When the clock is ticking, and there’s a substantial number of candidates to consider, even the most professional recruiters may slip into speed over capability.
Granted, you may not be dealing with 20,000 applications in a single day like Amazon was back in 2017. But if you’re tackling candidates by the hundreds, that’s still a sizable task.
So, how can you recruit in high volumes and still keep quality above quantity?
The rapid-fire answer: by setting realistic high-volume recruiting goals and using the right tools to streamline the job. And this article is here to show you how to put excellent high-volume recruitment into practice!
What Is High-Volume Recruiting?
High-volume recruiting is a specialized form of recruitment designed to quickly and efficiently fill a high volume of job vacancies within a specific timeframe. This type of recruiting is typically used by organizations that have seasonal hiring needs, high turnover rates, or are experiencing rapid growth.
High-volume recruiting involves developing and implementing strategies to source and attract a large number of qualified candidates, screening and assessing candidates efficiently, and managing the hiring process effectively to make timely and accurate hiring decisions. Successful high-volume recruiting requires a combination of technology, process efficiency, and a focus on candidate experience to ensure that the recruitment process is seamless and positive for all parties involved.
It can be a challenge for HR teams, but having the right tools and strategies in place can make the process smoother and more effective. High volume recruiting requires careful planning and organization to ensure that the right candidates are selected and hired efficiently.
Why Do We Have A High-Volume Recruitment Problem?
When it comes to high-volume recruiting, attracting the right candidates is just part of the challenge. The most demanding task is properly screening those candidates in a short amount of time.
As we’ve mentioned realistic goals, spending hours reviewing each candidate within each role is not feasible. Let alone manually reformatting hundreds of resumes and spending hours on screening calls!
Not only will those tasks prevent you from reaching your recruiting goals, but they will also create a dreadful experience that will bleed into your company’s reputation.
How to conquer those challenges? Make sure you’re speeding up the process at every single stage.
5 Strategies To Manage High-Volume Recruiting
Pick Up The Pace On All Recruiting Fr
onts
From job advertising to final hiring decisions, you must ensure each step is optimized to its full capacity.
The keyword here is “automation,” which you can implement in all parts of the process:
Job advertising: Traditional job board posting can be time-consuming if you’re hiring in volumes. Consider using programmatic advertising instead. This way, you can laser-target your ads by context and location, optimizing your hiring process as a result.
Applications: If you’re hiring through your website, is your careers page optimized to handle large traffic volumes? A slow-processing or faulty website could shun qualified visitors due to avoidable errors – so be sure your website is speedy throughout the recruiting process.
Interviewing: Some parts of the hiring process should never be automated, and interviews are one of them. But even though they require human intervention, they can still be streamlined. Video interviews are a must when hiring in large volumes, especially if you’ll be recruiting candidates across the globe.
Note that the tools you use can increase or decrease the pace at which you check all those boxes.
Use The Right High-Volume Recruiting Tools With Plenty Of Automation Options
The right candidate selection platform needs to be specifically suited for high-volume hiring. Ideally, it should be a central hub where you can tackle most, if not all, of the hiring steps faster without abandoning quality.
Key features you should seek in a candidate selection platform include:
- The ability to manage large volumes of applicants
- Offering constant and seamless candidate support
- Automated communication capabilities
- Containing self-screening features
- The option to set hiring benchmarks for goal-setting
- Offering a fully branded candidate experience
- Having a clean, user-friendly interface
Such features will allow you to quickly shortlist the most qualified candidates without increasing the cost-to-hire.
All the while, you should be tracking your time-to-hire (TTH) metric. The most important metric you’re working with is time – not because you’re rushing the process, but because you must recruit the best candidates in a short time.
What’s more, the less time recruiters spend on repetitive activities, the more time and resources they can free up to nurture better relationships with candidates.
Conduct A Skills Assessment
Describing one’s skills is one thing. Proving them is another.
It’s no use hiring candidates at the speed of light if they are unqualified for the job.
By testing candidates’ skills with pre-selected questions related to their role, you may be able to predict how well they will perform in that position. High-quality skill testing is especially suited to testing for candidates with prior experience in the position, although you can customize it to fit your requirements and company culture.
Combined with streamlined screening questions and automated resume reformatting, skill tests will narrow down your options towards the stellar applicants you’re looking for.
Spend Less Time Reformatting Resumes
You shouldn’t have to spend hours reformatting resumes to reflect your agency’s branding. Your job is to recruit — not necessarily to reformat.
Imagine having 5 extra hours a week to perfect areas where the human element is involved, such as seamless communication. With solutions like Allsorter, you can get the perfect candidates for your clients with minimal formatting time, all while keeping your branding top-of-mind and your candidates well-informed.
Don’t Dismiss Human Contact
A huge volume of candidates makes a 100% personalized experience humanly impossible. But at the same time, bad candidate experience could cost you a fortune. (We’ve all heard the story of how Virgin Media lost $5 million because of a bad candidate experience.)
Few things are more frustrating than not knowing if your application has been viewed or you’ve been considered.
The great news is that a good experience can be as simple as setting expectations throughout the application process.
Providing applicants with periodic updates about their application is table stakes, as users now expect communication at every turn. You can exceed those expectations by personalizing chatbots, which 69% of applicants don’t mind as long as they answer their questions, fast.
How Long Do Recruiters Look At Resumes?
- 6 seconds – survey by The Ladders
- 7.4 seconds – report by The Muse
- 11 seconds – report by Indeed
- 6 seconds – survey by Glassdoor
- 10-20 seconds – study by the NACE
- Above 5 averaging to 9.08 seconds.
As you can see, recruiters don’t spend a lot of time on each resume, so it is crucial that the resume is well-organized and highlights the most relevant qualifications in a clear and concise mann
High-Volume Recruiting Shouldn’t Be Equivalent To High-Stress
Even after automating processes and cutting inefficiencies, high-volume recruiting can still feel overwhelming. It’s a demanding job, regardless of what you do to simplify it.
However, once you start implementing the right tools, the task won’t be nearly as challenging – no matter how time-strapped you may be.
With the right process in place, you’ll be able to focus on quality while your tools handle the quantity.
Here are some more recruitment topics you might be interested in:
- How to reduce time to hire
- How to address biases in recruitment
- Top 5 high-volume hiring strategies
- Recruitment compliance guide
- ATS resume template guide
- Sales techniques for recruiters
- Business development strategies for recruiters