Here’s what happens when you use high-volume tech alongside your existing ATS to create recruitment magic.
Your ATS? It’s an important part of your recruitment system, but let’s be real. It’s probably not cutting it when it comes to high-volume recruitment – especially as we head into peak season. In fact, using the same ATS for your corporate roles as your store-floor roles makes about as much sense as trying to drill a hole with a hammer.
Frontline recruitment needs a different tool.
When turnover is high and you need people in jobs fast – you need both speed and quality while ensuring candidates walk out with a good recruitment experience, even if they didn’t get the job.
That requires an agile tool that works well under pressure and lets you recruit on values, fit and skill. Here’s what happened when one organisation, a major Australian retailer, adopted Weirdly for frontline (outside of its existing corporate ATS).
With Weirdly as your high-volume ATS, your tech-stack gets a boost, your recruitment process goes weeks faster and you get better candidates.
This Weirdly client completely did away with resumes. Instead, candidates register into a talent pool - including their shift availability, personal information, and a simple quiz assessing work-readiness. Recruiters could then instantly and simply generate instant shortlists out of that talent pool based on location, availability and fit (aka instantly screened).
You heard right - no more job ads. Instant access to pre-screened candidates, whenever a store manager sent through a job requisition.
For candidates who scored high enough, a simple drag-and-drop into a process bucket sends an automated interview invite. Candidates book their own interview times and are automatically sent SMS reminders before their interview (as well as offered tips and training to help make it a success).
"This part of getting candidates to interview is just so slick"
This was a core part of reducing the time-to-hire, but we didn't stop there. Managing documents - Working Rights and Contracts is the other big hurdle in reducing time to hire.
This is where the next automation magic happens. Successful candidates are dropped into the next bucket in the process and automatically sent Working Rights documentation. On signing, they're moved into the next bucket where recruiters can trigger a contract to be sent (in bulk, or individually), populated with all the details specific to that store and role. Notifications are sent when Candidates and Store Managers have signed, and candidates are then moved to the last bucket in the process where they can be automatically picked up and moved into the HRIS (in this case, Success Factors) to be added to payroll and onboarded. It's hard to quantify what an impact this document management automation has had on this organisation. One member of the recruiting team claims,
"it's reduced an hours, sometimes days-long part of the process down to 5minutes."
We know bias creeps in throughout the recruitment process. Here’s a study showing bias against candidates with Asian-sounding names, for example. This one shows that when minority candidates ‘whitened’ their resumes they got more interviews.
Covering up irrelevant demographic information is a good start, but it’s not enough. If you’re still reviewing resumes as part of your blind recruiting process, your clever brains may still be able to tell a lot about a candidate. For example, you’ll probably be able to tell if English is not a candidate’s first language, even if they’re fluent and the resume is error-free. A woman’s resume also generally reads very differently from a man’s.
So, our client solved that by removing resumes from the recruitment equation altogether. By eliminating inequities and focusing less on factors like work history and education and more on values, this client has seen a dramatic increase in indigenous hires.
It’s also worked for the Fletcher’s grad programme – using a custom quiz, we whittled 600 candidates down to 50, with no demographics or resumes. The client was pretty stoked.
“The huge volume would’ve forced us to make snap judgments and inevitably bias would’ve played into that. [Using Weirdly] we ended up uncovering a whole lot of brilliant candidates who might have either not got through or not even applied for our grad programme in the first place.” – Dan Phillips, Brand Experience Manager.
When you’re dealing with high volumes, speed is key but, of course, quality also matters. Weirdly has a lot of the functionality that a traditional ATS is missing, and because it can be customised to suit business needs, it takes away the grunty, time-consuming work.
Since using Weirdly, our client has seen its hit rates almost double– that is, the number of people interviewed who were hired. That huge increase demonstrates a direct correlation between candidates' percentage fit in the assessment with the quality of hire. Don't take our word for it though, feedback from the recruiting team has confirmed it:
“[The hit rate] rose to 90% initially and now we have settled to around 70–80%,”
You want to make sure that candidates come away from your recruitment process feeling good – whatever the outcome. Why? Well, because hiring for frontline generally means you’re hiring from your community – your candidates, their friends and their families are also your shoppers. Word spreads, and so does ill will. A great candidate experience does the opposite, spreading brand loyalty.
Giving high-volume candidates a good experience with an ATS is… hard. It’s possible but the time spent can be painful. Our retail client found that pairing its ATS with Weirdly meant the great experience is built-in – with a simple interface, automation and exceptional communication.
The goodness played out in the numbers: our client was able to achieve exceptional candidate experience scores –
“We were at 8.9 out of 10 [for NXS rating].”
Weirdly is your ATS’ new best friend. It’ll save you massive amounts of time and money (yay!), remove the barriers of traditional recruitment for more quality and diverse hires (ah-mazing!!) and integrate nicely with your existing ATS (hurray!!!) The icing on the cake? You’ll deliver a better candidate experience too.
We might be a little biased, but Weirdly really can do everything, *wink**wink*. Keen to see it in action? Book in a demo now.
