When high volume hiring, it can become almost too easy for hiring teams to get caught up in the manual tasks that make high volume recruiting a hassle.
Add to that the need to source and hire the best candidates, and it’s no wonder pressures mount. However, aside from candidate quality, speed is also crucial when hiring at mass, which can present an entirely different subset of challenges, such as:
- Applicants abandoning time-consuming job applications
- Candidates dropping off during the recruitment process
- A lack of standardization around hiring practices
- Little collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers
- Employee turnover
- Recruiter burnout
As your company opens more roles, these challenges can exasperate your entire recruiting process, making high volume hiring difficult to execute.
So, before you dive into your next round of high volume recruitment, consider these 4 simple yet powerful rules for optimizing your high volume hiring approach.
Focus on aligning recruiters and hiring managers with your high volume hiring objectives
Before hiring at mass, it’s critical that you align the recruiters on your hiring team with your hiring managers, as well as your organizations’ objectives for high volume hiring.
Beyond aligning everyone around the tools and resources you use, you’ll want to ensure that the team members responsible for sourcing and engaging candidates understand the roles you’re hiring for, why the roles are open, and the skills/experience/knowledge they should look for in each candidate.
This alignment must encompass every stage of your hiring process—from sourcing through to interviews and offers. Having a structured hiring strategy in place, for example, can help ensure that those involved in each part of your hiring process understand why you’re hiring at mass. This includes collaborating on job postings, role outlines, stakeholder inclusion, and more.
That means your team must ask and answer questions like:
- What roles are we hiring for, and why?
- What base criteria are we looking for?
- Which specific skill sets, knowledge, and experience should candidates have?
- Which stakeholders will be involved in the hiring process, and when?
At the same time that you align your team around the ‘why’ of high volume hiring at your company, you should also consider aligning on resource management.
Consider the time (recruiter hours) and resources that are dedicated to sourcing, screening, interviewing, and assessing candidates when you have several open requisitions at once.
That’s a lot of “man-hours” to put towards hiring, so how can you optimize the use of your hiring team’s time? Here are a few of our top tips:
- Automate as much of your process as possible (like outreach, nurture, scheduling, and more)
- Leverage templates for candidate outreach to send effective yet time-friendly touchpoints
- Use screening tools that help you quickly yet fairly screen applications
- Take advantage of your teams’ online networks to find candidates through referrals and social media sharing
Automation will be your “best friend” when high volume recruiting, as it will help ease the stress and energy spent on tedious, manual recruiting tasks. However, remember automating tasks or steps in your recruiting process shouldn’t distract from a diverse, inclusive, and equitable hiring strategy.
Streamline your recruiting outreach efforts
High volume recruiting grows even more challenging when you have a full pipeline of talent that you now have to nurture and engage. Often, this comes down to generic email messaging or templated social media outreach, but with so many candidates applying for multiple positions at once—and being recruited by other companies, too—you have to engage talent differently.
Enter, recruitment outreach.
Well-crafted recruiting outreach (such as email) draws candidates in and builds their curiosity about an open role. However, email nurturing isn’t a one-and-done initiative. That’s why writing great recruiting emails is an important step in your hiring process, especially as you engage candidates in your recruiting funnel.
The most difficult step in the process is ensuring your emails and messaging are differentiated enough to stand out from the pack and elicit a response from the top talent you’ve sourced. Especially important when filling multiple roles at one time, the way your team manages outreach efforts can be the difference between hiring the right candidates and alienating the talent you need.
To help your recruiters make the most of their time spent on outreach, follow these 10 easy outreach tips:
- Start by doing your research
- Create a replicable, customizable outline
- Write compelling subject lines that lead to more opens
- Factor in all the pertinent details
- Personalize your messaging (every time)
- Always have a clear CTA
- Leverage your email signature
- Use social media to connect with candidates
- Have a follow-up or nurture process in place
- Measure the results of your outreach
Once you have a process in place for how you craft, send, and follow-up with your outreach, you can test how well your outreach efforts are performing and where you can both automate outreach and optimize the time spent on engaging candidates. You can also leverage our 7 email templates in your next round of candidate outreach.
Get your team on board with recruitment marketing
Even though you’re hiring at mass, candidates will still carefully consider and vet your company just as you vet them and their applications. This is why employer branding and recruitment marketing are crucial components of a high volume hiring strategy.
In a nutshell, recruitment marketing (which leverages your employer brand) is a set of tactics or methodologies you can use to market your employer brand to candidates. Done well, recruitment marketing builds awareness and visibility around your company culture to help attract top talent. In order to attract the right talent, you’ll need to market your organization not only to active job seekers but passive ones, too
However, recruitment marketing only works when your entire hiring team is on board. If only a few recruiters are leveraging your employer brand, their personal networks, referrals, and social media to reach both passive and active candidates, recruitment marketing won’t be as successful.
The good news is that there’s more than one way to use recruitment marketing to attract candidates when hiring at scale. For example, your company’s social media pages are a great place to post open roles, but they’re not the only channel through which you can leverage employer brand to market your organization to candidates.
You can use inclusive job descriptions, for instance, to showcase your company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). You’d be surprised how far an effective job description can go in attracting the right candidates as you hire at mass.
Here are 5 easy steps you can follow to leverage your recruitment marketing when high volume hiring:
- Start by increasing awareness by targeting both active and passive candidates
- Then, focus on generating interest by creating candidate-centric content
- Next, start nurturing decisions with engaging outreach and open communication with candidates
- Finally, drive candidates to action with a positive candidate experience and a structured interview process
You can learn more about using recruitment marketing for hiring candidates in our other blog post here!
Use your data to improve your high volume recruiting process
As hiring at scale can quickly become a messy process, it’s better that your hiring team has a holistic understanding of how your recruitment strategy is working each time you dive into high volume hiring.
And, given your company may not consistently recruit at scale, knowing what works, what doesn’t, and where your team can improve its recruiting is critical to sourcing and hiring the right candidates.
This is why recruiting metrics and hiring data are so crucial when high volume hiring. Not only can you leverage this data to optimize your entire hiring pipeline, but they also help you understand where your sticking points are and what you need to improve upon to successfully hire a high volume of talent at once.
For example, hiring data can help you answer key questions like:
- How many candidates do we currently have in our talent pipeline for each role, and which stage of our hiring process are they currently in?
- Where have our largest number of candidates come from? (Referrals, job boards, social media platforms, Career pages, etc)
- How often are candidates abandoning our application process?
- How much time is it taking our recruiters to fill open roles?
When it comes to the data you “should be” tracking, this will depend entirely on what your high volume recruiting objectives are—however, it’s safe to assume you’ll want to track and measure some of the basics. Let’s take a look at 4 data points or metrics you can start with:
- Source of hire—understand which paid and organic sourcing initiatives are driving the most ROI. You may find, for instance, that certain job boards drive more traffic and applications to your open roles, while paid job ads only work for certain positions.
- Conversion rate—looking closely at your conversion rates for each role can tell you where, and why, you may need to eliminate any unnecessary steps in your recruiting process. For example, you may have too many steps in your interview process that are taking up otherwise valuable time for both recruiters and candidates.
- Diversity of candidates—To ensure you’re driving diversity in recruiting, look closely at the data around the diversity of your candidate pipeline. You can gather this data and measure this metric by leveraging things like EEO dashboards, candidate surveys, hiring feedback, and more.
- Sourcing effectiveness—Similar to the source of hire, sourcing channel effectiveness can show you which channels are driving the most ROI for your recruiting efforts. With this metric, you measure conversions per channel.
Optimize your high volume hiring with these 4 simple rules
Whether you’re high volume recruiting for the umpteenth time in your career, or you’re just diving into hiring at mass, having the right tactics in place will help you hire the right talent, at scale, quickly, and efficiently. Keep these 4 rules in mind when optimizing your high volume hiring:
- Focus on aligning recruiters and hiring managers with your high volume hiring objectives
- Streamline your recruiting outreach efforts
- Get your team on board with recruitment marketing
- Use your data to improve your high volume recruiting process
If you’re embarking on your next round of high volume hiring, grab your free copy of our high volume hiring eBook for easy, actionable tips that will help you source and hire the right talent, at scale.
