High Volume Hiring Strategies

A year into the pandemic and the face of talent acquisition looks very different than in 2020. A recent survey of talent acquisition professionals identified that in 2021 they are:

• Hiring again – in fact 90% are!
• Considering talent outside the geographic location of their office spaces (72%)
• Using new sourcing techniques to increase the funnel of candidates
• Focusing on diversity hiring
• Investing in technology to identify qualified talent

From health care services to fast foods, companies are hiring. High volume hiring is a big part of that upswing. The need for talent continues. Some companies are overwhelmed with applications and for others applications are barely dripping in. Whether they are receiving hundreds of applications or only a few, everyone is concerned about finding and identifying enough qualified candidates who will thrive and grow in their organization. 

High Volume Hiring

Finding qualified talent is elevated to mission critical levels when your company has high volume needs ranging from hundreds to thousands of open positions a year.

The unending demand and growing challenges for employers to attract, hire and retain talent for high-demand, high-turnover roles in today’s labor market are exhausting and intimidating when you don’t have a clear talent acquisition strategy and the correct tools in place.

There are actions you can take now to optimize your high volume hiring by innovating your application process and creating a positive candidate experience that will increase the number of candidates applying for the positions while reducing the time spent screening qualified candidates.  To help you improve your high-volume hiring process, here’s checklist that you can help you.

Create a positive candidate experience for all candidates

According to Indeed, 42% of job seekers found lengthy applications the most frustrating part of the application process and many will give up on the application process when they feel it’s too long. 

65% of job seekers now use their mobile devices to look for jobs, allowing them to apply for a job at any time. Being mobile-optimized includes a job application site that’s both mobile-friendly and allows job seekers to upload their resume using their phone.

Keep the application process short by having relevant qualification questions and time spent applying to a minimum.

Efforts to create a fast and mobile application process can tangibly improve the candidate experience.

Engage your candidates with a compelling employer brand

Communicating effectively is also very important in creating a positive candidate experience. In high volume recruiting, recruitment technology can be especially helpful with communications and engaging candidates. A recent survey revealed that two-thirds of candidates are happy to communicate with a chatbot, as long as it provided them with the answers they sought. 

Here are things that candidates want to know and that you should communicate:

• An acknowledgment letting candidates know when applications close and when they can expect to hear from you. 
• Let all candidates, both successful and unsuccessful, know the outcome. 
• Send updates with relevant content about their application and engaging information about the company, its employees and happenings.
  

Increase your talent pool

Create and maintain talent pools for future job openings and use it! Talent rediscovery is the practice of mining your existing resume database to find previous candidates for openings. Although many ATS will allow recruiter to search through existing resumes, the results are usually limited and error-prone. As a result, it’s often an unsuccessful effort. A talent rediscovery algorithm will automatically screen every resume in your ATS to find the most qualified matches to a new posting.

On average, companies need approximately 180 people to visit their career site to make one hire. With high volume recruiting, if a company has 50 openings, that would mean needing 9,00 views!  Plus, you need to have those views be from people who could be great candidates.

“Programmatic Job Advertising” (PJA) can help by getting a job posting to appear at places where you maybe wouldn’t think to advertise. A programmatic job advertising platform can help you find the most relevant talent in the shortest time.

Speed up your talent sourcing 

On average, 75% of the resumes a job posting receives are considered unqualified.

When you’re hiring for hundreds of open positions a year, this adds up to hundreds of wasted hours skimming through unqualified resumes. Software that uses AI to screen resumes can quickly identify candidates who have the right skills and characteristics to your roles. By automating manual resume screening, organizations such as retailers have reduced their time to hire by 75%.

Identify critical soft skills

Even with high volume recruitment, you should never compromise on quality of hire. An optimized recruitment process consisting of online assessments and the right interview questions will help you identify the qualified candidates faster and minimize taking the next steps with less qualified candidates. 

You can teach specific hard skills, whereas some critical soft skills can never be taught. There’s no need to wait until the interview process to get an understanding of your candidate’s soft skills.

Increase diversity hires and decrease hiring bias 

Hiring bias can be imbedded in the preselection process.  AI reduced hiring bias by carefully analyzing the algorithms being used in your preselection to ensure there are no hidden biases. Additional measures you can take include: 

• • Use assessments to evaluate actual skills, not candidates’ background 
  • Base hiring decisions on data evidence, not assumptions
  • Have a consistent and transparent hiring process
  • Provide interview training to all hiring managers
    

Use recruiting metrics to achieve quality hires

Recruiting metrics are essential for understanding where process improvements are needed and justifying investments into specific recruiting functions. Especially with high volume hiring, you need to optimize your time and resources where possible.

Some recruiting metrics  that can help you with high volume hiring include:

• Qualified candidates per hire
• Source of hire to optimize advertising spend
• Offer to acceptance ratio to reduce unnecessary steps and actions
• Length of time for each stage of your recruiting process to minimize bottlenecks
• Time to fill to understand how well your hiring team is doing
  

Invest and use technology to save time and money

Using an easy mobile application process and having the right tools for job advertising will increase your number of applicants.  With the time savings accomplished through AI screening, recruiters can spend on building and nurturing relationships with candidates and moving the process along fasters. 

Conclusion

If you have high volume recruitment needs, you will be lagging behind and missing candidates without a clear talent acquisition strategy and the correct tools in place. The speed to hire and hire right is available by having a high-volume candidate selection platform which:

• Handles large volumes of applicants
• Customizes the online assessment experience per role
• Sets hiring benchmarks
• Comes equipped with situational judgment tests
• Creates a branded experience for your candidates
• Automates parts of your communications