As a result, the most qualified candidates are engaged earlier in the process, allowing staffing firms to achieve a truly high touch recruitment process.