Whether you’re growing from 10 to 100 or 100 to 1000 people, a period of rapid growth can easily take a toll on your hiring team and recruiters if your organization isn’t prepared for a surge in company growth.
It’s why setting a precedent for high volume hiring in your organization is so critical—regardless of how frequently your hiring needs have to scale. Ensuring your HR and talent acquisition team has the hiring plan in place it needs to successfully hire multiple employees during rapid growth is the difference between hiring the right candidates and missing out on top talent.
The good news is, optimizing your hiring to help with rapid growth isn’t as challenging as we might think! There are 4 key tips you can leverage to help scale your hiring as your company grows:
- Have a hiring ‘roadmap’ in place
- Optimize your structured interview process
- Refine your new and existing roles (then, refine again)
- Automate menial recruiting tasks to save time
Now, you may be wondering, “Sounds simple enough,” but putting these tactics to work requires a bit of discipline from your entire hiring team. So, let’s go over how you can make each tip actionable for your next round of rapid growth hiring.
Before we dive in, let’s establish what high volume hiring is
High volume hiring refers to hiring numerous people for your organization in a short period of time. While it differs from traditional recruitment, many companies that experience a period of rapid growth will need to leverage high volume hiring at some point.
For many organizations, high volume hiring (otherwise known as ‘mass hiring’ or ‘high volume recruiting’) is not part of their everyday recruiting process. For example, you may not be hiring 20 people this month, and 45 next month.
High volume hiring depends largely on the side of your organization, its business objectives, and its growth trajectory. However, you’ll come to find that high volume hiring is typically used as an organization grows and teams expand (think: after fundraising rounds, investments, expansions, etc) as well as during hiring surges, after significant turnover, or when a company has undergone mass restructuring.
Now that we’ve got the definition down, let’s get into the 4 tips we mentioned above and how you can use them.
Get your hiring ‘roadmap’ or plan in place early
Even if your company has done high volume hiring in the past, there’s a staunch possibility that it wasn’t a smooth process. And that’s quite normal—hiring at scale can be a rocky road, especially if there’s no hiring roadmap or plan in place to guide your mass hiring efforts.
However, your hiring team can’t recruit the right candidates and hire the best talent for open roles if they don’t know what the future of your company’s recruitment objectives looks like.
Hence, a hiring roadmap!
A hiring roadmap is, in a nutshell, a plan of what hiring will look like in your company based on organizational growth. For example, if your company is approaching a rapid growth phase, your HR and talent acquisition teams should be communicating and aligning with senior leadership to better understand:
- The number of existing and net-new roles that will need to be filled
- The type of expertise you need to add to your company
- Budgets and KPIs around hiring new employees and moving existing employees internally
- How your hiring team will approach headcount planning for the next 1, 3, 6 months, and beyond
- What your team will do to streamline its diversity recruiting practices as you hire at scale
As you work your way through answering questions like these, the specific hiring objectives you need to set when mass hiring will ultimately become more clear.
Let’s say, for instance, that your hiring managers and recruiters understand the type of growth your company is experiencing, how much the current headcount of your company will have to increase, and when they need to begin hiring people to prepare for quick growth.
Your hiring objectives will likely differ from traditional recruiting, where you aren’t under a tight ‘deadline’ or pressure to hire for multiple open roles at one time. So, your hiring objectives may boil down to things like:
- Reducing employee turnover by leveraging internal mobility to move existing talent into open roles
- Expanding specific departments (like Product or Engineering) to support the development of new products and solutions
- Building a talent pool of candidates for seasonal positions
- Reducing time-to-fill and time-to-hire metrics based on your previous high volume hiring outcomes
Whatever your recruiting objectives, you should be able to tie or link back your hiring roadmap to your company’s growth trajectory, especially during a time of rapid growth or expansion when mass hiring is a must.
Take the time to optimize your interview process
Have you ever hired the wrong candidate? According to CareerBuilder, 74% of managers have done just that—and it can cost thousands.
Many challenges with poor hiring can be attributed to a lack of standardization and structure around recruiting and interviewing. Without structure, biases, lack of organization, and misalignment can quickly derail certain stages of your hiring process.
It’s why many companies are more frequently adopting structured hiring practices, which have been shown to be twice as effective at predicting job performance and, therefore, the right candidate for a role.
Now, structured hiring can feel pretty broad when we’re dealing with scaling your hiring or recruiting for multiple roles during a growth period. So, instead, we’ll focus on how it applies to high volume hiring.
When you’re interviewing several candidates, moving them through to the next stages of your process, have to gather insights into each candidate, and having multiple stakeholders involved, having a structured approach is going to allow you to accomplish a few key things:
- Aligning everyone involved in the interview process on what and how candidates should be evaluated based on the needs of each role
- Standardizing questions and rubrics to ensure every interview is objective and fair
- Optimizing the time you have with candidates by focusing on the most relevant details of their application
Why is this important when scaling your hiring, especially during rapid growth? Well, you’ll only have so much time to recruit and fill the many roles you’ll be hiring for, which means every minute you spend on recruiting becomes more crucial.
A structured hiring process will empower your entire team to conduct fair, objective, and effective interviews and, ultimately, hire the right candidates. It doesn’t hurt that structured interviews also provide a wealth of insight into how your hiring practices perform, which enables you to consistently optimize as you go.
Align on how you’ll source talent for open roles
Regardless of whether you’re going to hire from outside of your organization, try to source candidates through internal mobility first, or use a hybrid approach, you’ll need to be extremely clear (and aligned) on the roles you’re hiring for, at scale.
This means you’ll be focusing on two things:
- Recruiting active candidates
- Recruiting passive candidates
In other words, you’ll need to look at candidates that are actively seeking to join new companies, and those that may be passively looking but are open to new opportunities.
There are a few ways you’re going to source this talent, starting with your recruiting outreach:
- You’re going to reach out to candidates who fit your job descriptions
- You’re going to reach out to candidates within your network
- You’re going to reach out to existing employees who are candidates for roles you could fill internally
The benefits to these 3 approaches are very similar, in that you’ll not only be sourcing talent with the skills and experiences that fit your needs, but you’ll also be leveraging your team’s collective network to source talent while also offering internal mobility opportunities to existing employees.
However, you’re probably wondering, “How am I supposed to do that when we’re hiring at scale?” Let us break it down a bit further!
Create templates your team can personalize
Create templates for email and social media outreach (as well as SMS, if your team uses it) that your entire hiring team can leverage. These templates can be personalized to each candidate, but it’s important to ensure your team is aligned on these templates before you begin using and testing them!
Develop a few ideal candidate profiles you can work off of
Ideal candidate profiles are similar to those marketers use for ideal customer profiles, with the only real difference being that you’re looking to hire! The benefit of having these profiles on hand is that hiring managers, recruiters, and TA leads can use them to get everyone on the same page around the skills, experiences, and employment histories you’re team is looking for in each new role.
Use inclusive job descriptions
This may seem like a given, however, poorly crafted job descriptions can easily alienate talent that would otherwise feel encouraged to apply to your many open roles. And, seeing as many companies are hiring at scale, inclusive job descriptions can be your first line of offense when differentiating your company from the hundreds of others who are high volume hiring, too!
BONUS TIP: Align everyone involved in the recruiting process with the roles you’re hiring for, and how net-new roles may impact the internal mobility of existing employees.
Automate menial (and manual) recruiting tasks to save time
Very few recruiters have the time they would typically need to sit down and perform all of the manual tasks that comprise day-to-day recruiting, which is why many are opting for tools that allow them to automate a majority of those tasks.
For example, as a recruiter, you could be automating (if you’re not already):
- Interview scheduling and calendar management
- Candidate feedback surveys (including EEO and DEI surveys)
- Recruiting data and talent analytics reporting
- Candidate outreach and follow-up
- Screening and assessments
Those are just a few examples, but the gist of it is that, by automating these tasks, you have more time to focus on aspects of your role such as recruitment marketing, diversity recruiting, optimizing key metrics, and even eliminating the need to outsource recruitment during periods of mass hiring.
It also allows you to focus on creating a more positive candidate experience, which is an added bonus of having more time (and resources) on your hands!
There are a few ways you can start automating many of your manual recruiting tasks as you hire at scale during a growth phase:
- Onboard the right talent relationship management solution (also known as “TRM”) that will enable your whole hiring team to track, analyze, and optimize your recruiting efforts
- Create reusable outreach templates you can store and use directly in your TRM tool
- Build and save candidate feedback surveys based on questions your team feels are most relevant to helping you improve your hiring practices
- Nurture candidates with follow-up messaging you can automate
- Automate interview scheduling and calendar updates
The benefits of recruiting automation like this include:
- Boosting the productivity of every talent acquisition team member
- Reducing or eliminating altogether the reliance on agencies and third-party recruiting services
- Triggering essential workflows such as candidate updates, outreach, and nurture
- Syncing data with your HRIS and HCM tools
- Driving internal mobility with internal career boards and applications
Ready to hire the best talent, at scale?
There will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to high volume hiring that works for every organization, nor will one hiring structure work the same for every high-growth company. But that’s not the real challenge when hiring at scale—optimizing your hiring practices and recruiting process is.
To help you build a hiring strategy that empowers your team to scale recruiting when your company is in a rapid-growth stage, check out high volume hiring guide, which shows teaches you everything you need to optimize your mass hiring process.
