Messy spreadsheets, tight timelines, hundreds of applications, and interview no-shows – these are just a few challenges companies face while hiring. Now 10X the magnitude of these problems, and that’s what high volume hiring brings to the table.
The hiring team deals with thousands of applications. At the same time, they need to create an optimal candidate experience to maintain brand reputation.
A few errors here and there could result in a massive waste of time, money, and effort.
This is why having a high volume hiring strategy is so important. In this guide, we’ll touch upon everything you’ll need to build one.
What is high volume hiring?
High volume hiring or high volume recruiting involves hiring a large number of individuals over a short period of time. This form of hiring is often prevalent in hospitality, retail, contact centres, consumer brands, and corporates.
For example, when it expands its services to a new location, Amazon may opt for a high volume hiring of delivery personnel.
High volume hiring often involves balancing speed with the quality of hires. This is why companies often use a structured process, applicant tracking systems, and AI to automate activities and avoid huge costs.
When to engage in high volume hiring?
You don’t need to go through the costly endeavor of subscribing to 10 different tools or setting up a detailed process to hire 5 people across two teams. Here are five situations when you actually need to enter the high volume hiring arena.
High turnover rates
Some industries and fields see higher turnover rates than normal. For example, the leisure and hospitality industry observes a 79% turnover rate. This high turnover often means a lot of vacancies to fill on an immediate basis. Otherwise, this could hamper customer service and tarnish your brand’s reputation.
More entry-level requirements
Entry-level jobs often require fewer skills and are thus very competitive. If you are in an industry where there are more entry-level positions, you need high volume hiring to attract a large number of applicants.
Company expansion or project increases
Think of a construction business needing more workers for a new site project. Or a consulting firm expanding rapidly and taking on more projects. Both of these situations call for hiring more people in a short span of time to keep operations running smoothly.
High volume recruiting ensures that existing employees are not overburdened and customer satisfaction is maintained.
Seasonal demand fluctuations
Many industries deal with an ebb and flow of demand. For example, gifting and ecommerce companies see a surge in interest and sales before the holiday season. To cater to this demand, they need additional delivery personnel, customer support representatives, and administrative facilitators.
Challenges of high volume hiring
Hiring a large number of employees across positions is no small task. You’ll be faced with challenges on the way. By being aware of these potential roadblocks, you can make plans to avoid them.
Attracting the right candidates
75% of employers report they are finding it difficult to fill roles. The talent shortage is real, and even though you might get thousands of applicants, the question remains – How many of them are qualified for the role?
To attract the right candidates, you need your job posting to be powerful. Apart from the basic details, you can add a section on “What’s it like to work for us?”. Here’s how Grow and Convert displays employee testimonials on their job application page.
Managing a large volume of applicants
The number of applications in high volume hiring can overwhelm you. You need to review, screen, and qualify a lot of applicants. With different resume formats and possibly different ways of applying, you may get lost in a sea of data.
One solution is to add a short assessment in the first stage of the application or to use software that rules out resumes that are not a good fit for the role.
Scaling recruitment operations
You need strong systems, technology, and personnel to make quick hiring decisions. This also involves onboarding temporary personnel to handle admin activities. Some businesses also prefer hiring agencies to manage the first few stages of the recruiting process.
Without sufficient scaling of recruitment operations, you’ll face bottlenecks and hurdles, resulting in delays and inefficient hiring.
Avoiding hiring bias
Hiring bias is real. And recruiters accept it.
To overcome this, Leang Chung, a career and leadership coach, suggests:
“Design and consistently implement a structured recruiting operations process. This will ensure that every candidate flows through the hiring process following the same steps. Everyone in the process understands the role they play, and interviewers stick to the same questions and methodology for evaluating candidates. Unconscious bias increases when these standards are missing from the hiring process.”
Another step you can take is to impart knowledge about hiring biases so recruiters can recognize and avoid them. Here’s an infographic you can refer to.
Balancing speed with accuracy
If you are looking to fill vacant positions in your company, time is of the essence. Half-baked plans and faulty decision-making processes can unnecessarily delay decisions or, worse yet, result in the wrong hires.
A simple solution is to invest time at the start. Get clarity on these questions:
1. What skills are we looking for? How do we find out if the candidate has those skills?
2. How will we weigh candidates against each other? Can we create a scoring system?
3. What is most important to us for this role?
4. Can we set up a pre-hire assessment that replicates the role the person will play?
Here’s a Twitter thread you can check out to make quick and effective hiring decisions.
Managing candidate experience
To attract talent, you need to invest in creating great experiences for candidates. In fact, 77% of candidates who have a negative overall experience share it with their personal networks. One wrong move could lead to candidates badmouthing you on platforms like LinkedIn, and the damage is almost irreparable.
To avoid this, focus on small factors like having clear job descriptions, ensuring an easy application process, maintaining regular communication, and delivering a good interview experience.
Above all, always inform candidates if they are not selected. Even a generic message goes a long way.
8 best strategies for high volume hiring
Below are some practical strategies that you can use to efficiently recruit and onboard a large number of employees.
1. Start with a clear recruitment process and timeline
Pushbacks and delays are common in hiring. However, when hiring on a large scale, these costs can easily pile up. Thankfully, there’s a way out. Lay out a plan at the start.
This involves:
- Finalizing the job description
- Picking the sourcing channels
- Setting the criteria for initial screening
- Deciding on assessment tests (if any)
- Strategizing the number of interview rounds
- Noting the interview process
- Deciding who will be responsible for what at each stage
Once the plan is set, break it down in a particular timeline. For example, 7 days of open applications, initial screening by AI tool in 2 days, followed by a week of interviews.
💡Pro-tip: Consider past hiring data to set durations so there are no unnecessary changes in your timeline.
2. Utilize Programmatic Job Advertising (PJA)
Programmatic Job Advertising (PJA) involves using technology to buy, place, and optimize job ads across different online platforms.
Instead of your hiring team approaching different platforms, asking for their rates, and finalizing a platform, PJA takes care of all these steps. All you need to do is design the advert, register on a PJA platform, specify the target audience, and let the platform handle everything for you.
PJA saves time by researching all the advertising sources to point out the channels where you’ll attract the right set of eyes. This ensures you get actual employees, not just a high number of applications.
3. Invest in technology and automation
One sure-shot way to reduce time-to-hire is incorporating automation and AI into your high volume recruitment process.
Think of this. 75% of the resumes one gets through a high volume job posting are unqualified. Even if you spend a few minutes skimming through thousands of these resumes, you waste hundreds of hours.
Talent management software like Peoplebox provides AI-powered resume screening to reduce applicant review time by 90%. The software provides you with each applicant’s strengths, weaknesses, and a related score.
You can use this score to move candidates to the next stage of the process. Many interview management platforms like GoodTime allow you to schedule interviews easily without email’s back-and-forth communication. For example, Pinterest registered 50% time savings with time to hire by reducing clicks to schedule interviews from 40 to less than 10.
4. Optimize sourcing by using diverse channels
With PJA, your job adverts will find a home on different online platforms. But even then, you’re missing out on an important channel – employee referrals. If you have thousands of employees in your organization, this channel can work wonders.
The best part? Referral hires are 40% more likely to be retained after a year than non-referral hires.
Scott Gorlick, previous head of Strategic projects at Uber, talked about how Uber went from being in just a few cities to over a hundred in two years. The biggest problem they had was growing their limited pool of drivers.
Apart from going where the drivers were and cold calling them, they used a referral strategy.
Another company that has successfully reaped the advantages of a great referral program is Salesforce. Almost 50% of new hires at Salesforce come from referrals from their current employees.
Apart from the referral bonus they provide, the company hosts Recruitment Happy Hours, where employees can invite friends they want to refer. This informal and fun way to get to know candidates and interact with them goes a long way in building relationships for future job applications.
5. Provide a clear and thorough job description
A clear job description brings the right set of applicants. Here are tips on what it should include and how to write one:
- Have a clear job title. Avoid using words like ‘rockstar, ninja’ and other cliches.
- Don’t get wordy with your job descriptions. Break them into responsibilities, required qualifications, benefits, salary range, and a short about-us section. Here’s a great example from Canva.
- When writing the responsibilities section, avoid generic descriptions. Articulate what the person will be doing on the job. Here’s how Litera showcases what a day in the life of a CSM at Litera looks like.
- Avoid using gender-specific language and biases. Ryan Whitacre, partner at executive search firm Bridge Partners, says, “Recognize that you will have bias. No matter how evolved you believe yourself to be or how hard you try, it isn’t possible to exist without some sort of bias. Your bias, though, will be different from another person’s bias. So have other people take a look at it.”
6. Keep the application process short for quick screening
Job seekers are likely applying to multiple job postings daily. If your form consists of 10 questions that take significant time, you lose out on qualified candidates. Statistics say the same. 72% of applicants who gave neutral or poor ratings to a job application experience blamed a lengthy process with too many requirements as the main factor.
This can be a costly error when you’re engaging in high volume recruiting.
Instead of taking your candidates to multiple platforms or portals, have a simple form where you ask for their resume, key details, and a couple of questions. Many job portals have Auto-fill option that automatically fills basic details.
7. Focus on candidate engagement
With so many tasks on your list, you might turn a blind eye to candidate engagement. However, if you want to avoid interview no-shows and a drop in the offer acceptance rate, it should be a priority.
One of the most important factors is communication at each stage. 54% of candidates abandon the recruitment process due to poor communication from the recruiter. To ensure communication at each stage, you can create triggered email sequences using tools like Mailchimp and EngageBay.
Many companies even clarify how long each stage of the process will take, what they can expect, and tentative timelines.
As employing chatbots is easier than before, you can use them to answer questions about the role. Here’s how IKEA used chatbots to improve their online application process and double the number of monthly application volumes.
8. Communicate company culture
A Workbuzz study found that 45% of employees and business leaders would rank a “great” culture as the top factor in choosing a job. Hiring managers should take this into consideration while creating job descriptions and postings.
There are many ways to do this:
- Showcase employee testimonials on your careers page and postings
- Highlight your vision and values
- Display initiatives like company retreats, flexible working opportunities, or paid time off.
- Share employee stories on social media
- Talk about causes and movements you support. For example, sustainability or inclusion initiatives.
Important high volume hiring metrics to track
How do you assess the effectiveness of your high volume recruiting process? One way is by using the right metrics. Here are seven high volume hiring metrics you should track and analyze.
1. Interview-to-hire ratio
The interview-to-hire ratio indicates the number of interviews conducted for one successful hire. It shows the efficiency of your mass hiring process.
A high ratio indicates that you are conducting a lot of interviews to find a suitable candidate, signaling time and resource inefficiencies. You might need to optimize your screening or evaluation process.
A low ratio may indicate that you are too particular in your screening process and might miss out on good talent.
2. Time-to-fill
This metric tracks the average time to fill a position(s) from the time the job was first posted. In high volume hiring, where speed is a priority, the lower this time period, the better. This metric gives you insights into how effective your processes are.
It also ensures that positions don’t stay vacant for a long time in your company, maintaining team productivity and a competitive edge in the market.
3. Offer acceptance rate
The offer acceptance rate measures the percentage of job offers accepted by candidates compared to the total number of offers made.
A high acceptance rate shows that your offer is attractive to candidates. It shows your compensation, culture, job responsibilities, and overall opportunity are positively showcased to candidates.
A low acceptance rate denotes issues with job description, culture, or compensation.
4. Candidate experience metrics
This metric shows whether candidates consider their overall experience applying, interviewing, and communicating with your company satisfactory.
It covers factors like ease of application, job description clarity, interview scheduling and professionalism, and consistent communication across stages.
You can measure this by sharing anonymous easy-to-fill surveys after interviews. A good candidate experience increases brand reputation and impacts the offer acceptance rate.
5. Cost per hire
Cost per hire shows the total expenses for filling job vacancies. This includes costs like job advertising charges, agency fees, assessment test fees, tool subscriptions, and your team’s time spent on the high volume hiring process.
Calculating this metric can help you understand the financial implications of mass recruitment and ways to optimize costs.
6. Quality of hire
You don’t want to fill a position temporarily. Retention is often the goal for most hiring teams. Quality of hire metric evaluates the performance of new hires over time. It involves measuring metrics like performance ratings, the impact of new hires on business goals, and retention rates.
While it takes time to measure and get data on the quality of hire, it’s an important metric to understand if your recruitment process is resulting in good, loyal talent.
7. Sourcing channel effectiveness
You posted application details on various job boards. But which channel got you the most applications? Which resulted in the best talent? Did employee referrals work better or was an online platform more effective? Channel effectiveness gives you the answers to these questions.
To calculate this, you need to measure different metrics like the number of applicants, cost per hire, and quality of hire for each channel. Based on this data, you can allocate resources to each channel for future hiring.
How to use Peoplebox for high volume hiring
Without a proper tech stack in place, hiring teams can find themselves losing time in activities like resume screening that can be easily automated. Peoplebox is a one-stop that uses AI and talent management insights to screen all inbound resumes and identify the best matches in seconds.
Reduce your applicant review time by 90% using AI-powered screening
When working on a tight hiring timeline, you don’t want to spend time on unqualified candidates. Instead of poring over thousands of resumes, use Peoplebox’s AI resume screening software.
It identifies key strengths and gaps in a candidate’s profile and gives you a recommended score. Based on this score, you can shortlist candidates for interviews. Our clients see a 90% reduction in applicant review time by using the tool.
Here’s a sneak peek into the kind of output it delivers.
Time to put your high volume hiring strategy into practice
High volume hiring comes with its own set of challenges. By following the strategies mentioned above, you can make it a pleasant experience for both the recruiters and candidates.
The most crucial part is using the right tools to streamline your processes. Whether reducing manual work or eliminating bias, these tools go a long way toward reducing time to hire and attracting the best talent.
Ready to equip your hiring team with great AI resume screening software? Subscribe to Peoplebox today.
