When we talk about recruitment, it’s easy to imagine individual processes where an HR professional is tasked with filling a role and they assess a number of candidates to fill that role — but what does this look like at scale?
For some organizations, hiring needs to happen in bulk. Recruiters are tasked with high-volume hiring initiatives where they have to fill as many roles as possible to ensure the business’s success. Getting this right requires carefully choreographed processes that account for high candidate drop rates, a competitive hiring landscape, and limited recruitment resources.
In this article, we’re taking a closer look at what high-volume hiring is, as well as four best practices recruiters can leverage to improve their processes.
What is high-volume hiring?
Used interchangeably with terms like high-volume recruiting or mass hiring, it describes the process of hiring many employees within a short period of time. This is particularly common in organizations that ramp up staffing during particular seasons — like in the tourism industry — or with businesses opening a new call center or location that needs staffing.
In a high-volume recruitment process, recruiters will advertise multiple positions at a time, and evaluate various applicants as quickly as possible. Because this can be such a large task, some organizations seek outside support from recruiting agencies or RPO providers that specialize in this form of hiring.
What are the common challenges in high-volume hiring?
Like with any other form of hiring, high-volume hiring isn’t without its obstacles. Some of the key challenges that can get in the way of a high-volume recruitment strategy include the following:
- High-volume recruiting requires a lot of time and resources, and can easily become an inefficient process
- It requires the ability to review quality of candidates at scale, which can make it hard to pinpoint the best person for a given job
- There’s a lot of competition to hire the best candidates in the market, and that requires a seamless process that moves candidates through the hiring journey quickly
- For industries like tourism and hospitality, there’s currently a limited market of skilled candidates, making it harder to hire candidates at scale
So, what can you do to make your high-volume hiring process as effective as possible?
Withe makes high volume hiring more effective with virtual hiring events and on-demand video interviews
1. Prioritize the candidate experience
It’s a candidate’s market out there. People want higher wages, are more willing to change jobs sooner for better opportunities, and they expect more from their employers in terms of work-life balance and benefits. This means two things:
- Companies need to have a strong employer brand that clearly communicates their values and how employees benefit from working with them. This should be communicated often and consistently across multiple channels so that candidates have a clear understanding of who they are applying to work for.
- Recruiters need to optimize for the candidate experience, meeting candidates where they are, proactively answering common questions, and addressing their needs in the hiring process.
This second point is difficult to do at scale, granted, but it helps to have a robust understanding of your target candidate audience, including their priorities as well as how they consume and interact with information. This way, you can create semi-customized experiences that cover as much ground as possible.
The right technologies can also help here. Leveraging tools — like a streamlined mobile application that makes it easy to apply to jobs — can create a positive first impression with potential candidates.
2. Build in automation where it makes sense
Technology and automation can also provide support to your recruiters, so it’s worth introducing tools that can reduce the complexity of high-volume hiring workflows. This can include automated features or integrations in your ATS that move candidates through the recruitment process. It can also include resume parsers that use keywords and Boolean strings to find relevant candidates within large stacks of resumes. Automated communication features that rely on an archive of templated email responses can also be helpful here.
Recruitment tech should reduce your cost and time to hire, while also enabling your team to better engage candidates throughout the hiring process. That said, when evaluating a new tool, it’s important to consider how candidates will experience it. Automation should never come at the cost of human interactions or accessibility.
3. Leverage on-demand video interviews
One technology that can vastly improve high-volume hiring is on-demand video interview software. This software facilitates virtual conversations via video chat software, without necessarily having to schedule the call. As such, it can be used as scale during high-volume hiring events, allowing multiple interviewers to speak with as many candidates as possible during a given event.
As a hiring event platform, Withe offers on-demand video interview software that makes it easier than ever for recruitment teams to interview and hire at scale. With this functionality, a recruiter could host and advertise a four-hour hiring event where candidates show up and immediately have a face-to-face virtual interview with a hiring manager. This can be paired with a registration and scheduling process, so candidates can also have a set time to show up to their interview.
Offering these interactions is particularly important in a competitive market, as candidates appreciate the opportunity to speak to a real person and get a true sense of what it would be to work at the organization.
Related resource: How to implement video interviews in your volume hiring process
4. Use metrics to review performance
If you want to improve a process, it’s important to know exactly how you’re performing. Teams that use data to evaluate their high-volume recruiting efforts are better positioned to set benchmarks and targets for where they want to improve.
Some useful metrics to track include:
- Time-to-fill: Measures the time between a job being posted and a candidate accepting an offer for that role. This metric speaks to recruiting efficiency and the candidate experience.
- Source of hire: Points to what channels hires are coming from, and which channels are most effective. This can help teams make decisions around marketing spend on each channel.
- Offer acceptance rate: Identifies how many offers sent are accepted. A low acceptance rate could point to issues in compensation, employer branding, and other key areas.
- Cost-per-hire: Measures the internal and external recruiting costs in high-volume hiring initiative. Having a benchmark can help you track the performance of new tools and processes.
Using these recruitment analytics will enable a feedback loop, allowing your team to make data-driven decisions on how to optimize processes, choose new tools, and prioritize investment.
Optimizing high-volume hiring
There are a lot of moving parts in a high-volume recruitment initiative. You have to account for candidate behaviors and experiences, what your competitors are doing differently, and whether your recruiters are being used as efficiently as possible. With all of these things in play, it’s important to leverage technologies that address these pain points while reducing the burden on your team, so that they can dedicate more time to the things that are harder to control. Finding the right balance will be key to ensuring that your high-volume hiring processes are as effective as they can be.
We’re helping high-volume hiring teams get in front of candidates 82% faster. Find out how.
