What is High-Volume Recruiting? 4 Best Strategies & Tools to Master It

Originally Published at RecruitCRM https://bit.ly/3Sd9iHK

As the name suggests, high-volume recruiting or mass hiring refers to recruiting a wide variety of candidates in a limited period.

Here, there is no specific number you could hold on to.

Such high-volume recruiters are always in a tight spot, meeting deadlines and filling multiple positions in a single day. Sometimes they can hire more than 50+ candidates for the same job type.

This makes such recruiting quite baffling and stressful at times. So, before you read any further on understanding what is high-volume recruiting, here’s some data from The New York Times on Amazon (because trust us, nobody does mass hiring better than this company):

“In 2020, Amazon had added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its workforce to more than 1.2 million people on a global level, more than 50% from what it was in 2019. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas!”

It is, however, intuitively clear that small businesses or startups do not often utilise high-volume recruiting techniques.

Sometimes placing more than ten candidates in a single day— going through the phases of sourcing, shortlisting, interviewing, and and evaluating- is not new for high-volume recruiters.

What is challenging is constantly staying on your toes, delivering consistent results and investing in the right recruitment tools.

What Are the Challenges of High-Volume Recruiting?

With high-volume recruiting comes many no-shows, interview cancellations and unprepared candidates, but what’s most interesting is how recruiters can go to any length to be successful at this.

Sometimes you get disappointed with the candidate fall-off rates and high employee turnover, but the show must go on. Hence, we’ve first identified the significant challenges for you to help resolve.

1. Loads of Applications to Choose From

Shortlisting about 50 candidates per job opening is not anything compared to 50 openings with loads of candidates in each. It’s not anything that an Excel sheet and some folders can’t sort out in the primary case. However, the latter requires sorting loads of applications and a mammoth struggle for your HR team.

2. Loss of Time

As high-volume recruitment includes going through and reviewing lots of CVs, loss of time is one of the primary demanding situations recruitment agencies need to face. A typical job opening itself receives loads of applications, so imagine having to cope with numerous such open positions for a company. The quantity is so huge that it’s impossible to address this with just a handful of recruiters in a given time period.

3. Poor Employee Branding

Why will a company trust your recruitment agency in high-volume hiring if you don’t have a strong employee brand? Let’s break it down for you. Would you buy software for your agency from a startup that has affordable pricing but no social media presence, quality website build and poor customer service or from a company that has all that it lacks, even if it means you’re spending a few extra bucks?

4. Unable to Provide Proper Candidate Experience

Recruiters will inevitably struggle in providing a good candidate experience when they’re hiring in large numbers. A good candidate experience is an essential step in your recruiting cycle and makes or breaks your employee branding.

4 Best High-Volume Recruiting Strategies

1. Refine Your Branding

Attracting new hires is all about the brand nowadays. Refining your recruiter or recruitment agency’s branding is the first step you have to take before mass hiring. Candidates are more likely to apply for jobs that have a face and a presence digitally than some company that is faceless. Recruiters might often consider this to be the last step in their high-volume recruiting cycle, but trust us, this should be your very first.

Make your recruitment business stand out by sharing pictures from your office or your work-from-home setup. Let your employees take over your Instagram or LinkedIn for a day and help your audience understand your work culture and values.

2. Take Help of Recruitment Automation

When you’re hiring in large numbers, and your entire talent acquisition process is bulky, rushed, full of complicated workflows and chaos, it will be next to impossible to succeed.

As per Inc., 67% of 400-plus recruiters have stated that recruiting has become more complicated than it was five years ago, and 62% said that it’s tougher to find top-notch candidates for their companies than it was about five years ago.

To maximize efficiency and overcome the above, recruiters will need to choose an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and a good Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) software 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, automate job alerts, parse resumes, hotlist candidates, give you insightful data on performance, and so much more. Make sure you choose the right ATS as per your agency’s needs. Automating your entire workflow, managing candidates through your CRM software, and unburdening yourself from repetitive tasks will fasten your hiring cycle and save you time and produce positive candidate feedback.
• Automate scheduling interviews with your shortlisted candidates via a separate interview scheduling software, or the most beneficial and cost-effective option would be to go for a recruiting software that offers all automation benefits in one.

Pre-hire assessments can also be used to automate the recruiting process for high volume hiring. ThriveMap, for example, is a customisable assessment tool that takes candidates through a digital “day-in-the-life” of a job. It automatically tells recruiters which candidates to prioritise in the hiring funnel and remove the need for resumes and in some instances replaces interviewing entirely.

3. Mine Your Existing Talent Database

Talent rediscovery is the process of screening applicants who had previously applied for an open role with the help of your ATS and matching them to the current positions you’re hiring for. 70% of talent that recruiters hire are made up of passive talent, candidates who aren’t currently actively searching for jobs. Thus it’s advisable to mine your existing candidate database to source such hidden gems, reducing the time of hire and other recruiting costs.

4. Work on Improving Your Candidate Experience

Skills are undeniably indispensable in an employee, just like their mindset and commitment. Ensure that you provide proper training and coaching to the new employees you’re onboarding. This is doable in high-volume recruiting when the job requires little or no experience. You’re creating a win-win situation in this process, making way for a better candidate onboarding process. Automate your interviews, simplify the job application process, keep your candidates engaged, and you’re on your way to victory.

What Are the Recruiting Tools Required When Hiring in Huge Numbers?

To maximise your performance in bulk hiring, you must look out for AI recruiting tools. It’s essential to take into consideration the industry’s most effective AI-powered recruiting software.

When using any software program for high-volume recruiting, it’s also necessary to track overall performance metrics to ensure you’re spending your money efficiently.

Relying totally on cost-per-hire is an old-fashioned approach. Using a hiring scorecard and advanced analytics can help determine how successful you are in this.

3 Important Recruitment Metrics That Recruiters Should Track

1. The Ratio of Interviews to Hires

When evaluating the ratio of interviews to hires, recruiters can be sure of the number of candidates who responded to the job offer and were hired to the ones who lay in the pipeline.

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 round.

This is essential since it may either positively or negatively affect a candidate’s view of the company.

Now, where does this fit into high-volume recruiting? This ratio tells you how many applicants you interviewed have made their way into the final recruiting stage.

Knowing this data lets you make plans for an increasingly efficient high-volume recruiting strategy from the start.

2. Source of Hire (SoH)

Tracking the Source of Hire (SoH) will help you post job ads to the most used and relevant recruiting channels. Using this recruitment metric, you can decide which job platforms, activity forums or websites are the best candidate sources for your agency.

Recruiters also can acquire this data via candidate surveys or the usage of a drop-down self-choice menu as a part of the job application even though those aren’t reliable as the candidate himself/herself is manually typing the data— something that can be biased based on their interests.

3. Time Taken to Fill a Position

The time needed to fill an open job role for a company is usually higher, and therefore, the cost involved with it also increases with time.

Thus, measuring the time required by you to hire will help you in understanding whether the recruitment method you’re utilising is effective or not. Stream your cycle with this KPI, and you’ll be able to optimise your high-volume recruiting process with ease.

In Final Words

Though high-volume recruiting is pretty challenging, it 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, right recruiting tools and keeping precise professional relationships with your candidates, you can be on your way to creating a fool-proof mass hiring strategy.