With the stiff competition in the talent market, hiring the right talent, especially at scale, is a challenging task. It requires tremendous effort, time, resources, and budget to fit a specified time frame.

Hiring teams spend hours creating personalized outreach activities, conducting interviews, keeping the candidates updated throughout the recruitment process, filling the data in spreadsheets, updating the hiring pipeline, etc. This process is repeated hundreds of times when high-volume hiring, and it can get messy and disorganized without an effective strategy in place.

Fueling high-volume hiring with a well-defined strategy and practical tips is essential to making your recruitment process more effective for both recruiters and candidates.

These five tips will help you get a better understanding of how to utilize your hiring efforts to recruit the right talent for your organization without compromising on candidate quality and experience.

 

What is high-volume hiring?

High-volume hiring refers to the process of hiring many (high numbers of staff) employees within a short time period. It can refer to hiring for multiple open positions or recruiting for a single job role with many potential candidates.

Either way, this practice is quite common in times of exponential growth, hiring surges (after a significant turnover), seasonal peaks, or new store openings. Searching for and evaluating a high volume of potential candidates for different (or a specific) open position(s) while keeping constraints, such as time and budget, in mind can get quite challenging and stressful.

All of these candidates need to be found, interviewed, assessed, selected, and onboarded, and this mission comes with placement targets for recruiters to meet.

That’s why it’s essential to establish a well-defined high-volume strategy, making the hiring process efficient and fast – for both candidates and recruiters.

 

What are the challenges in high-volume hiring?

Hiring many employees within a limited time frame isn’t easy, and it doesn’t come without challenges.

Misaligned job role expectations

Filling many open positions simultaneously can get quite hectic, as recruiters should know exactly what each role demands to find the most suitable candidate. This is especially difficult with the lack of transparency and misaligned job role expectations.

Being unclear in candidate expectations for the role creates unnecessary confusion, diverting recruiters’ attention from what truly matters regarding candidate hiring.

Too many applications, too little time

Like any other type of hiring, high-volume hiring comes with a time constraint. What makes it more challenging is that multiple applications (which can reach hundreds) need to be reviewed for a number of different positions at the same time, filtering out the most suitable candidates to proceed to the next stage.

This can often create confusion and chaos among hiring teams, especially when deadlines are tight. That’s why it’s crucial to have a well-defined high-volume hiring strategy in place, which sets the priorities and explicitly mentions how the hiring teams will assess numerous candidates at one time.

Poor candidate experience

Another struggle with high-volume hiring is delivering high-quality candidate experience. Although it’s difficult to ensure that each applicant has a great candidate experience throughout the recruitment process, it’s an essential element of the hiring process that you must focus on.

From personalizing outreach activities and automating certain tasks to keeping your candidates up-to-date and informing them of each stage of the recruitment process, it’s important to prioritize candidate experience in high-volume hiring.

5 tips for a successful high-volume hiring strategy

Whether you’ve already gone through a round of hiring at scale or you’re new to high-volume hiring, it’s essential to have a well-defined strategy that will guide hiring teams throughout the process, supporting their efforts.

Let’s take a look at 5 tips you can use to create an effective high-volume hiring strategy without compromising the role quality and candidate experience.

Implement automation

On average, 75% of resumes sent in response to a typical high-volume job posting are considered unqualified.

Imagine you’re hiring for multiple open positions at the same time. This results in hundreds of hours being wasted on skimming through unqualified resumes. While human recruiters have limits on how many resumes they can skim through daily, it’s exactly the type of job AI can be used for.

As with any other type of hiring, there are some repetitive tasks that can be automated, speeding up the hiring process and helping hiring teams prioritize their tasks.

Automating repetitive manual processes and tasks is just as helpful and efficient in high-volume hiring as it is for day-to-day hiring. Not only does it make the whole process quicker and more efficient, but it also eliminates human-induced bias.

Speed up sourcing with talent rediscovery

Talent rediscovery refers to the practice of screening the candidates in your database, who have already applied to a job role in your company before, to match them with the current open requirements.

In other words, talent rediscovery helps you look into the pool of past candidates in your database for the roles you’re hiring for today. It allows you to get in contact with the candidates who were already interested in working with you in the past, increasing the number of potential candidates.

This practice is prevalent today due to the supply-demand imbalance in the tech talent market. Many organizations have introduced programs to reskill internal talent to fit open role requirements. Talent intelligence allows you to gain better visibility into your talent pool, helping you understand the diversity of skills within your workforce.

Leverage data and analytics

Recruiting metrics are essential for measuring progress, helping you identify the processes that need to be improved and optimize your entire hiring pipeline. Leveraging these data helps you to get a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, creating space for further improvement.

Some of the key recruiting metrics to be mindful of when high-volume hiring are:

– Conversion rate: by tracking your conversion rates, you’ll be able to take a look at the bigger picture. It can tell you which unnecessary steps within your recruitment process can be eliminated without wasting valuable time for both candidates and recruiters.

– Source of hire: closely analyzing the source of hire can help you optimize advertising budget. By assessing both organic and paid sourcing initiatives, you’ll be able to understand which job boards and ads attract a higher number of applicants to your open roles.

– Engagement patterns: reflect on your candidate experience, identifying its weak points. Whether it requires more touchpoints between the recruiter and the candidate, or a more interactive and engaging ‘careers’ page, finding these weak points will help you improve your hiring process and make it more efficient.

– Candidate diversity: look closely into your hiring pipeline to ensure diversity. This metric can be measured by hiring feedback, candidate surveys, etc. However, by setting internal diversity goals, you’ll be able to prevent the selective resume screening process and ensure that underrepresented demographic groups are also given a chance to participate in interviews, get job offers, and eventually get hired.

Develop a “candidate-first” job application process

Think of the application process from the candidate’s perspective who is applying to one of your open positions. Wouldn’t you be frustrated filling out lengthy and time-consuming applications and wondering whether you missed any important details?

The candidates get worn out when going through lengthy job application processes, sometimes even giving up midway. That’s why building a candidate-centric application process is critical to capturing the interest of suitable candidates.

Some of the key points you should pay attention to when developing a “candidate-first” job application process are:

– Clearly mention the job titles, responsibilities, and compensation

– Make sure your application is accessible on multiple devices

– Reduce candidate friction by keeping the application process short wherever possible (enable social profile apply, reduce the number of qualification questions to five or less, etc.)

– Be transparent in communicating the benefits of working at your company

When high-volume hiring, you should consider bringing awareness to your open roles across different platforms – job boards, your company’s website, and other channels to reach a wider pool of potential candidates.

Clearly communicate company culture

When browsing for jobs, potential candidates pay attention to the company’s culture by checking online reviews, website or even getting in touch with some of its employees.

By clearly communicating company culture and values, you’ll be able to attract candidates who share similar values with you, building a strong team. For example, you can place an employee testimonial, which shares the importance your company gives to teamwork, on the company website, demonstrating one of your core values. These reviews help to not only attract the suitable candidates, but also filter out those who may not be a good fit for your team.

High-volume hiring is an integral part of the recruitment tactics of many organizations, especially in times of exponential growth, seasonal hiring, and new store openings.

With the right strategy and tools in place, the hiring process gets smoother and more effective, helping hiring teams find the most suitable candidates for the open positions without having to extend their deadlines.

If you’re struggling with finding talent for your open tech positions, TalentGrid is here to help.

 

TalentGrid is a platform companies use to actively search for tech talent, allowing them to share their preferences and salary expectations with our community of 40K+ software developers from under-tapped markets like Turkey, Romania, etc.

By creating an account on the TalentGrid platform and submitting your open tech roles, you’ll save a significant amount of time and effort that goes into headhunting, contacting, informing, and updating the candidates, finding the developer you’re looking for fast and seamlessly.