High-volume recruiting is quite a common term for the HR department. Some industries that often have a lot of job vacancies to fill and use high-volume recruiting include technology, healthcare, and retail. However, high-volume recruitment often causes organizations in these industries “headaches” because they need to fill so many positions in such a short amount of time but still require high quality for each hire.
What Is High-volume Recruiting?
High-volume recruiting or mass hiring is simply a type of recruitment that focuses on sourcing and hiring large numbers of candidates within a short period of time. This process can be done through a variety of means, such as online job boards, job fairs, social media, and employee referral programs. High-volume recruiting is often used by companies that are experiencing rapid growth or who have high turnover rates.
The Difficulties That Come with High-volume Recruitment
Since the volume is large and the time is short, high-volume recruiting may absolutely pose a chain of challenges:
Time Pressure
The biggest challenge with high-volume recruiting is the time crunch. When you are trying to hire a large number of employees within a limited period of time, you will not have the luxury of taking your time to interview and assess each candidate thoroughly. According to Ideal, 52% of talent acquisition leaders acknowledge screening candidates from a large applicant pool is always the most time-consuming and the hardest part of their job.
Therefore, the time constraints can lead to making hasty decisions and hiring candidates that are not a good fit for the position of your company. Even worse, the time pressure when recruiting employees in great numbers may also lead to other obstacles, such as time and money wasting. Therefore, it is critical to have a clear idea of what you are looking for in a candidate and to set up an efficient system for screening and interviewing candidates.
Budget Constraints
As always, time and money often go together, and in the recruitment process, they do again. Hiring employees in great numbers at once can strain your budget, especially if you are using expensive recruiting methods such as headhunters or job boards, regardless of the average cost per hire. This can be a big challenge for organizations with great demands for manpower but little budget. Usually, the shorter time you have and the larger the numbers of employees you require, the more money you have to spend on recruiting methods to achieve the goal.
In order not to be over budget, recruiters may need to get creative with their hiring strategies. For example, you could use social media or employee referral programs to reach a larger pool of candidates without breaking the bank. Unfortunately, this leads to the third challenge – heavy workloads.
Heavy Workload
The process of hiring a large number of employees within a short time and with a limited budget is definitely overwhelming for your talent acquisition team. Recruiters may feel like they are constantly playing catch-up and may struggle to keep up with the demand. More candidates come, more paperwork, more phone calls, emails, and a dozen things to handle. This will soon lead to burnout, mistakes being made, and good candidates slipping through the cracks. That’s why it is important to have a plan in place to manage your workload efficiently. One good way to ease the process is to use an applicant tracking system (ATS) or talent management system to help you keep track of candidates and streamline the process, or consider scaling up your recruitment team. Alternatively, you could delegate tasks to other members of your team or outsource some of the work to a staffing agency.
Quality of Hires
Above all, quality should not be sacrificed for quantity, but with high-volume recruiting, this can be a real challenge. When you’re trying to hire a lot of employees quickly, it can be difficult to give each candidate the attention they deserve. This often leads to rushed interviews and hasty decisions, which can result in candidates who are not a good fit for the position or company. In addition, when recruiters are under a lot of pressure, they may be more likely to make mistakes, such as overlooking important qualifications or failing to vet candidates properly. As a result, the quality of hires will be straightforwardly affected one way or another. A little tip here is to optimize the system for screening and interviewing candidates. In addition, consider using assessment tools to help you explore the true potential of a candidate and make more informed hiring decisions.
Hiring-bias
This is one of the primary causes leading to low hiring quality. Since we have a lot of vacancies to fill, it is more likely to happen that we overlook a candidate’s potential just because they do not “fit” our ideal candidate profile. Consequently, we may end up hiring someone who is less suitable for the job just because they are “better on paper.”
Should-know Tactics to Strengthen Your High-Volume Recruiting Strategy
High-volume recruitment is never easy, but at least we can do something with it to make it less challenging.
Leverage the Free Resources but Do Not Rely on Them
To lift the burden of the high budget off your team’s shoulders, you should take advantage of all the free resources, such as social media channels (Facebook and LinkedIn). However, remember that “free” does not get along well with quality, so you have to be selective.
In-house First, Outside Later
By this, we mean internal talent mobility. This is not a solution but a good way to fill as many vacancies as possible before resorting to external recruitment. The first step is to identify good potential candidates within the company who could move into the role. You can do this by looking at performance review data, employee engagement surveys, or even just talking to managers and team leads about who their top performers are. Once you have a list of potential candidates, reach out to them and gauge their interest in the role. If they are interested, start working on getting them trained and up to speed. This will not only help fill the vacancy quickly, but it will also help develop your employees and retain top talent.
Technology Is Your Ally
The recruitment process can be optimized to the fullest by applying HR-specific technology solutions, such as recruitment management systems. With the support of advanced technology, you can boost the performance and productivity of the talent acquisition team, so when it comes to high-volume recruiting, you and your team will have fewer problems to worry about.
Train Your Recruitment Team
Obviously, a strong recruiting team will be able to accomplish tasks better than a young and inexperienced one. So, training your recruitment team should be one of the first things you do to improve your high-volume recruiting strategy.
Try Not to Rush
As you are under pressure to fill a lot of vacancies quickly, it can be tempting to lower your standards or make hasty decisions. However, this is usually a recipe for disaster. It is important to remember that quality should always come before quantity. So, take your time, do your due diligence, and only hire the best candidates. For those organizations who often have seasonal mass recruitment, it is better to prepare everything in advance so that you will not be stuck in a last-minute situation. And for those who do not frequently hire employees in high volume, you should consider outsourcing to a staffing agency that specializes in high-volume recruitment.
Bottom Lines
In brief, recruiting staff in large volumes is a challenging process for any organization. By knowing the difficulties that may arise during the process, you will be able to prepare a better high-volume recruiting strategy and avoid making mistaken decisions. Furthermore, the tips we provided in this article also contribute to helping you optimize your recruitment process and strengthen your talent acquisition team.
