Even the most efficient recruiters can struggle to meet high-volume hiring demands. Finding qualified candidates by the dozens, or even more, is nearly impossible without the help of some specialized tools. For high-volume recruiting, it’s vital to have a recruiting engine that generates results.
When it comes to high-volume hiring, however, it can feel like there isn’t enough time in the day to track down qualified candidates. Even with some help from recruiting engines, some recruiters have difficulty meeting the demands of companies looking to fill a high volume of positions all at once. On average, companies need approximately 180 people to visit their career sites to make one hire. Building a high-volume recruiting engine is only half of the battle for recruiters these days. Now, they need a recruitment engine that drives itself.
What is high-volume recruiting?
High-volume recruiting, or mass hiring, is when a company hires a large number of varying applicants in a short period. This means that manual search methods will have to take a back seat to automated recruitment engines. Searching through your candidate pool to find the right person for a job will not fulfill the needs of the company looking for hundreds of candidates in a limited timeframe. Recruiters need to spend that time engaging candidates and building relationships with them.
There are many effective tools to gather candidates en masse without taking the time to find them yourself. Relying on outdated tactics will only make the job more difficult in the long run. Innovating the ways candidates are found and ultimately reducing the time-to-hire for the client is more achievable than ever with today’s technology and online hiring tools. Here are some of the most effective ways to maximize your recruiting methods.
1. Actively Hire For The “Always Open” Roles
With large candidate pools for roles that are often entry-level positions, the choice of candidates is seemingly unlimited. The catch, however, is that candidates in these pools often need ongoing management to reduce turnover and fall-off rates. Even still, recruiters can expect a lot of no-shows and cancellations of interviews. Virtual interview tools like Qualifi allowed Five Star Call Center to re-engage 50% of candidates who weren’t responding back to them.
For roles that constantly need staffed, engage with candidates quickly during the hiring process. This is often done for higher-value candidates, but it is essential to employ the same tactics with entry-level positions as well. Passive recruiting is a thing of the past, so companies have been more proactive in their communication to significant effect. These days, human resources make and maintain contact with applicants early on to build relationships and draw them into their organization and away from competitors.
2. Make Your Application and Interviewing Process Accessible
The accessibility of the application process can be a make-or-break aspect for potential candidates. Suppose an application takes too long or requires too much information or time to fill out. In that case, candidates will likely move on to a more manageable application altogether. Streamlining the application process by requiring only the most vital information can draw in more applicants. It takes 36 to 42 days to fill an average position in the US, meaning every moment in the process counts if you're going to meet your hiring goals.
In addition, fine-tuning the interview process by using on-demand phone interviews instead of video calls will allow candidates to interview quickly and enables you to screen the interviews for the most qualified applicants. Efficiency is critical, and playing scheduling tag does not bode well for efficiency.
Hiring for high-volume or high-turnover industries is a whole different ball game. Read some of our tips and tricks here.
3. Find Ways to Engage Quality Along With Quantity
Just because you need to hire a large number of people doesn’t mean you should ever sacrifice the quality of the hires for quantity. The average cost to hire an employee is $4,425, so it’s important to make sure the candidates are still of the highest quality available. Implementing relevant assessments and pre-recording virtual interviews can help identify qualified candidates quickly. It is crucial to find and engage quality talent early and often to give them the best chance of successfully making it through the hiring process.
While it is a challenge to constantly contact hundreds of candidates at once, swift and clear communication often leads to a successful hire. Utilizing an interview scheduling tool that helps you share a hiring timeline can help keep candidates engaged in the process and limit the guesswork on their end. If they aren’t right for the role, consistent communication allows for you to retain them for future jobs and fosters a healthy relationship moving forward.
Understanding what you envision as a perfect candidate is also a helpful practice. Creating a persona for your idea of a qualified candidate and clearly defining what that looks like will help you identify those qualities as you search through candidates. Use the marketing concept of buyer personas to create candidate personas that focus your search and save time by identifying ideal candidates.
4. Revamp Your Candidate Sourcing
Innovating the methods you use to find your candidates in the first place is another effective way to boost your efficiency and hiring rate.
Step 1: Use your best employees to zero in on other qualified talents through referral programs.
Step 2: Offer better salaries and benefits. The best candidates are looking for more than just decent money.
Step 3: Enter the name of your ideal candidate into the LinkedIn Recruiter search bar will generate a search based on similar candidates.
Be sure to utilize existing databases as well. You can review data on talent pools through your hiring software to acquire qualified candidates. With Qualifi, you can even access past on-demand interviews for similar roles, giving you more insight into the quality of the candidate and helping you fill positions faster.
Essentially, the true role of the recruiter can be compared to that of the researcher. Utilizing every resource to gather the information needed to get the job done. This means diving into a state’s unemployment database, military employment websites, college job fairs, and workplace development centers to find potential candidates for high-volume hiring. The best recruiters find a way to use every resource at their disposal to fill the role.
5. Track Your Metrics
It is crucial to track your metrics throughout the hiring process. Without data that details the effectiveness of your work, it can be challenging to improve and troubleshoot your weaknesses. Here are some examples of essential metrics you should be tracking:
- Quality-of-source. This refers to the effectiveness of the specific source your candidates come from. Understanding how effective your source-of-hire (SoH) is can be vital because you can begin to spend less time on the sources that prove least fruitful.
- Cost-per-hire. In high-volume recruiting, the common practice is to distribute your recruitment budget across a wide range of channels to attract as many candidates as possible. This is a myth and leads to poor results more often than not. Instead, tracking sourcing analytics to determine where to focus your recruitment budget allows you to acquire the highest quality candidates in large volumes. This generates the highest return on investment and leads to more efficient recruiting in the long run.
- Time-to-hire. It is most important to get people through the hiring process and into jobs as fast as possible in mass hiring situations. Every moment that is not spent hiring someone is a moment spent losing a candidate to the competition. Determine internally what your time-to-hire should be and track it across your company to ensure you meet it.
Using these metrics to track your efficiency will lead to a more productive daily process for hiring. There are plenty of other metrics you can use to optimize your hiring efficiency as well. Every second counts in high-volume hiring.
After taking all of this information in, you may still be wondering the best way to kick your high-volume hiring process into high gear. That’s where Qualifi can help. With Qualifi, invite hundreds of candidates at once and immediately shave an entire week off of your time-to-hire.
