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High-volume recruiters are often in a tight spot, filling multiple roles and meeting hard deadlines. They may need to hire 40+ candidates for the same role type — all within a season or even a month’s time.
It’s no wonder high-volume hiring can be stressful at times. So how do you stay ahead? Knowledge. ????
In this piece, you’ll learn everything you need to know to master large-scale recruitment, from overcoming common challenges to finding the best tools for mass hiring success.
What Is High-Volume Recruiting Exactly?
High-volume recruiting, also called high-volume hiring or volume recruitment, refers to the practice of hiring a large number of candidates during a short window. A high-volume recruiter may, for example, need to hire hundreds — or even thousands — of employees during a holiday season.
High-volume hiring is often required for:
- A business that receives a substantial funding round
- Opening a new branch of a company
- Hiring employees for your busy season
- Scaling a business quickly
What Are the Challenges of the Mass Hiring Process?
A Dreadful Candidate Experience
In a candidate-driven market, a negative candidate experience can hurt your chances of attracting top talent. High-volume recruiters can struggle with this, as they may not have time or the processes in place to communicate with hundreds of candidates, set up interviews, and answer questions.
Sourcing Sensational Candidates
High-volume recruiters often depend on inbound strategies to fill positions. In other words, they post open roles on job boards and wait for the applications to come in. While this approach can work well for quantity, it won’t work well for quality.
Attracting top talent requires the use of smart sourcing channels, ones that promote your jobs to both active and passive candidates. This strategy fast-tracks the hiring process and enables you to avoid wasting your hiring managers’ time.
An Interview Logistics Nightmare
When you’re hiring hundreds — if not thousands of candidates — it becomes almost impossible to coordinate interviews between candidates and hiring managers. This is especially true if you work on a smaller team or don’t have the right technologies in place.
Interview overload can have a negative impact on recruitment, leading to recruiter burnout. You’ll also lose quality candidates, and details will quickly fall through the cracks.
4 High-Volume Hiring Strategies That Actually Work
Use a Virtual Career Fair Platform
The easiest way to solve the above problems? Utilize a virtual career fair solution. You’ll be able to:
- Provide a better experience for candidates
- Easily coordinate interviews
- Source candidates using recruitment marketing
There’s no need to set up hundreds of interviews. Candidates simply join your virtual career fair — from anywhere — and then you can connect and sift out the best ones. Next, you instantly connect candidates to hiring managers, all within the platform.
Provide a Candidate-First Experience
A question we hear often from clients: How do I attract more candidates? The answer lies in providing the best possible candidate experience. Virtual hiring solutions offer exactly that:
- No need to fill out tedious application
- Meet with recruiters & hiring managers directly
- Avoid having to travel
- Save time
- Interview from the comfort of home
Pay Attention to High-Volume Hiring Metrics
Real-time data should be the cornerstone of your high-volume recruiting strategy. A virtual career fair platform will provide big-picture and granular metrics, such as the number of registrants and attendees per event.
In addition to checking these stats regularly, track your sourcing metrics and which channels are driving the most candidates. Finally, pay close attention to big-picture metrics, like cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, as these impact your ability to stay ahead of competitors.
Take Advantage of Recruitment Marketing
Sourcing a large number of high-quality candidates is a tremendous challenge. That’s why it’s crucial to work with a volume recruitment partner that can promote your open roles, build your employer brand, and attract both active and passive candidates. For example, a partner can help you reach candidates via search marketing, job boards, direct mail, and social media.
The Surprisingly Best Bulk Hiring Tools for Mass Hiring
Video Interview Software
Video interviewing tools are key for high-volume recruiters. They offer all the benefits of remote recruitment, including no travel, no need for masking, no checking CDC guidelines, and no trying desperately not to cough ????????.
Additionally, they allow for the recruiter and candidate to see each other’s faces and body language, helping both parties build rapport. It’s no wonder we included video interviewing as part of our virtual hiring event platform, Live Recruit.
You’ll want a video interview software with cool features. For example, Live Recruit allows you to conduct video interviews, take notes on candidates, and then refer candidates to hiring managers; in other words, you can move candidates through the hiring process in minutes.
Applicant Tracking Systems
Volume hiring requires a lot of tedious busywork, which is why it’s crucial to use an ATS tool. This will reduce the administrative burden involved with sourcing candidates and allow you to stay organized — an essential need when recruiting hundreds or thousands of candidates.
A worthwhile ATS tool will help you:
- Manage all your candidate data in one place
- Automate the job posting process
- Reduce paperwork
- Build your pipeline
Onboarding Software
High-volume recruitment teams may be responsible for onboarding hundreds, or even thousands, of employees. That’s a big job — one that includes mundane, tedious tasks.
Onboarding tools will help you:
- Track and organize employee documents
- Manage skill and personality assessment tests
- Avoid human error
- Reduce time spent on administrative tasks
By automating much of the onboarding process, you’ll save time and energy, giving you more time to focus on the tasks that really matter, like collaborating with hiring managers, answering candidates’ questions, and building your employer brand.
Recruitment Analytics Software
High-volume hiring involves thousands of data points, which can be overwhelming for recruiters who are using a data-first approach. To find success, the data needs to be analyzed and written into a greater narrative of your particular mass hiring process.
Some examples of data points include:
- Time to hire
- Number of candidates in your talent pool
- Cost per hire
- Sources of bulk hiring
- Volume of hires
- Offer acceptance per hire
Recruitment analytics software allows you to optimize based on what’s working and what isn’t, doing the majority of the legwork for you. You get to focus on making data-driven decisions and improving results over time.
Virtual Career Fair Platforms
Because of the nature of high-volume recruiting, it requires a lot of administrative tasks, from coordinating interviews to collecting candidate data. Virtual career fair solutions, like Live Recruit, minimize the need for tedious, logistics-related tasks — at a very low cost. The scheduling responsibilities, for example, are shared between the platform and the candidate, who signs up for a time slot to meet with a recruiter.
Once the interviews are scheduled, recruiters meet with candidates during the virtual event. Promising candidates can be passed to hiring managers — all within the platform. Lastly, recruiting active and passive candidates becomes easy, as Live Recruit will handle the event promotion.
Wrapping Up: How to Succeed at High-Volume Hiring in 2022 & Beyond
As high-volume recruiting becomes more difficult during The Great Resignation, it’s important for talent acquisition teams to understand the challenges, strategies, and technologies they need to succeed. The right tools, including virtual hiring events, promote your employer brand and increase your ability to hire high-quality candidates quickly. Including them in your high-volume hiring strategy is key to staying ahead of your competitors and meeting your organization’s hiring needs.
Get even more recruitment tips, tricks & tools in our FREE whitepaper, Your Can’t-Miss Guide to High-Volume Hiring.
