High-volume hiring: what you need to know and strategies for success

Whether your organization is experiencing rapid growth or looking to hire lots of seasonal workers, high volume hiring can be challenging. It involves balancing several important factors, like hiring costs, time constraints, and quality, all while trying to give candidates a  smooth and positive experience and deliver value to employers. It’s a lot. That is why we’re here to break it down for you and give you some strategies that could help with your high volume recruiting challenges.

What is high volume hiring? 

High-volume hiring, or recruitment, is the process of hiring many people in a short period. It typically occurs in industries with high employee turnover, such as retail or restaurants, where many applicants are vying for similar entry-level or seasonal positions.

In short, it involves quickly finding the right candidates. Without a solid plan to attract and manage candidates, the process can become overwhelming.

Important high-volume recruiting KPIs

When it comes to high-volume recruiting, efficiency and effectiveness are key. Here are some important metrics to focus on:

Cost-per-hire

Cost-per-hire measures the total expenses incurred when hiring new employees, including costs for sourcing, recruitment advertising, onboarding, referral bonuses, and related expenses. To minimize cost-per-hire, you can optimize your sourcing efforts and use a smart applicant tracking system (ATS) to automate tasks and reduce hiring resources.

Time-to-hire

Time-to-hire refers to the number of days from when a candidate applies for a job to when they accept a job offer.  On average, it is roughly 44 days from application to acceptance, but this number varies depending on the region and industry.

A lengthy time-to-hire may result in losing top candidates to competitors and delays in filling critical positions, which translates to a loss for the organization. Conversely, decreasing time-to-hire can benefit your business big time. For example, Koenigsegg, managed to reduce their time-to-hire from an average of two months to just 25 days by having the right tools and processes in place to assess and track applicants. 

Source channel cost

Monitoring the costs of your sourcing channels entails analyzing data to find the channels that deliver the highest return on investment in terms of both candidate volume and quality. 

Optimizing costs here can involve both narrowing and broadening the selection of sourcing channels.

Offer acceptance rate 

For one reason or another,  not all job offers are accepted. For a more effective recruitment process you want to maximize offer acceptance rates  and avoid the time-consuming sourcing-attracting-interviewing loop, especially when recruiting at scale. 

One effective strategy to maximize offer acceptance rates is to identify and address the most common reasons why candidates decline offers. A rejected offer is always disappointing, but it’s an opportunity to get curious. Follow up with candidates to find out why they declined and what you could do differently in your process or include in your offer. Crafting job-specific offers and implementing a seamless digital signing process can also remove obstacles and get candidates to accept faster. 

Challenges of high-volume recruiting

Talent acquisition is already a challenging process. Hiring at high volume amplifies these challenges. Below are some of the primary challenges of high-volume hiring.

Lack of alignment within the hiring team

When it comes to high-volume hiring, even minor misunderstandings between a recruiter and a hiring manager can result in significant resource loss. It's crucial to align goals  from the start of the hiring process to avoid wasting time searching for the wrong candidates. 

This can  be solved in the following ways:

• Agree on 2-3 main performance indicators for the future candidates
• Agree on the essential  skills and qualities the candidate will need to have to reach the goals 
• Choose recruitment software that simplifies collaboration within the team

Sourcing

It is not easy to find one qualified candidate, but it gets even harder when you need to find tens or even hundreds. It is not usually a question of  if they are out there, but how do you reach them?  

While sourcing can be complex, it also offers opportunities for experimentation and innovation.

You optimize your career pages for search engines (SEO) to gain organic traffic from relevant job seekers, post your vacancies on free and paid  job boards and social media, or even integrate your ATS with Linkedin Recruiter to add potential applicants  from LinkedIn directly to your ATS.

Searching your candidate database for previous candidates can also jumpstart your high-volume recruiting. You do not have to start your search from scratch but can engage with those who have  already expressed interest in joining your organization.  

While sourcing candidates, also make sure to not not overlook employee referrals, as this can bring you quality candidates. Your existing talent can open up a wide network of ready and qualified talent. 

Hiring events, as dated as they may seem, have tremendous potential to bring the crowd you need. They are a great way to engage a large number of people, and you can assume the motivation is high for those in attendance. 

Efficient screening and selection

Screening at scale can be time-consuming. That’s why it's important to know the tools you have at your disposal to cut down and automate tasks. If you don’t want to lose the human touch (and you probably shouldn’t) , try automating at least mundane and repetitive tasks.  Automation solutions can help you run assessment tests, objective scoring, verify references, and as a result, qualify or disqualify candidates faster. 

Speed/Quality balance

Balancing speed and quality in hiring decisions can be difficult. A slow or cumbersome hiring process can lead to increased applicant drop-off rates, while moving too fast and hiring the wrong people can disrupt team dynamics and cause high turnover. Both scenarios can impact the organization's reputation and overall success. Quality hiring outcomes can be influenced by the clarity and accuracy of job descriptions. Investing in crafting detailed job descriptions early in the process can yield significant benefits and mitigate these risks.

Candidate experience

In high-volume hiring, candidate experience can be your secret weapon or your Achilles' heel. Approach it as a process of building a relationship with candidates from the very first interaction. Clarity, transparency, and personalization are crucial as leaving candidates with a positive impression can be the deciding factor for rejecting or accepting a job. 

Mitigating bias

Diversity and inclusion are essential components of successful hiring. As humans, we can sometimes exhibit biases unknowingly, revealing our prejudices through wording or overly specific job requirements. When hiring as scale and decisions need to be made quickly, it’s important to have solid processes in place to mitigate bias at every stage of the recruitment process. This can be achieved through anonymized recruitment, where certain candidate data and information are hidden from hiring teams. Having a diverse hiring team and using structured interviews are also ways to reduce bias and increase fairness. 

High volume recruiting strategies

Now that we have discussed the challenges, there are many things that can be done that can improve your high-volume recruiting outcomes. Consider these six things that can impact your ability to source, attract, and hire at scale:  

• Employer branding: Employer branding is a long-time investment that will benefit your business in many ways. Your company’s image may be the main reason a candidate wants to join your organization, as they connect with your business goals and values. Strong employer branding reduces costs, time-to-hire, and also  strengthens employee-retention.
  
  
• Data-driven decision making: While hiring in volumes, don’t just follow your gut. Let data guide your actions. Gather information  about your source channels’ performance, conversion rate, time-to-hire, and cost. Analyze your recruitment funnel to find out where candidates get stuck and eliminate bottlenecks. 
  
  
• Creativity and innovation: High volume hiring provides an opportunity to experiment and innovate. What if your network performs better than traditional job boards? What if video interviews save time by eliminating the need for scheduling and conducting in-person meetings? Can we streamline the process by advancing highly-assessed candidates directly to the final stages of hiring? There is more than one way to engage candidates and why not try them all? 
  
  
• Technology: Automation may not be everything, but without it, time-consuming and repetitive tasks devour our time. Embrace technology and delegate candidate review, branded communication, and interview scheduling to an ATS, allowing you to invest more time into strategy development.
  
  
• Measuring results: To improve your process, measure every hiring stream according to key recruitment metrics. The data you collect will provide valuable insights for future improvements.

Key Takeaways:

• High volume hiring presents significant challenges, including aligning hiring goals, optimizing sourcing channels, maximising offer acceptance rates, reducing time and cost expenses as well as creating a smooth candidate experience.

• Essential recruiting metrics for high volume hiring include cost-per-hire, time-to-hire, source channel cost, and offer acceptance rate.

• Long-term strategies that help include employer branding, a holistic approach to recruitment, data-driven decision-making, creativity, and leveraging technology for automation and efficiency.

• Building a positive candidate experience through clarity, transparency, and personalization is critical in high volume hiring.

In conclusion, high volume hiring may be challenging, but having  a strategic approach and a  smart combination of tools and tech solutions can accelerate the process substantially. 

Feeling stuck and want to know how your ATS can help with high-volume recruitment? Book a meeting to discuss your particular challenges and see how Jobylon can help.