Executive Insights

Optimize Volume Hiring

The Supply Chain Approach to Improved Performance


Guy Gauvin

Optimize Volume Hiring: The Supply Chain Approach to Improved Performance
By Guy Gauvin, EVP of Global Services, Taleo

The hiring process in a small operation is frequently a one-on-one process. But in large enterprises with dozens to hundreds of branches, stores, or offices, that process simply does not scale. Your operations may suffer from high turnover and low productivity. But analyzing the variability in process and performance becomes complex.

Just like in any supply and demand relationship, a supply needs to match the demand in three key areas: volume, time and quality. In the talent management world, there are severe consequences if these are not met including high employee turnover rates and extraneous costs.

Supply chain management has been dealing with these issues for years in order to establish a process that applies your best practice criteria across your enterprise. Taking a supply chain approach is your solution for consistent success.

Apply Supply Chain Principles

Effective talent management can be simplified by applying supply chain principles. To achieve success in high volume hiring, you need to establish consistent best practices that scale to satisfy the needs of the enterprise. The consequences of this will be a higher quality hire, a reduction in turnover, and increase in retention. Focus on these key areas:

  1. Establish Consistent Automated Processes
    Automated processes eliminate manual steps by key personnel on non-value added tasks. Automation also increases efficiency by enabling more tasks to be completed within a shorter time. It has been proven that best practices and technology combine to create immediate value through automated talent management and staffing processes.


  2. Reduce Cycle Times, Keep All Parties in Sync
    Integrating your talent supply chain reduces cycle times. Workflow management synchronizes tasks, information, and status between candidates, recruiters, and managers. The role of each contributor is supported for maximum effectiveness. Managers are instantly notified when a top candidate is identified and requisitions are pushed to recruiters immediately upon approval. Action triggers eliminate the need for manual intervention.


  3. Identify Higher Quality Candidates
    With a systematic talent management process including assessment, you identify and acquire higher quality candidates. Improving the match rate between job requirements, competencies, and other candidate factors delivers more successful hires in larger volumes. Integrated sourcing tools feed better candidates in a pipeline to meet changing demand.

See Bottom Line Results

For many organizations, savings are proportional to size and volume. Measured process yields increases to the bottom line. Companies also cite increased productivity from higher quality employees. Clients report a total return on investment in as little as one quarter following implementation.

Leading global companies in financial services, retail, and hospitality use talent management and supply chain principles from our services organization to meet their volume hiring needs for call centers, branches, stores, and hotels. They experience impressive results, including:

  • Dramatic impact on revenues and costs in the millions.
  • Reduction in hiring cycle times of 70 percent.
  • Reduction in cost per hire of 50 percent.
  • Increased retention of up to 15 percent.
  • Shorter new hire time to contribution.

With an understanding of supply chain systems, you can apply those principles to high volume hiring. The combination of Internet technology, focused assessments, and talent process automation has proven to deliver substantial value.


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