High volume hiring: Strategies and tools for successful recruitment

Volume hiring on a tight timeline can strike fear into even the most experienced hiring teams. After all, the fallout of failing to hire enough people often causes real pain to the business.

So, how can you tackle high volume recruiting and get better with your high volume recruiting strategy each time? In this article, we share pro tips to get the high volume recruiting process right. But first…

What is high volume hiring?

High volume hiring, also known as high volume recruiting, is the process of recruiting for many positions (50 or more) concurrently or in a very limited period of time.

Oftentimes, the 50+ roles will be of the same job type, but not always. Either way, recruiters must deal with a large number of job candidates, making high volume recruiting tools crucial.

Volume hiring in recruitment is most common in retail and hospitality, where many people have to be hired quickly for busy periods, events, and/or new store or restaurant openings. Graduate recruitment in large organizations often falls under high volume recruitment too, as does hiring for nurses, other health workers, and call center staff. So, a proper high volume hiring strategy is pivotal in these sectors.

Additionally, during the pandemic, we saw the emergence of surge hiring, another form of high-volume hiring, where recruiters had to find quality candidates and fill thousands of open positions within days.

5 challenges to overcome in the high volume hiring process

There are five main high volume recruiting challenges that organizations face:

1. Time invested in high volume hiring

Roles filled by high volume recruitment often have a highly sensitive empty chair impact.

A restaurant with too few servers, a shop with too few attendants, a call center with too few people answering the phone, or a hospital ward with too few nurses. Each scenario underscores the importance of volume hiring in 2025 and beyond.

Some recruitment requirements can be anticipated and planned for using the right high volume recruiting tools, but not all. That’s why a scalable, repeatable high volume recruiting strategy is vital.

2. Cost invested in high volume hiring

It’s easy to blow out timelines when you’re attracting, screening, selecting and hiring 250+ people at once during the bulk recruitment process. But time isn’t the only concern.

The cost to find and hire suitable candidates quickly can easily go over budget too. This is where scalable processes, talent pooling, and high volume recruiting tools are your allies.

3. Poor candidate experience during high volume hiring drives

In many industries that need high volume recruitment, your candidate is also your customer.

Often people are applying for a position because they love your brand. If they dislike the application process, you could lose them as a customer, along with their friends and family.

Getting the candidate experience right at scale isn’t easy, but it’s essential. Otherwise, your marketing department will be asking some serious questions, and it will be hard to find top talent in the future.

4. Communicating employee value proposition (EVP) during a high volume recruitment drive

Speaking of reputation, your employer brand and employee value proposition play a huge role in attracting the right applicants and creating a positive candidate experience.

You may also find that applicants in certain industries, like retail and hospitality, are easily swayed to join a competitor who tells a better story during the candidate journey.

Sometimes a candidate’s decision to take a role is related to their hourly rate. But more and more often, candidates want to work for companies that align with their values and offer learning and development opportunities. Make sure you articulate your EVP using an effective high volume recruiting strategy. Your competitors will be using their EVP to try and snaffle your candidates.

5. Balancing diversity in your hiring pool across high volume roles

A high volume hiring strategy demands that diversity be a cornerstone.

Hiring for diversity when you’re under time and cost pressure can feel overwhelming. But it’s essential that you embed diverse hiring practices in all of the hiring you do. Building a diverse team will result in better decision-making, better customer service, and a healthier bottom line.

Now you know the major high volume recruiting challenges, it’s time to put together the right volume hiring strategies to help you overcome the challenges and hire the best people.

Bulk hiring techniques have come a long way over the years, from Applicant Tracking Systems scanning and scoring CVs, to the explosion of recruitment AI now available.

Let’s take a look at the volume hiring best practices you can use to make each stage of the bulk recruitment process scalable, fast, and fair.

6 major milestones of the bulk recruitment process

There are six major milestones in the bulk hiring process: discover, engage, assess, interview, decide and validate. If you complete each one effectively, you’ll keep candidates engaged.

Milestone #1: Discover

Do the most qualified candidates know about your company’s open positions?

Remember:

Lean into your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Spend time writing a great ad that highlights your EVP, then let the ATS do the hard work of shipping said ad to multiple job boards.

Also, think about how applicants from underrepresented backgrounds can find your ad, and make it clear that everyone’s welcome, regardless of personal beliefs, preferences, etc.

For retail and hospitality, don’t forget to consider walk-in applicants. Check if you can use a “kiosk mode” or something similar inside your ATS. That way, applicants can fill in their details on an iPad rather than having paper applications pile up on a manager’s desks and get lost.

Finally, check previous applicant pools and ask for employee referrals to help identify qualified candidates.

Measure:

The performance of each advertising channel (ideally by how many successful candidates the channel attracts). Check the diversity of your applicant pool as well.

Pro tip:

People want to know what it’s like to work for your organization. Have a video on the ad with people in a similar role explaining what it’s like. If you’re in a hurry, include quotes from an employee or two instead.

Milestone #2: Engage

Once you’ve got an applicant’s attention, you need to make sure they stay interested.

Remember:

Applicants are applying for multiple positions, and the organization that delivers the best candidate experience wins. So, make communications look as one-to-one as possible.

Measure:

Application completion rate, which will tell you if your hiring process is working or if there’s something putting potential applicants off. In regard to the challenges of high volume recruiting, this could be the length of the form, a confusing requirement, or even a technical glitch.

Pro tip:

Add character to your “application received” responders. Write as you talk rather than like a bureaucrat. And don’t say “We can’t get back to everyone, so if you don’t hear from us you’ve been unsuccessful” (or similar). If you expect candidates to put energy into applying, put energy into replying.

Milestone #3: Assess

Now that you have a pool of candidates, you need to assess them.

Remember:

CVs are a poor way to assess future performance, and they only reinforce biases. This is an opportunity to disrupt standard bulk-hiring techniques with something that delights candidates and hiring managers.

Measure:

Candidate satisfaction, which will tell you how candidates find the experience, is a good indicator that offer acceptance will be healthy, and that you won’t lose customers who are candidates.

Some recruiting platforms offer candidate satisfaction surveys to help gauge applicant sentiments. You can also use your employee engagement platform for this purpose.

Pro tip:

We created Smart Interviewer, our conversational chat technology, so that every candidate could have an interview. Not only do you get detailed responses to questions, but the answers also reveal more about the candidate’s personality than any CV ever could. Using natural language processing, we’re able to build accurate personality profiles. Plus, every single candidate receives automated, personalized feedback, which they can use to improve future interviews. One supermarket client, Iceland, interviewed 50,000 candidates and received a 100% candidate satisfaction score.

Milestone #4: Interview

Once you have the results of AI chat assessments, you’ll want to interview the candidates whose scores and profiles appear to match your requirements.

Remember:

Have a diverse selection panel (especially if you have a diverse talent pool).

Also, be consistent in how you interview and assess candidates. And don’t be tempted to hire extroverts, especially in group interviews. You need a mix of personalities to build a successful team.

Measure:

Interview attendance. If there’s a significant drop-off after interview scheduling, look into why. You can’t build a successful high volume recruitment strategy if applicants don’t attend interviews.

Pro tip:

We created Talent Insights so you can easily see each candidate’s score and psychometric profile informed by their AI chat responses before you speak with them. We designed our Live Interview platform to make collecting and recording consistent data a breeze, so everyone gets a fair go (and you don’t have to sort through impossible to interpret notes after your meetings).

Milestone #5: Decide

At this point, you have a list of potential candidates whom you’ve met and spoken with. Now, you’re ready to inform candidates if they got the job or not.

Remember:

Now is not the time to fall back on “gut feelings” or “cultural fit“. Use the data you’ve collected to make informed, unbiased bulk-hiring decisions. It’s what your business needs.

Know in advance if you’ll accept a candidate with minor flags in background checks or character references in place of professional ones. Then, stick to these decisions.

Measure:

There are three important metrics to measure at this point in the high volume recruitment process:

• Offer acceptance rate: To uncover any underlying issues with how attractive your EVP or employer brand is.
• Applicants to hire rate: To understand if you could advertise less or use fewer channels in future.
• Candidates to hire rate: To understand if you can optimize the size of your interviewed candidate pool.

Pro tip:

Start onboarding the moment an employee signs. Invite them to your learning platform, or simply send them a video from their manager or the CEO to welcome them on board.

Milestone #6: Validate

Measure your success to ensure your process is working.

Remember:

Take time after the completion of each bulk recruitment process to analyze the data.

Look at the list of challenges above, and any goals you had at the start of the process, and see how you performed against them. Are you happy with your quality of hire? What about the time it took to sign new employees? Did each candidate have a pleasant experience, whether they were hired or not?

Measure:

Measure the five metrics below to properly evaluate your bulk hiring process.

• Candidate satisfaction: This will come from surveys sent to all candidates. It’s built into Sapia and most other recruitment software.
• Time to hire: The time between when a candidate is first contacted (in these volume hiring strategies, the assess stage) and when they’re hired.
• Cost per hire: All of the hiring costs, divided by how many candidates were hired.
• Offer acceptance rate: The number of offers accepted, divided by the number of offers made, multiplied by 100. If this is low, analyze your EVP and the time it took to make an offer after an interview.
• Diversity: At Sapia, we don’t collect attributes which could attract bias. We build an understanding of diversity by using Namsor in order to validate the effectiveness of our platform. Namsor takes names of applicants and derives gender and ethnicity, and we use that data to understand how effective we have been at achieving diversity at each step of the path.

Pro tip:

If you measure, learn, and optimize your high volume recruiting strategy after every completed project, you’ll make incremental improvements. This will save time and money, and increase diversity.

Bulk hiring tools that are perfect for high-volume recruiting

Technology is your friend when it comes to building scalable volume hiring strategies and embracing high volume recruiting tools. Here are four key pieces of technology to consider for high volume recruiting. There are plenty of tools out there, so this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Applicant tracking system

Your ATS will help you post ads, screen resumes, bulk communicate with applicants, and collect data. When working within a high volume recruiting strategy, you should also use it to build talent pools and pipelines for future roles. Doing so will improve future time to hire metrics.

Interview automation

AI assessment tools like Sapia give every single applicant a conversational chat interview. As such, the quickest payback you will get on volume hiring is an investment in interview automation.

Interview automation can enhance your high volume recruitment process, making it more efficient (and pleasant) for everyone involved. This will help you save time and release the budget for automation in other areas of recruiting. Embracing such high volume recruiting tools ensures productivity.

Sapia meets the needs that challenge many modern businesses. How do they manage high volume recruitment processes in a streamlined and cost-effective way, while still delivering a great candidate experience and quality hiring decisions? With Sapia, you simply leverage the latest in data analytics and tech to maximize efficiency and effectiveness, and deliver quality candidate feedback. Doing so creates a fresh and engaging candidate experience that ensures a positive reputation in the marketplace.

Candidate experience surveys

Consider sending candidate engagement surveys as well.

Each survey should ask questions to reveal how well your EVP is resonating. Then you can compare candidate engagement scores with new employee engagement scores and exit interviews to understand if you’re delivering on your EVP as part of your bulk recruitment process.

Onboarding

Integrating your onboarding software with your ATS (or choosing one with built-in onboarding features) allows you to start onboarding and engaging candidates as soon as they sign their contracts. This is a dream for high volume hiring, as it allows companies to complete workplace health and safety, and even procedural training, before a new employee walks in the door.

Find qualified candidates in less time

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed throughout the high volume hiring process. This is especially true in the face of soaring candidate expectations. But there’s good news: the technology to support recruiters in their bulk hiring tasks has never been faster, fairer, or more scalable.

Establish your own volume hiring best practices and keep optimizing your volume hiring strategies. It takes time to set up, but the rewards are well worth the effort.

Looking for the best way to bulk hire for your enterprise organization? Sapia simplifies the process by offering automated chat-based interviews to all applicants. Scores are then automatically given so recruiters can quickly zero in on the most suitable candidates. Book a demo to learn more.

FAQs about high volume hiring

What does successful high volume hiring look like?

Successful high volume hiring delivers quality candidates on time and within budget while creating positive experiences for everyone involved. You’ll see high offer acceptance rates, strong candidate satisfaction scores, and diverse hiring outcomes. The process feels smooth and predictable, with clear metrics showing improvement over time. Most importantly, your new hires perform well and stay with the company, proving you’ve made smart hiring decisions at scale.

How do I keep candidates engaged throughout the high volume hiring process?

Keep communication personal and timely, even when hiring hundreds of people. Send immediate confirmations, regular updates, and personalized feedback at every stage. Use conversational language instead of corporate jargon. Provide clear timelines and stick to them. Give every candidate a meaningful assessment experience that showcases your company culture. And finally, make the process feel special, so candidates stay excited about joining your team.

How does Sapia.ai simplify high volume hiring for enterprise organizations?

Sapia automates the interview process through chat-based conversations that assess every candidate fairly and consistently. Our platform then builds detailed competency profiles and automatically scores candidates, helping recruiters quickly identify the best fits. Plus, enterprise teams get actionable insights, streamlined shortlisting, and personalized onboarding plans. This eliminates manual screening bottlenecks while delivering exceptional candidate experiences that strengthen your employer brand. The result is faster, smarter hiring decisions at any scale.

About Author

Laura Belfield

Head of Marketing