He's not talking about 30k rows, he's talking about 30k people. It could easily be big data if you monitor & document their every working moment, but they probably aren't doing that so you're probably right.
1 million applications received. Say 10% of those go into some sort of evaluation process = 100k assessments/year.
Say 10% of those go through an interview panel of (on average 3 interviews) = 30k assessments/year
For 30k employees with (say on average) 2 assessments per year = 60k assessments/year.
So 1 million CVs per year on which to do some sort of evaluations, and 200k individual assessments per year. Over the past five years that roughly 6 million data points.
Since there's no hard-and-fast rule on this, that's why I called it small Big Data.
It really doesn't look like something big.