Let’s face it — high volume recruiting isn’t easy. It can mean the HR business partners need to manage multiple recruitment campaigns and sort through thousands of applicants to fit the right fit for the role and organization.
So, how can recruiters make the process more manageable? The good news is that, in 2021, there are a plethora of tools and strategies available to do just that. Whether it’s utilizing artificial intelligence, implementing automation practices or polishing up your candidate experience, there are effective tools no matter why you need to fill a large number of roles.
Before we break down those strategies, though, it’s important to define what we mean by high volume recruiting and why an organization may need it.
At its core, high volume recruiting is a quick and significant increase in roles that must be filled. This will be relative to different organizations, of course. For instance, if your company typically fills 150 roles per quarter, a high volume recruitment campaign may mean that you now need to fill 800 or 1,000 roles in a given quarter.
Meanwhile, smaller firms that fill about 5 or 10 roles per quarter may view an increase to 50 roles as a high volume need.
Each organization will have different driving factors for high volume recruiting too. If a company moves from a start-up to a major scale-up phase, thanks to a large influx of capital, they will need to find talent to fill new departments and roles. Similarly, when a business opens a new branch or expands to a new market, they will need to quickly fill a large number of roles in order to begin operations. Businesses may also need to recruit a high volume of seasonal workers — in agriculture or retail, for instance.
These different drivers, and the current size and operational model of your business should dictate a unique approach to your recruitment needs. However, there are a few core principles that can serve nearly every surge in talent acquisition.
Programmatic Recruitment
As data-centric technologies and artificial intelligence have continued to rapidly evolve in recent years, recruiters have increasingly looked to programmatic recruitment tools to help manage several processes.
These platforms can review the role requirements, analyze your talent CRM data and cross reference market trends and talent demographics to create much more effective job ads.
Depending on the platform, it can then recommend where the job ads should be displayed, increasing the likelihood that you will attract many more qualified candidates.
Programmatic recruitment platforms with integrated job advertising capabilities will probably also contain customizable budgeting tools that allow you to control cost-per-click rates, display frequencies and overall spend rates. This sort of “set it and forget it” technology provides confidence to recruiters that their job advertising is effectively reaching as many candidates as their budget allows, without having to constantly manage the campaign.
Automation
While it may seem like a flashy new buzzword that often gets thrown around with little meaning, automation can be a major tool for high volume recruitment needs. Much like programmatic recruitment, automation sees technology play a major role in managing your recruitment efforts.
These powerful technologies can assist in sourcing talent, track the performance of your sourcing efforts in real time, provide overviews of where different applicants are at in the hiring process, vet applicants and even communicate with talent on your behalf.
One of the most interesting tools to emerge in recent years within the automation and AI space is the HR chat bot. These pieces of technology can advise candidates on the next steps of their recruitment, answer questions and more. These communications can exist wherever your potential candidates are, too. For instance, chat bots can be web-based and appear on career pages of your company site, they can be integrated into your social media platforms and they can even communicate with talent via SMS.
This provides a seamless candidate experience, while unloading a ton of manual work for recruiters. When you’re facing a major volume spike in your recruitment needs, this kind of resource can mean the difference between quick success and a long, drawn out recruitment.
Improve Your Talent Onboarding
Implementing powerful technologies can help relieve a large part of the manual workload for a high volume recruitment campaign, but talent acquisition partners need to take advantage of their increased work capacity by ensuring the candidate onboarding process is as smooth as possible. Particularly in high volume scenarios, if candidates have a poor onboarding experience, they may become disenchanted with the role, scuttling your recruitment efforts.
It’s important that HR professionals and hiring managers communicate the brand values and the company culture.
Again, technology has a role to play here — particularly given all of the remote or hybrid work models.
Employee experience videos and images can help convey what’s really like to work inside a company. What is the social experience like? How do people get along? Is this company the right fit for a candidate?
Instagram can be a particularly powerful tool in distributing this kind of content. Other social media profiles can be effective in promoting company culture and values, too. YouTube or Facebook can be used to livestream company events, and new platforms like Clubhouse can be an effective way for prospective talent to listen to the organization’s top thinkers.
By creating a richer candidate experience, organizations have the power to attract better talent at higher volumes, exponentially increasing their high volume recruiting efforts.