Top Tips to Filter Hundreds of Applicants

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Inbound recruitment is a type of recruitment strategy where organisations receive job applications from potential candidates, rather than actively reach out to them. With its host of benefits such as reduced candidate acquisition costs, reduced risk of failed hires, and a decrease in the time to hire, there is no doubt that inbound recruitment remains a popular strategy.

While this saves talent acquisition teams a lot of time in having to source for candidates since they can sit back and have applications pouring in, it becomes a problem when one receives piles of talent profiles and resumes to review.

With online job boards giving a larger talent pool the option to easily apply to many job postings at a time, it can be overwhelming to filter through all applications to find the most suitable candidate.

HackerTrail has several tips to help mitigate these problems:

Top 5 Tips to Filter Hundreds of Applicants

1. Keyword Searches

Rather than go through the details of entire resume from contact details to volunteer experiences, it helps to start with keyword searches of a candidate profile. While there is still some manual filtering required, being keyword-focused helps to cut out irrelevant candidates quickly.

2. Get Additional Input from Hiring Managers

When faced with a large pool of applicants, speaking with the hiring manager can help you make quicker and better decisions on filtering out candidates. Gaining a better idea of absolute must-have skills, experiences, and requirements that a hiring manager is looking out for in a candidate, for instance, can help you sieve out irrelevant applications a lot faster and easier.

3. Stay Organised

Stay organised by eliminating duplicate applications, if possible, as well as tracking which applicants have been reviewed and what their statuses are. This prevents your team from doing double or unnecessary work when filtering through candidates.

4. Keep Your Job Postings Updated

Make sure you attract the right candidates with clear, targeted and updated job postings. With relevant keywords, requirements, and clear job descriptions, these job postings typically encourage only the most suitable and relevant candidates to apply. Start by digging into your ideal candidate profile and building job postings around that. For tips on writing a good job description, take a look at our guide here.

5. Automating Inbound Recruitment

Automating the filtering part of inbound recruitment can work wonders. Using an applicant tracking system (ATS) for instance, which helps with filtering, organising and tracking job applicants, can help take the load off filtering since the ATS can filter for candidates based on your own pre-set keywords, qualifications and requirements.

Bonus Tip: Go for Outbound Recruiting

By relying solely on inbound applicants, you may not reach passive job seekers (those who are not actively seeking but are open to better offers). And if your employer branding and recruitment marketing become weakened, there will be a lack of candidates applying to your open roles.

This is where having an outbound recruitment strategy, in addition to your inbound recruitment efforts, would be ideal.

In order to find the best and most relevant talent, you will have to find them instead rather than rely on direct applications. While outbound recruitment can be time consuming, particularly when it comes to candidate sourcing, automation and AI tools can help significantly while also bringing in more qualified candidates to your roles.

Using intelligent sourcing tools like Scout, for instance, can help to cut your sourcing time by 50% while also helping you uncover the best, most qualified passive and active candidates for your open positions.

Conclusion

Having an inbound recruitment strategy brings a lot of benefits and can be a less costly way to hire. However, when there is a huge inflow of job applicants, hours have to be spent sorting through profiles, many of which can be irrelevant or unqualified for the role.

Thankfully, there are ways to filter through hundreds of applicants, such as gaining additional input from hiring managers, or even leveraging technology to automate the inbound recruitment process. Lastly, it helps to broaden an organisation’s recruitment strategy to include both inbound and outbound recruitment.

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HackerTrail has several tips to help mitigate these problems:

Top 5 Tips to Filter Hundreds of Applicants

1. Keyword Searches

2. Get Additional Input from Hiring Managers

3. Stay Organised

4. Keep Your Job Postings Updated

5. Automating Inbound Recruitment

Bonus Tip: Go for Outbound Recruiting

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