High-volume recruiting can be an uphill battle, either with a tight hiring timeline or with a flood of applicants (maybe both!).
Consider this: while the average job posting attracts 59 applicants, high-volume recruiting positions can receive over 250 applications. Sorting through countless resumes, conducting numerous screening calls, and managing the sheer labor-intensiveness of it all can quickly become overwhelming, time-consuming, and costly, leaving everyone involved with a less-than-ideal experience.
If this sounds familiar, then it’s time for you to try out these game-changing strategies to make your high-volume recruiting efforts stress-free, efficient, and highly effective.
Get ready to revolutionize your approach and achieve outstanding results.
What are the challenges of high-volume recruiting?
With high-volume recruiting comes many job applications, no-shows, interview cancellations, and unprepared job seekers.
Sometimes you get disappointed with the candidate fall-off rates and high employee turnover, but the show must go on. So, here’s how you and your hiring team can approach these common challenges.
1. Managing multiple candidates
The number of applications received in high-volume recruiting can be overwhelming. Each qualified candidate needs to be evaluated, interviewed, and informed about their application status.
This multiplies the recruiter’s workload and makes it difficult to ensure that the right candidate receives an efficient and fair process. Implementing structured evaluation techniques in the application process and using recruitment technology to streamline candidate communication can significantly improve your management abilities.
2. Time constraints
Mass recruitment often means tight deadlines. The challenge here is managing all the stages of recruitment; job advertising, candidate sourcing, screening, interviewing, job offers, and onboarding within a limited timeframe.
To manage this, you can use recruiting software to speed up tasks like resume screening and scheduling interviews. Framing a strategic recruitment plan with clear timelines can help keep the process on track.
3. Poor candidate experience
With the rush to fill positions, it’s easy to forget about the candidates’ experience. You need to ensure that each applicant, regardless of their outcome, has a positive experience.
This involves preparing attractive job ads and career page, maintaining clear communication, providing timely updates, and giving constructive feedback. A positive candidate experience enhances your employer brand and can lead to better-quality applications in the future, reducing employee turnover.
4. Maintaining the quality of hire
When there’s pressure to fill many positions quickly, there’s a risk that quality might be compromised for quantity. It’s important to ensure the talent acquisition process remains thorough and that each candidate is properly verified, even when dealing with large volumes.
You can maintain quality by conducting background checks, implementing robust screening processes, and using data-driven methods to assess candidates.
5 best high-volume recruiting strategies
1. Leverage #RecTech
When you’re dealing with a bulk of applications, as is common in high-volume recruiting, using technology effectively becomes a game-changer.
To maximize efficiency and overcome the above challenges, you must choose an applicant tracking system to take care of high-volume hiring.
An ATS will help you build a strong candidate pipeline by automatically sourcing candidates for the correct positions, automating job alerts, parsing resumes, hotlisting candidates, giving you insightful data on performance, and so much more. Make sure you choose the right ATS as per your agency’s needs.
But don’t just stop at an ATS. There’s a whole world of tech tools out there.
AI-powered chatbots can help with the initial screening by answering common queries and gauging candidates’ interest levels. Leverage the use of ChatGPT for your recruiting process.
2. Build a strong employer brand
In the world of recruiting, the image you project to potential candidates is paramount. This is your employer brand. It’s what differentiates you from other employers and helps attract high-quality candidates.
When you’re in a high-volume recruiting scenario, you want candidates to choose you over others. You must showcase your company’s culture, values, and benefits to do this. You can use your company’s website, social media channels, and even offline events to project a positive image of your workplace.
But remember, authenticity is key. The image you project should represent your company, as this will help attract candidates who are a good fit for your organization.
3. Provide a great candidate experience
Every candidate who interacts with your company, whether selected or not, should have a positive experience. This might sound challenging when you’re dealing with high volumes, but with some planning, it’s achievable.
This could involve keeping candidates informed about the recruitment process, providing timely updates, or giving constructive feedback post-interview. Each of these actions shows respect for the candidate’s time and effort and leaves them with a favorable impression of your company.
A positive candidate experience enhances your employer brand and can lead to better-quality applications in the future.
4. Focus on retention
Recruiting is not just about filling positions; it’s about filling them with people who stay, grow, and contribute to the company. This is why focusing on employee retention is so important, especially in a high-volume recruiting scenario.
A solid onboarding program can play a pivotal role here. The onboarding process should help new hires understand their role and responsibilities, introduce them to their team and the company culture, and provide them with the resources they need to perform their job effectively. Regular check-ins, particularly during the early stages, can also help new employees feel supported and valued.
Remember, the aim is not just to hire in bulk but to hire employees who stay.
5. Utilize talent rediscovery
Talent rediscovery is the process of revisiting past applicants in a company’s ATS to fill new open roles.
This typically involves using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning tools to search and sort through a database of past applicants to find suitable candidates for current openings.
Rediscovering talent from past applicants means you already have some basic information about the candidates and possibly some initial assessments. This can speed up the recruitment process significantly as opposed to starting from scratch.
Talent rediscovery ensures you are not missing out on any potential candidates who have previously shown interest in your organization and can significantly speed up the hiring process.
What are the tools required to master high-volume recruiting?
1. AI recruiting software
AI recruiting software is taking the recruitment world by storm. These tools leverage AI and machine learning to automate a wide array of recruitment tasks.
They can screen resumes and match candidates to job descriptions based on skills, experience, and qualifications, reducing the manual effort of sifting through large applications.
This software can also predict candidate success based on historical data and behavioral analysis, helping recruiters make more informed decisions.
Their ability to learn and improve over time makes AI tools stand out, making them more accurate and efficient. These tools are particularly useful in high-volume recruiting scenarios where the sheer number of applications can be overwhelming.
2. Social recruiting tools
Social media hiring has changed the hiring landscape in many ways, offering many tools and platforms for sourcing talent.
Platforms like LinkedIn Recruiter have become indispensable for many recruiters. With a vast user base of professionals across various industries and levels, this tool allows you to tap into this pool of talent effectively. You can perform advanced searches using specific keywords related to skills, job titles, and locations.
For example, if you’re hiring a ‘Java Developer’ in ‘San Francisco,’ you can input these parameters and instantly get a list of potential candidates.
Then there’s Twitter, which, with the right hashtag strategy, can increase the visibility of your job postings. It’s also a great platform for showcasing your company culture, engaging with potential candidates, and building your employer brand.
In essence, social recruiting tools, when used strategically, can significantly augment your high-volume recruiting efforts, helping you attract and engage with high-quality candidates more effectively and efficiently.
3. Cold email software
Cold emailing is an effective way to directly reach out to qualified candidates using email software like ActiveCampaign or ClickFunnels who may not be actively job searching.
Cold email tools help automate and scale this process immensely. AI Email Tool helps you reach out to your potential candidates through personalized emails at scale. They also send timely follow-up emails to non-responders.
It also tracks opens, clicks, and replies, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of campaigns. Features like sequencing prevent overwhelming recipients with too many emails at once.
3 important recruitment metrics that you should track
1. Interview-to-hire ratio
The interview-to-hire ratio is a valuable recruitment KPI that measures the number of interviews conducted relative to the number of hires made. In high-volume recruiting, where efficiency is crucial, tracking this ratio provides insights into the effectiveness of the interview process and the selection criteria being used.
A high ratio may indicate that the screening or evaluation process needs refinement. It suggests that a large number of interviews are being conducted before finding a suitable candidate. This can lead to time and resource inefficiencies. On the other hand, a low ratio may indicate that the screening process is too stringent, potentially leading to missed opportunities to identify top talent.
This ratio can help you decide whether or not your interview process is too long, too quick, or too repetitive and boring. Over time, hiring managers can also note how the candidates and recruiters behave in their interview rounds.
2. Quality of hire
While the goal in high-volume staffing is often to fill multiple positions efficiently, maintaining the quality of hires is paramount for long-term hiring success.
This metric focuses on evaluating the performance and impact of candidates hired through the recruitment process. It takes into account factors such as job performance, productivity, cultural fit, and retention rates.
By tracking the quality of hires over time, you can identify patterns and trends in candidate success. This information helps them assess the effectiveness of their selection criteria, sourcing channels, and candidate assessment methods.
3. Time taken to fill a position
The time needed to fill or time to hire for each open role for a company is usually higher; therefore, the cost involved with it increases with time.
Measuring the time required by you to hire will help you understand whether the recruitment method you’re utilizing is effective or not. Stream your cycle with this KPI, and you’ll be able to easily optimize your high-volume recruiting process.
Reducing time-to-hire ensures that vacant positions are filled promptly by the best talent, minimizing disruptions to team productivity and maintaining a competitive edge in the market.
High-volume recruiting is pretty challenging but can be accomplished, especially with proper techniques.
By clarifying the criteria for open positions, being up-to-date, polishing your brand, getting granular with data, using the right recruiting tools, and keeping precise professional relationships with your candidates, you can create a fool-proof mass hiring strategy.
