High Volume Hiring: 5 Tips and Tricks For Recruiters

What’s the most valuable asset of a company? Ask any successful business leader, and they’ll respond with “the workforce”. Of course, products, services, and customers are other essential aspects for long-term success. Ultimately, though, success stems from how skilled, engaged, and productive your employees are.

This alone should be a good enough reason to keep investing in talent acquisition. After all, hiring and developing the best professionals holds the key to a thriving business.

But, while most of the time recruitment simply means looking for the right candidate to fill a vacant role or cover temporary leave, in some specific circumstances high volume hiring is required.

To find out more about this recruitment process and how to approach it in your organization, keep reading our comprehensive guide.  

Understanding High Volume Hiring

As a recruiter, you might have come across the expression “high volume hiring”, but perhaps weren’t involved in the process directly. Also called “mass hiring”, high volume hiring simply refers to the need to recruit many people for your company in a limited timeframe.

It’s easy to imagine how much pressure HR teams are under when they deal with high volume hiring. However, you can make the process easier by using specific software tools as well as AI in the workplace solutions.

But before we move forward, let’s examine the most common situations that would typically require a company to opt for high volume hiring.

When Is High Volume Hiring Used?

There are three main reasons why a company would go down the high volume hiring route:

• During a rapid expansion, or if the company has started working with remote talent
• When a company decides to open one or more new branches or locations (such as a franchise)
• At specific times of the year when customer orders suddenly spike (such as the holiday season)

The Top 5 Tips to Make High Volume Hiring (Almost) a Cinch

Here are five top tips for mastering mass hiring.

1.   Install the Right Tech

Simplify and streamline your hiring pipeline during high volume hiring with the right software tools.

They will give you something highly valuable  when dealing with a huge applicant pool: automation. With the right tech, you can wave goodbye to spending entire days sifting through thousands of job applications. You also won't need to grapple with the intricacies of interview scheduling, or feel frustrated when coming across unqualified applicants.

As if all this wasn’t enough, recruitment software also helps to cut recruitment bias. You can use tools that anonymize the hiring process and let you focus on a candidate’s core skills.

2.   Use a Candidate-Centric Approach

When you are hiring large numbers of candidates, you may not want to adopt a candidate-first approach. You may feel like this is going to raise costs and add significant and unnecessary complication to the task.

You must, though, stay focused on your goal: hiring the best people for the job. And this only happens if you foster a positive and empowering culture throughout the entire application process.

Start by crafting clear, comprehensive, and enticing job descriptions. Next, remember to always give feedback to every candidate on their application. To help you streamline this process, send out automated emails to all the unsuitable candidates.

Yes, this lacks a little personal touch. At least, though, it keeps them informed of their application status and allows them to move on to the next opportunity.

3.   Search for Talent in Your Network

As an HR recruiter, the chances are that you have a wide network of business acquaintances and take part in events and meetings. After all, you are a people person, right? Then, why not harness this all-important skill to find the right talent within your network?

For example, you may consider any of the following, or even a combination of them to boost your high-volume hiring process:

• Organize open-recruitment days and events, where you’ll have access to a large talent pool
• Post your vacancies on industry-specific forums and websites where relevant talent hangs out
• Offer cash incentives and other rewards to your internal staff for candidate referrals whenever you have several positions available. To help with mass hiring, offer higher-value prizes to those employees who provide you with a set number of valuable applicants, depending on how many positions you are looking to fill.

If your entire team gets on board, the chances of success will skyrocket.

4.   Leverage Specific Recruitment Metrics

As with any other type of recruitment, high volume hiring is only as effective as the metrics you use to measure it. This means that if you want to figure out whether you are doing it right, you need to know exactly what to keep an eye on.

In this specific case, you may want to look at recruitment metrics such as:

• Channels. This allows you to determine which channels are worth investing in when publishing your job advert. Usually, channels may include job boards, job aggregators, and social media platforms.
• Engagement. This metric is particularly helpful if you are mass-recruiting on social media as one of your main channels. Take a look at the in-built insight functionalities of most social platforms to help you with this metric.
• Drop-out points. This enables you to single out any specific points in the process when a high number of candidates stop engaging with you and, eventually, drop out of the application altogether. 
• Conversion rates. This metric helps you to understand which part of your recruitment process you may want to adjust if you want to achieve optimal conversion rates of your best candidates.

To ensure enduring success, it's important to give special attention to metrics that help to retain talent. You can monitor key indicators such as employee turnover rates and post-hiring performance to gain valuable insights into how effectively your high volume hiring efforts contribute to retaining quality employees over time.

5.   Optimize the Screening Process

Screening applications is one of the most time-consuming parts of any type of recruitment process, but it becomes even more daunting if you are tasked with hiring dozens of people within a very limited period.

The name of the game, once again, is automation. First, find a good resume parsing tool that can help you divide your applicant pool between suitable and unsuitable candidates. This will immediately help you to rule out a good chunk of poor-quality or irrelevant resumes and leave you to focus solely on those that matter.

After resume parsing has left only a handful of interesting candidate profiles on your desk, it’s time to delve a bit deeper into this cohort. Depending on the specific job vacancy that you’ll want to fill, you may choose to do any of the following:

• Ask your shortlisted applicants to engage in a timed test to demonstrate their proficiency in an important aspect of the job
• Put together a list of questions and ask your most interesting candidates to answer them either via email or (better) via submitting a short video clip
• Take advantage of video conferencing tools to set up a collective and informal meeting where you get to know your candidates better.

Having said all that, it’s still helpful to get to know individual applicants better through a more standard interview, whether you are recruiting ten new people to increase your call center efficiency or hiring a much larger pool of global freelancers. Naturally, this will depend on how many people you have been asked to recruit, how much time you have available, and how many resources you can allocate to this task.

Additionally, consider utilizing recruitment CRM software to manage and track candidate interactions effectively throughout the high volume hiring process. This software can help you maintain organized candidate profiles, communication logs, and automate follow-up tasks, ensuring a streamlined and efficient recruitment workflow.

Ready to Master the Art of High Volume Hiring?

At some point in your HR career, you may be asked to manage the very specific type of recruitment process known as high volume hiring. While it may sound overwhelming, the truth is that there are lots of different strategies you can put in place to help you turn it into a fast, smooth, and successful endeavour.

By following our five top tips, you will be in a much better position to handle all the challenges that high volume hiring might throw at you – such as huge lists of potential candidates, around-the-clock monitoring of recruitment metrics, rigid time restrictions or scant resources.

And once you have found the best people for the job, you’ll finally be able to tell yourself: I have mastered the art of high volume hiring!