High-volume recruitment can be a challenging prospect. It doesn’t matter if you need to hire top-quality personnel for multiple roles, or if you have a large number of applicants for a single role (or both!). The volume of information that results from multiple ongoing job requests can be overwhelming for hiring managers. This scenario requires more comprehensive and holistic hiring strategies, which is exactly what this blog explores.
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The Need to Improve Hiring Strategies for High-Volume Recruiting
You may ask yourself why you need to improve your current high-volume hiring approach when you’re already focusing on leveraging diversity hiring strategies to meet staffing requirements. The answer is quite simple: a one-dimensional strategy simply won’t cut it when it comes to acquiring great talent for advertised positions. According to this blog from Forbes, the average advertised position in the marketplace will draw applications from 118 separate prospective candidates.
Out of necessity, when you’re hiring for multiple roles, your approach will have to reflect the needs of the end client. After all, the hiring strategies for startups differ radically from the outlook of established enterprises.
Let’s examine these tips in more detail below to understand how these tactics can help you optimize high-volume recruitment.
Using PJAs in Addition to Regular Channels
A corporation requires dozens, if not hundreds, of website visitors to their career page to make one quality hire. This can compound the problem when you’re looking to fill multiple roles. In order for your hiring process to be effective, your postings need to be seen by more eyes. That means you need to expand your reach. At the same time, you must ensure that those viewing your posts comprise your target audience. Qualifying candidates at the advertisement stage can deter irrelevant applications from the outset. This is where PJAs or Programmatic Job Advertisements come into play.
PJAs can help you expand your reach, become more visible to relevant candidates, and even position your advertisement on platforms you might previously have overlooked. This approach is particularly effective because it can help to optimize your presentation in a multitude of digital spaces. PJAs can help you shortlist the best talent for multiple roles within a relatively limited span of time.
Adopting Platforms to Select Candidates
This strategy may be something already in place within your organization, but it is a common deficiency among most small business hiring teams. When it comes to high-volume recruitment, the right candidate selection platform is crucial for a successful and efficient hiring process. These platforms allow recruiters to automate specific parts of the hiring process as well as shortlist the most suitable candidates for the advertised roles.
The functionality of job platforms is very simple. They are intended to match your organization with the candidates most befitting your needs, based on their skill sets, traits, and other professional attributes. Job platforms also facilitate relationship building, a far more attractive prospect than sorting through hundreds of applications. When vetting out a candidate selection platform, be sure to keep the following in mind:
- The system’s ability to handle a high volume of applications.
- Customizability, particularly as it relates to experience assessment for specialized roles.
- The ability to determine benchmarks for hiring.
- The option to carry out customized judgment tests for various situations.
- The presence of your brand identity on the platform to differentiate your employer experience.
- The ability to automate the repetitive and time-consuming parts of the recruitment process.
Working on Better Engagement with Candidates
The unemployment rate in the Western Hemisphere, especially the United States and Europe, is currently at an all-time low. As a result, the hiring market favors employees, not employers, and your hiring strategies should reflect that. One of the ways you can strengthen your chances of success in high-volume hiring is to find ways to engage better with your candidates.
Many modern businesses employ chatbots in their hiring process, which candidates are more than happy to communicate with, as it still reflects a form of engagement between themselves and your business. Using a mix of online chatbots, automated messages, employer branding, and a multi-platform presence, you can open up several avenues of engagement with a larger volume of candidates. Remember, frequent communication and effective engagement go hand-in-hand, which is why you should leverage the following:
- Clearly communicating your hiring process timeline to candidates.
- Informing successful and unsuccessful candidates alike of their status.
- Sending frequent and relevant updates to candidates.
Putting Talent Quality First
When hiring large volumes of personnel for multiple roles, it is very easy for the quality of hire to take a backseat. However, if you want the net effect of your hiring efforts to be successful over the long-term, hiring quality talent should always be a top priority, even when doing so in significant volume. There are a number of ways you can spot and qualify the best candidate for specific job roles within your organization. For example:
- Optimize your recruitment process with the right questions to qualify candidates more efficiently.
- Be on the lookout for transferable skills that closely relate to the roles you offer.
- Give due attention to soft skills that can help smoother integration into the larger workforce.
Monitoring Your Hiring Timelines
Identifying and removing bottlenecks from your hiring process makes things easier in high-volume scenarios. This optimizes the overall recruitment protocols you already have in place. One of the key metrics hiring managers need to pay attention to are the timelines in the hiring process. You need to know how long it takes your hiring team, on average, to fulfill an open position.
Why is this important? Simply put, the longer you take to hire a replacement for an open job role, the more employee turnover will cost you. And not just in monetary terms either. Taking too long to fill open roles reflects poorly on your employer brand. Even more alarming, candidates quickly lose interest in a hiring process that takes too long. Lengthy hiring processes present a poor company culture to prospective candidates. As such, monitoring and optimizing your hiring timelines is one of the surest ways to improve your hiring strategies.
Identifying and Avoid Hiring Bias
Split-second decisions are second nature to hiring managers, even those who strive to remain free of hiring bias. While every company strives to hire based on merit and cultural fit, even in larger numbers, hiring bias might inevitably come into play, prompting hiring managers to identify and mitigate it. Even when using computers and AI, hiring bias may manifest itself when the algorithms you use derive from human experience and subsequently inherit human bias. Here are a few ways you can identify and reduce hiring bias in your high-volume recruitment:
- Employ blind hiring techniques by removing all irrelevant information from a job application.
- Assess and evaluate candidates based on actual skills instead of their background.
- Encourage transparency and consistency at every stage of the hiring process.
- Set up routine interview training for hiring managers.
- Create and implement a standard interview script or guideline.
