In this post, we will walk you over the essentials of volume hiring so that you can be set off to a great start!
We will discuss:
- What is volume hiring
- The important 6 steps you should take in order to have a smooth volume hiring process
- Tips to make it easier
- The most common challenges recruiters face when hiring in high volumes
- The use of technology in volume hiring processes
- Conclusion and recommendation of the best volume recruiting software.
What is Volume Hiring?
When you have to hire many employees in a short period, we call it high volume hiring. When a company gets a new project or plans to start a new department or set up a branch in a new location, volume recruitment arises.
In some cases, volume hiring can mean hundreds of available positions at a time.
However, it all depends on the size of the business and how many positions are available. Volume hiring often happens with seasonal hiring, a quickly growing organization, or new store openings.
If not planned properly, the entire recruitment campaign can be stressful and disorganized, leading to dissatisfaction within the team and candidates. High volume hiring is different from normal hiring as it requires a big group, and the stress gets multiplied.
6 Steps You Should Take For Smooth Volume Hiring
A volume hiring plan should include:
- Collaboration between recruiter, client, and hiring managers
- A well-planned target candidate profile
- An aggressive marketing approach
- Strategizing
- Time-saving approaches
- Quality onboarding
Collaboration
The recruiter, client, and hiring managers must collaborate to ensure a workable strategy that the recruiter understands and can address the client’s needs. The group doesn’t waste time arguing over expectations or techniques.
Go over issues with the client such as budget, time frame, preferred candidate qualities, management styles, and onboarding expectations. If there is a significant source of contention between you, work it out early rather than letting it come up at a crucial stage later, or keep coming up and creating needless headache and time-wastage.
If you are having difficulty with the hiring manager because they either don’t understand why you want to collaborate with them or butt heads with you on some significant issues, try our prior blog post – 3 Ways to Handle Hiring Managers Better.
And here are some ways to engage clients in a joint hiring plan – Recruiters! Use These Tips To Engage Clients In A Joint Hiring Plan!
Candidate Profiling
A well-prepared target candidate profile will make finding candidates much quicker and more successful. You will know how to attract well-matched candidates and be able to go through resumes with surprising ease. Does reading candidate resumes seem mindless? It shouldn’t.
First, determine the qualities you are looking for in a hire. What goals does the client want to achieve with the hire: a lot of manual labor, innovation for a new project, a massive company change, a staff rebuild after a disaster? Consider who will best address this need.
Think of experience, skills, salary expectation, personality traits, preferred management styles, goals, and approaches to achieving goals. What benefits, culture, and daily realities of the job will determine who will be motivated to succeed while working for this client?
Which groups are more likely to have people with these qualities? Some people target candidates laid off from a competitor or within the same industry or businesses in a different industry but utilize employees with similar traits.
A client with flexible work schedules might target mothers, fathers, or caregivers. If your client particularly needs love for their brand, they might target current customers. Get creative with it.
Think of people who might not typically be targeted. Look for what will most work, not any available large group.
Marketing
Recruiting always shares many similarities with marketing, but these tactics need to be in overdrive when you’re volume hiring.
You need to advertise harder and smarter than… you know what? Keep raising that bar higher. Advertise harder and smarter than you usually do, than you have previously done, and then you can even currently anticipate.
For starters, do not avoid technology and social media. In today’s world, almost all recruiting is going to require online connectivity.
Ways to market with technology:
- Make use of job search engines.
- Use LinkedIn to attract, network, and reach out to candidates.
- Send targeted emails and social media messages to interesting candidates.
- Create a well-functioning job portal on your website.
- Discuss corporate culture and benefits on the website.
- Create and share valuable and interesting information on social media, particularly where your targeted candidates will likely see it.
- Use a free online applicant tracking system.
But don’t rely solely on the internet either:
- Attend job fairs and local events.
- Run a radio ad.
- Use billboards.
- Have the client put a banner on their buildings.
- Encourage current employees to tell others about the new position.
- Make sure the job is listed at the local employment agency.
Don’t start with a bit of effort. Start aggressively. See where that gets you, and then ramp up your efforts.
Creative and strategic ads can both attract a lot of the right kind of attention and weed out less-than-perfect matches without you reading a single resume or making a single phone call first.
This technique requires that you create ads based on that candidate profile you created. You can add and highlight the information these candidates will be particularly interested in within your job descriptions. Word ads in the language your perfect candidate would use and
Whatever you do, do not send mass, un-personalized or non-targeted emails or make similar non-targeted cold calls. Not only will it waste your time because it isn’t strategic or personalized to the right candidate, but it may run good candidates away from your job!
If you end up needing to approach people “cold,” do it with the same precision as we suggested you do with your ads. Write to select people and so it in a way that they will be likely to be attracted to.
Strategizing Your Candidate Selection
Look at that target candidate profile you made. What are the 3-5 most important criteria? Make sure to include “hard” criteria such as experience and “soft” criteria like personality traits.
This will ensure you get a 3D perspective of the candidate. It doesn’t do much good to fill a spot with a qualified candidate who won’t stay because the culture or managerial style doesn’t suit them.
Those 3-5 criteria I mentioned, what are some surprising places you might find them?
For instance, if you are looking for someone with a specific skill but can’t find the said person at the right salary or with other personality traits you need, you might be someone with similar skills and is eager to learn new things.
They might be perfect for the job, and you might have looked them over to keep tortuously searching for something too specific. There is a fine line between settling for less and missing something great because you are too rigid in your view of how the right thing will look.
Don’t hesitate to follow your instincts or look at a resume from a personal perspective. If you need someone charismatic for a job and you respond well to their resume or social media profile, this is an excellent indicator that they are a candidate to consider.
If they put you off and that feeling represents criteria that are the antithesis of something good for the job, then you can probably stop there. If you need an innovative, go-getting sort of person, and the person inspires or motivates you while reading their resume, then you are well on your way.
Just make sure you can find some verifiable proof to list for your client and your legal records.
A strategic target candidate profile and priority list, as well as your current resume-reading techniques, should save you enough time that you can spend time getting to know the candidates that seem promising.
Saving Time
With volume hiring, you’ll be running many candidates through your mental processes and daily task load. It is crucial to save time.
Save yourself some time by making notes and scoring candidates while you’re reading their resumes, conducting their phone interviews, and doing face-to-face interviews so you can quickly recap. This way, you will only have to do each thing once with minimal recap time before the next step.
Applicant tracking systems like Recruiteze can save you a lot of time also. More efficiently manage resumes, send emails, and more so you can spend more time making loads of quality hires.
Onboarding
Onboarding is critical to ensuring that hire is quick, efficient, and fertile ground for success.
These general onboarding tips will help clients get the most out of their new hires:
- Prepare all the paperwork the client will need for hire.
- Introduce the employee to people they will need to know, such as their
- Immediate supervisor
- Closest team members
- HR team
- Have them run through some trial tasks.
- Show them around the building.
By thoroughly preparing the new hire, they won’t have to start cold. They will be much more confident in their first days on the job and much more likely to succeed in the long term. For more information on on-boarding, please be sure to read these related topics below:
Tips to make volume hiring easier
Whatever created the need for volume hiring, you must understand that a few tips can help you make sure you are approaching this type of recruiting correctly.
- You may have noticed a trend with finding candidates in a specific area. If that’s the case, go where the candidates are. Whether it’s LinkedIn, job fairs, Facebook, or career centers, be sure to target the areas you know you’ll find candidates in.
- Make sure your online application process is user-friendly and easy to approach. If it’s not, it can be confusing and time-consuming for the candidates. That means they won’t be as interested in the job if they have to go through quite a bit of red tape to fill out an application online. Try to minimize your online application process to a one-click system that will have five or fewer questions and text boxes that are pre-populated. It’s also a good idea to provide a way to create a social profile.
- If you don’t have a way for candidates to apply via mobile applications, it’s important to go ahead and implement this now. Sometimes, applying through a desktop computer isn’t always feasible for those who are currently working. That’s why having a mobile-friendly website that can be used easily on a handheld device or smartphone is key.
- Take a look at previous candidates that might be a good fit for the available positions. You can rediscover previous applicants if you have a talent pool, giving you a nice headstart on the volume recruiting.
- Make sure you’re using an up-to-date applicant tracking system that will help you screen resumes so that you don’t have to spend countless hours trying to find an excellent fit for available positions. Especially when you’re hiring hundreds of new employees, it’s essential to do whatever you can to shorten your overall hiring process.
- Have you ever heard of recruiting metrics? If not, get familiar with them now. This will be a great shortcut that you can use to help you with high-volume hiring.
- Make sure your overall hiring process is productive and effective. Unfortunately, recruiting can be many pushing papers, conversations on the phone, and other time-consuming tasks. Do what you can to minimize busywork by taking advantage of an applicant tracking system or recruiting software. This can help you make sure you are strategically using your time for productive tasks that get you more involved in dealing with potential top talent versus hundreds of applicants.
- Get an automated system for scheduling interviews with candidates. This can save tons of time. If you could take advantage of a system that schedules interviews, you save a great deal of time in the overall hiring process.
- Take a look at your employer brand. If it’s well known and attractive, it will do some of the recruiting work for you. Passive candidates will notice when you hire, and other employees will be more likely to offer referrals. If you don’t have an attractive employer brand, consider working on that before beginning volume hiring.
We hope these tips help you get out there and ready for volume hiring. The information here will help you find top talent without having to overwhelm yourself or the candidates!
Challenges of volume hiring
Lack of Time
Each job posting may attract around 250 applicants, depending on the type of position. The number of applications multiplies with more open positions.
So, if you have to hire ten employees, you may have to sift through 2500 applications. Apart from resume review and phone screening, you have to do several other time-consuming steps such as interviews, background screening, offer discussions, etc., before making the final offer.
Without the help of online hiring software, it will be very stressful.
Read More: How to use an online applicant tracking system to manage your job applications.
Team Limit
When the company scales, the pressure to hire suitable candidates builds upon the recruiters. They have to strike a balance between the expectations of the company and the candidate.
Things become more arduous with a small recruitment team as it becomes impossible to interact with thousands of potential candidates personally.
Cost per Hire
Sourcing, interviewing, and vetting the candidates impact the financial health of the company as well. And when it comes to volume hiring, the expenses grow exponentially.
The cost also includes posting on various job boards, running ads on different social media channels, reviewing the applicants, etc.
Online ATS: How it enables efficient and optimized Recruitment Metrics
Candidate Experience
It becomes hard to manage schedules, sending notification emails, or acknowledge receipts to the candidates. Not being in touch with candidates throughout the recruitment process can badly impact the candidate experience.
Clear communication and staying organized are the two main components to impress the candidates. With a vast number of candidates, it becomes challenging to make them feel welcomed and thrilled.
How can technology be helpful for volume hiring
An online hiring system helps you make things manageable by automating the underlying processes.
Here’s how an online hiring system would help you select high-quality talent within a short period.
Whether hiring one employee or several, you need to practice the same amount of due diligence.
Look at how the online hiring system allows you to stay on top of the volume of recruitment.
Helps Candidate Sourcing
Hiring candidates in bulk means that the company must advertise the job vacancy on all major platforms such as social media and online job boards to attract suitable candidates.
Modern online hiring software is usually integrated with all major platforms and posts the job adverts with just a single click. Online hiring software helps not only in attracting the applicants but convinces them to apply as well.
Read More: A Small Business Owner’s Guide To Recruiting
Screener Questions
A modern online hiring software will allow you to create customizable role-specific screener questions. Screener questions can help you save time immensely by allowing you to reject candidates that do not fit the role very quickly.
The best hiring process eliminates the candidates who do not match the position soon to work with a smaller qualified applicant pool.
Read More: 9 Recruitment Metrics to Gauge the Performance of your Recruitment Marketing Strategy
Communications and Notes
Communication is the key to successful recruitment. A recruiter has to do both marketing and sales. Marketing is spreading the word about the position and getting the leads, in this case, applicants. Everything after getting the lead is sales.
The most critical skill for sales is communication. Communicating effectively not only increases candidate experience, but it also helps the recruitment team work cohesively.
An online hiring system can significantly help by providing the tools to effectively communicate with all the stakeholders involved in the recruitment process.
Collaborative Hiring
An online hiring software enhances the efficiency of recruitment efforts and reduces the time-to-fill metric. All the recruiting stakeholders can see the progress, give feedback, etc. and make the recruiting process seamless and organized.
Conclusion + Best Recruitment Software for Volume Hiring
Volume hiring is a challenge, an actual test of your marketing, strategizing, and matching skills.
Start aggressively, use a targeted campaign to get more quality candidates faster, and perform compatible hires, so you don’t have to hire more people to fill the spaces of those who immediately leave.
And, don’t forget to use one of the best recruiting software for small and mid-sized businesses, Recruiteze.
Recruiteze will allow you to effectively track and manage candidates, enhance the candidate experience, and save loads of time that would otherwise be wasted on tedious and repetitive tasks.
iReformat, is another recruiting tool, aimed at resume reformatting, which reformats dozens and hundreds of resumes in less than a minute.
Try Recruiteze and iReformat for free during a 15-day free trial.