It’s all too easy for recruiting teams to get bogged down in the manual procedures that make high-volume recruitment so inconvenient.
Add to it the desire to find and hire the best people, and it’s simple to understand why tensions are rising. Aside from candidate quality, punctuality is crucial when recruiting in bulk, which provides a unique set of challenges, including the following:
- Applicants abandon long job applications.
- Candidates who remove their names from consideration during the hiring process
- a lack of consistency in recruitment strategies
- Interaction between recruiters and hiring managers is inadequate.
- Employee turnover
- Recruiters’ exhaustion
As your company grows, these roadblocks may wreak havoc on your whole recruiting process, making high-volume hiring unfeasible.
Consider the four basic yet powerful rules for optimizing your high-volume hiring strategy before embarking on your next round of high-volume recruitment.
Concentrate on aligning your recruitment and hiring managers with your high-volume hiring objectives.
Prior to mass hiring, it is critical to match the recruiters on your hiring team with your recruitment managers and your organization’s high-volume hiring objectives.
Aside from aligning everyone around the tools and resources you employ, you’ll want to make sure that team members in charge of identifying and engaging candidates understand the roles they’re filling, why they’re open, and what skills/experience/knowledge they should look for in each candidate.
This synchronization must take place throughout the hiring process, from sourcing through interviews and offers. Having a structured recruitment strategy in place, for example, can help ensure that all stakeholders engaged in the hiring process understand why you’re hiring in bulk. This includes, among other things, working together on job descriptions, role descriptions, and stakeholder involvement.
This means that your team will have to ask and answer questions like the ones below:
- What roles are we looking to fill, and why are we doing so?
- What are the primary criteria that we are looking for?
- What specific skill sets, knowledge, and experience are expected of candidates?
- Which stakeholders will be involved in the hiring process, and when will they be involved?
Structured hiring is beneficial to recruiters.
In addition to aligning your team behind the ‘why’ of your company’s high volume recruitment, you should consider aligning around resource management.
Consider the time (recruiter hours) and resources necessary to identify, screen, interview, and evaluate candidates when you have a large number of open requisitions.
That’s a lot of “man-hours” to spend on recruitment; how can you make the most of your hiring team’s time? Here are a few of our top suggestions:
- Automate as much of your process as feasible (like outreach, nurture, scheduling, and more)
- Make use of candidate outreach templates to create effective yet time-efficient touchpoints.
- Use screening tools to help you filter applications quickly and fairly.
- Make use of your team’s online networks to find candidates via referrals and social media sharing.
When it comes to high-volume recruitment, automation will be your “best friend,” as it will help relieve the tension and energy spent on time-consuming, manual tasks. However, keep in mind that automating tasks or stages in your recruiting process should not distract from your aim of hiring a diverse, inclusive, and fair staff.
Streamline your recruiting outreach initiatives.
High-volume recruiting becomes even more difficult when you have a full pipeline of talent to develop and engage. Often, this is performed with a generic email message or templated social media outreach, but with so many individuals applying for several opportunities at the same time — and being solicited by other organizations — you must engage talent differently.
This takes us to the topic of recruitment outreach.
An effective recruiting outreach strategy (such as email) attracts prospects and piques their interest in an open job. Email nurturing, on the other hand, is a continuous process. As a result, sending efficient recruitment emails is crucial to your hiring process, especially when contacting prospects farther down the recruiting funnel.
The most difficult part of the procedure is making sure that your emails and messages stand out from the crowd and get a response from the top talent you’ve discovered. When filling many positions at the same time, how your team performs outreach activities might be the difference between attracting the right people and alienating the talent you need.
Use these 10 basic outreach strategies to help your recruiters make the most of their outreach time:
- Begin by doing research.
- Make a reusable and adaptive outline.
- Make fascinating subject lines that result in higher open rates.
- Take into account all relevant information.
- Customize your communications (every time)
- Add a clear call to action.
- Utilize your email signature to its full potential.
- Use social media to connect with candidates.
- Create a process for follow-up or nurturing.
- Examine the effectiveness of your outreach.
Once you’ve built a process for designing, emailing, and following up on outreach, you can review its effectiveness and discover opportunities for automation and efficiency of time spent engaging candidates.
To hire new employees, use recruitment marketing.
Prospects will thoroughly examine and assess your business in the same manner that you vet them and their applications, even if you hire in mass. As a result, employer branding and recruitment marketing are key components of any strategy that includes a high volume of hiring.
In a nutshell, recruitment marketing refers to a set of strategies or approaches for selling your employer brand to candidates. When done successfully, recruitment marketing promotes awareness and exposure regarding your company’s culture, contributing in the hiring of top talent. To attract the finest employees, you must publicize your company to both active and passive job seekers.
On the other hand, recruitment marketing works best when your whole recruitment team is on board. Recruitment marketing will be useless if just a few recruiters utilize your employer brand, personal networks, referrals, and social media to reach passive and active prospects.
The good news is that when hiring at scale, there are various ways of recruiting candidates. For example, although your company’s social media platforms are a wonderful place to publicize open jobs, they are not the only way to leverage your employer brand to attract candidates.
For example, you may use inclusive job descriptions to highlight your company’s commitment to diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI). When recruiting in mass, you’d be surprised how far an outstanding job description can go in terms of attracting the top candidates.
Here are five basic tactics for maximizing your recruitment marketing efforts during high-volume recruiting periods:
- Begin by educating both active and passive candidates.
- Then, focus on boosting interest by creating candidate-centric content.
- Following that, start nurturing options by making proactive contact and having open and honest conversations with candidates.
- Finally, provide a terrific applicant experience and perform scheduled interviews to entice prospects to take action.
Make the most of your data to improve the efficiency of your high-volume recruiting operation.
Given how quickly recruiting at scale may degrade into a chaotic process, it is vital that your hiring team thoroughly understands how your recruitment strategy is doing each time you engage in extensive volume hiring.
And, since your business may not be able to recruit at scale on a consistent basis, knowing what works, what doesn’t, and how your team can improve its recruiting is critical to identifying and hiring the right people.
This is why, when recruiting at a high volume, recruitment analytics and hiring data are crucial. This data may be used to not only optimize your whole recruitment pipeline, but it can also help you discover bottlenecks and areas for improvement in order to efficiently acquire a large number of talent at once.
For example, recruitment data may help you solve crucial issues such as:
- How many candidates for each job do we currently have in our talent pipeline, and where are they in the recruitment process?
- Where did the vast majority of our candidates come from? (Among other things, referrals, job boards, social media platforms, and career sites)
- How often do candidates withdraw from our application process?
- How long do our recruiters take to fill open positions?
Recruitment analytics
The data you “should be” gathering is entirely contingent on your high-volume recruiting goals—however, it’s safe to presume you’ll want to monitor and evaluate some of the essentials. As a starting point, consider the four data points or metrics listed below:
Source of hire—compare the ROI of sponsored sourcing tactics to organic recruiting strategies. For example, you may realize that some job sites produce more traffic and applications for your open positions, but paid job adverts are only beneficial for certain openings.
Conversion rate—paying close attention to your conversion rates for each position may highlight where and why your recruiting process needs to be streamlined. For example, your interview process may have excessive steps, consuming valuable time for both recruiters and candidates.
Diversity of candidates—To ensure that you are fostering diversity in recruiting, carefully assess the diversity of your application pipeline. This information may be gathered and tracked through EEO dashboards, candidate surveys, and hiring feedback, among other techniques.
Similar to the source of hiring, the efficacy of your sourcing channels may reveal which channels deliver the best return on investment for your recruiting efforts. This metric is used to keep track of conversions by channel. You may maximize your high-volume recruitment by using these four key criteria.
Whether you’re recruiting at scale for the umpteenth time in your career or are new to mass hiring, having the appropriate processes in place will allow you to find the right individuals quickly and effectively. Keep the following four recommendations in mind while optimizing your high-volume recruiting:
- Concentrate on aligning your recruitment and hiring managers with your high-volume hiring objectives.
- Streamline your recruiting outreach initiatives.
- To hire new employees, use recruitment marketing.
- Make the most of your data to improve the efficiency of your high-volume recruiting operation.
