​​Northern Monk Brewing Company in Leeds had 1,021 applications for one packing vacancy.

HR manager Sophie Lennon said: "When we posted the job within the first day we had a really high number of applicants. We've never seen that before.

"We advertised the job for three weeks and at the end of that time we'd had 1,021 applicants for the job which is way above what we'd usually see." - BBC

A brewing company has over a thousand applications for one packing job.

We are seeing 180 applicants per role advertised by Aspire and that number is rising rapidly.

One of the key concerns is how do we ensure we respond to everyone and treat them with respect, fairly, and equally. In reality, it only takes a couple of minutes to read a CV, so based on 180 applicants you have to commit to 6 hours of scanning CVs.Then the problem starts - how do you choose when you will undoubtedly have many applications that look similar? Shortlisting will suddenly take much longer.

How many will you have to interview? Frankly, it's going to be difficult to keep the number of 1st interviews to a reasonable level as you actually know so little about the applicant. All you have is their CV. If you asked for a cover letter then you can double the amount of time it will have taken to just do the initial sift.

Then what? Telephone interviews to try and get the number down to a manageable size. How long will that take, 20 minutes an interview, how many candidates, 10% of the applicants - 18? That's another 6 hours of telephone interviews. As they won't all happen back to back this is going to take days. What about your day job?

Then you can start your face to face interviews (virtually in this era).

You can see the original article here - BBC