Are You Set Up For High-Volume Recruiting?

When a business launches a high-volume recruiting campaign it can quickly become overwhelmed leading to a drop in the quality of the hire process.

This post looks at what high volume recruiting is, when it’s needed, the challenges it creates and, most important of all, what businesses can do to prepare for and overcome those challenges.

What is high volume recruiting and who does it?

High volume recruiting involves hiring a large number of employees in a short timeframe. It is a relative term. That’s to say, it relates to what a business or industry perceives as normal. For a small business, that could mean hiring dozens of new people in a month. For a multinational corporation, that figure could be hundreds of thousands of new hires.

As a ballpark figure, the average number of candidates applying to a regular job posting is fewer than 50. In contrast, high-volume campaign job posts bring in an average of more than 250 candidates.

There are a number of reasons why businesses need to launch high volume recruitment campaigns including company expansion (local or geographical), M&As, office relocation and seasonal work (e.g. agriculture).

Some industries (e.g. hospitality and retail) are more likely to need to run high volume recruitment drives than others. A recent Harver report found that 56% of telecoms firms, 48% of hospitality businesses and 46% of healthcare organizations were expecting to bring in more than a hundred new hires over the following 12 months.

The emergence of the gig economy has also led to a situation where high turnover is the norm and freelancers and casual workers tend to be recruited in bulk to meet the needs of a specific project.

The biggest challenge for businesses looking to hire en masse is speeding up the hire process while maintaining the quality. On the one hand, screening, shortlisting, phone interviews, pre-interview assessments and interviews all need streamlining. On the other hand, applicants need to be kept happy. As many as 60% of applicants abandon their applications if they are having a poor user experience and this also reduces the likelihood of them re-applying, referring friends and even buying the company’s products or services in the future.

How to master high volume recruiting

The first thing to understand is that traditional recruitment methods break under high volume recruitment conditions. The answer is to recruit in a smarter way. Strategies used by successful high-volume recruitment teams include embracing new technology, utilizing social media, optimizing jobs pages and using high impact marketing techniques.

The right choice of technology is essential to managing a high-volume campaign. If your business has been hesitant to adopt new recruitment technologies, you will need to overcome this resistance before launching a high volume recruitment campaign.

At every stage of the recruitment funnel there are now tools you can use to handle the extra workload. Basic screening can now be carried out by chatbots. These are now sophisticated enough to weed out those applicants who, for example, may not have the essential pre-requisites in place (work permits, basic qualifications, etc.)

There is also software available to automate pre-employment assessments, schedule interviews, organize documentation and even use data from successful hires to mine your ATS for potential good matches. Once a hire has been made, tools can even handle the onboarding process.

All of the above needs to be reinforced by cutting edge communication and that means via mobile devices. Depending on the source, between 65% and 89% of job applicants use their smartphones or tablets to apply. The idibu mobile app is designed with this in mind, helping recruiters to engage quickly with candidates and provide them with a positive user experience.

Utilizing social media is also vital, especially if you are targeting younger applicants. McDonalds understood this when they rolled out Snapplications to help meet their goal of 250,000 summer hires. This consisted of fast application forms accessed through Snapchat.

Optimizing job pages for conversion is also important and technology can help here as well. For example, dynamic content software can serve different jobs pages to different applicants based on their demographics or online behaviour.

Finally, more recruiters are using traditional high impact marketing techniques to capture attention. Amazon did this with their instant hire ‘Amazon Jobs Day’ campaign as they sought to fill 50,000 open positions.

Hopefully you will now have some ideas of how to prepare your business or recruitment company for the challenge of high volume recruiting. To find out more about how idibu can help you to maximize your recruitment CRM, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.