Volume hiring on a tight timeline can strike fear into even the most experienced recruiter! More often than not the fallout of failing to hire enough people causes real pain to the business, managers, and you. 

So, how can you tackle high volume hiring and get better and better each time? 

Here are our pro tips.  

What is high volume hiring?

High volume hiring is recruiting for many positions (50 or more) concurrently or in a very limited period of time. Often the 50+ roles will be of the same job type. It also implies high volumes of applicants coming through for recruiter’s review. 

Volume hiring in recruitment is common in retail and hospitality, where many people have to be hired quickly for busy periods, events, and new store or restaurant openings. Graduate recruitment in large organisations is often high volume recruitment, as is hiring for nurses, other health workers and call centre staff.

During C-19 we saw the emergence of surge hiring – again, another form of high-volume where thousands of people are needed in-store or in the contact-centre within days.

High volume recruiting challenges to overcome

Apart from the sheer logistical challenges, there are five major high volume recruiting challenges organisations 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 centre with too few people answering the phone, or a hospital ward with too few nurses, both are nightmarish scenarios. 

In a perfect world, recruitment requirements can be anticipated and planned for, but that’s not always the case. That’s why a scaleable, repeatable high volume recruiting strategy is essential.  

2. Cost invested in high-volume hiring

When you’re attracting, screening, selecting and hiring 250+ people at once, it’s not just timelines that can blow out.

The cost can easily go over budget too. This is where scalable processes, talent pooling and technology tools are your friends.

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 have a bad experience, you’ll not only probably lose them as a customer, they’ll tell their friends and family too. 

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 you’ll find it much harder to find good applicants in 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 candidates. You may also find that candidates in certain industries (like retail and hospitality) are easily swayed to join a competitor who tells a better story. 

Sometimes a candidate’s decision whether or not to take a role is related to their hourly rate. But more and more often, candidates want to work for a company that aligns with their values and offers learning and development opportunities. Make sure you articulate your EVP well. Your competitors will be using their EVP to try and snaffle your candidates.  

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

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. 

Volume hiring strategies

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 attract 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 scaleable, fast and fair. 

Six major milestones of the bulk recruitment process 

There are six major milestones in the bulk-hiring process. Discover, engage, assess, interview, decide and validate. Each stage is equally important, and most stages of the bulk-hiring process can be streamlined so that they’re highly scalable. (The Interview and Decide stages are the most time and resource-intensive, but they’re well worth the investment.)

1. Discover 

Ensuring the right potential applicants find you is the first step in getting volume hiring in recruitment right. 

Remember:

• Lean into your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Spend your time writing a great ad highlighting your EVP and let the ATS do the heavy lifting of shipping to multiple job boards. 
• Think about how applicants from underrepresented backgrounds can find your ad, and make it clear everyone’s welcome. 
• For retail and hospitality, don’t forget walk-in applicants. Check if you can use a ‘kiosk mode’ or similar with your ATS so applicants can fill in their details on an iPad rather than having paper applications pile up on manager’s desks (and get lost!).
• Check previous applicant pools and ask for employee referrals. 

Measure: 

• Performance of each advertising channel (ideally by how many successful candidates the channel attracts)
• The diversity of your applicant pool

Pro tip:

• People want to know what it’s like to work at your organisation. Ideally, 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.   

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 organisation who delivers the best candidate experience wins. Make communications look as 1:1 as possible.

Measure:

• Application completion rate. This will tell you if the process is working, or if there’s something putting potential applicants off. This could be the length of the form, a confusing requirement, or even a technical glitch.

Pro tip:

• Put some character into your application received responders. Write as you talk rather than like a bureaucrat. And don’t say: we can’t get back to everyone 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. 

3. Assess 

Now you’ve got a pool of candidates; you need to assess them. 

Remember:

• Sadly, CVs have proven themselves to not be a good way to assess future performance, and they only reinforce biases. This is an opportunity to disrupt the usual bulk-hiring techniques with something that delights candidates and hiring managers.

Measure:

• Candidate satisfaction. This will tell you how candidates find the experience. It’s is a good indicator that offer acceptance should be healthy, and that you won’t lose customers who are candidates. Some recruiting platforms offer candidate satisfaction surveys, or you can choose to use your employee engagement platform. 

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 an accurate personality profile. Every single candidate receives automated, personalised feedback, and they love it. One supermarket client, Iceland, interviewed 50,000 candidates and received a 100% candidate satisfaction score. 

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).
• Be consistent in how you interview and assess each candidate. Especially in group interviews, don’t be tempted to hire extroverts. You need a mix of personalities to build a successful team.  

Measure:

• Attendance. If there’s a significant drop-off, look into why.

Pro tip: 

• We created TalentInsights 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 LiveInterview platform to make collecting and recording consistent data easy, so you can ensure everyone gets a fair go (and you don’t have to sort through impossible to interpret notes after your meetings).

5. Decide

Now you’ve got a list of fantastic candidates, you’ve met them, and you’re ready to invite some of them to join you. 

Remember:

• Now is not the time to fall back on ‘gut feeling’ or ‘culture fit’. Use the data you’ve collected to make informed, unbiased bulk-hiring decisions. 
• Know in advance if you’ll accept a candidate with minor flags in background checks or character references in place of professional ones. Stick to the decisions when you’re in those situations. 

Measure:

• 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 in fewer channels in future.
• Candidates to hire rate – to understand if you can optimise 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 welcoming them on board and saying how excited you are to have them.

6. Validate

To ensure your process is working, it’s essential to measure your success.

Remember: 

• Book in an hour or two a week or so after the end of each bulk recruitment process to analyse the data.
• Take a look at the list of challenges above, and any goals you had at the start of the process and see how you tracked against them.

Measure:

• 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 elapsed 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, consider any issues with your EVP or the time it takes 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 (www.namsor.com) 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:

• Measure, learn and optimise your high volume recruiting strategies every single time you complete a project, and you’ll find you improve each time. 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. Here are four key pieces of technology to consider. 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. You should also use it to build talent pools and pipelines for future roles. 

Interview automation

An Ai assessment like Sapia means you can give every single applicant a conversational chat interview. The quickest payback you will get on volume hiring is an investment in interview automation. Interview automation can truly enhance your high-volume recruitment process and help you make it more efficient (and pleasant) for everyone involved. This will help you get your time-back quickly, and release the budget for automation in other areas of recruiting.

Sapia meets the needs that challenge many of my clients today – 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 leverage the latest in data analytics and tech to maximize efficiency & effectiveness; and the candidate experience is fresh and engaging, with great feedback! The product is great and constantly evolving!

Read: The Ultimate Guide to Interview Automation Employee Engagement 

It’s worth considering a candidate engagement survey. In this survey you can 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. 

Onboarding

Integrating your onboarding software with your ATS (or choosing one with onboarding included) allows you to start onboarding and engaging candidates as soon as they sign their (automated) contract. This is a dream for getting workplace health and safety and even procedural training done before a new employee walks in the door. 

Good news: It’s only going to get easier

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re doing high volume hiring in an environment where there’s elevated unemployment or other challenging factors. The good news is that as much as the world may be getting more complicated, and as much as candidate expectations are soaring, the technology to support recruiters has never been faster, fairer or more scaleable. 

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

https://sapia.ai/blog/six-reasons-automating-interviews-automation/

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To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we have a great eBook on candidate experience.

Hiring with heart is good for business: candidate experience in C-19 times. Sapia launches its Candidate Experience eBook. This book provides an insight into the changing face of the candidate experience. 

If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the job searchers, that time is now. Unemployment in Australia has passed a two-decade high. The trend is similar for other countries. That means there are a lot more candidates in the market looking for work.

With so many more candidates, the experience of a recruiting process matters more. What are candidates experiencing? Are they respected, regardless of whether they got the job or not? Is their application appreciated. Are they acknowledged for that?

This may be the time to rethink your candidate experience strategy.

Here are two big reasons to prioritise improving candidates’ experience:

1. There is a much higher value attached to it – both for candidates and your organisation. 

This story won’t be unfamiliar to you:  An Australian based consulting firm advertised for a Management Consultant and decided to withdraw the advert after 298 candidates had applied. That was in their first week of advertising.

When candidate supply outstrips demand, that is bound to happen. Inundation of your Talent Acquisition team becomes an every-day thing. Employers are feeling swamped with job applications.

Being effective is much harder when there are more candidates to get through every day.

High-volume recruiting issues become further aggravated when two additional dynamics come into play:

>> When the role for which you are hiring requires a relatively low skill level.

In the example provided above, the Management Consultant role had several essential requirements which should have limited applications.  Included in the applicant list were hoteliers, baristas, waiting-staff and cabin crew (it’s heartbreaking). So when it comes to roles with a much lower barrier to entry, the application numbers can quadruple.

The traditional ‘high-volume low-skill role’ has now become excruciatingly high-volume. This trend is being seen across recruitment for roles like customer service staff, retail assistants and contact centre staff.

>>When your organisation is a (well-loved) consumer brand. 

Frequently, candidates will apply to work for brands that they love. Fans of Apple products, work for Apple. They also apply to work and get rejected in their millions. So, how do you keep people as fans of your brand when around 98% of them will be rejected in the recruiting process? That’s not only a recruiting issue – it’s a marketing issue too.

Thousands of organisations and their Talent Acquisition teams are grappling with both dynamics right now.

The combination of unemployment and being in Covid-19 lockdown means that consumer buying is being impacted. Their confidence is down. Buying is also down. With people applying for more jobs and spending less as consumers, the hat has somewhat switched. For many who were consumers, they have now become candidates. That may be how they are currently experiencing your brand. As candidates first, customers second.

If customers are candidates and candidates are customers, is there a reason for their experience to be fundamentally different? 

Candidate experience is defined as the perception of a job seeker about an organisation and their brand based on their interactions during the recruiting process. Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey.

Is there a difference? It’s all about how the human feels when interacting with your brand. A person is a person, regardless of the hat they are wearing at the time!

All about the human experience.

Millions, even billions, of dollars are spent each year by organisations crafting a positive brand presence and customer experience. Organisations have flipped 180 degrees to become passionately customer-centric. It makes sense to do so. Put your customers first, and that goes straight to the bottom line.

What is perhaps less recognised is the loss of revenue and customer loyalty which is directly attributed to negative candidate experiences.

How about those loyal customers who want to work for your brand? They eagerly apply for a job only to get rejected.

2. Candidate Experience improvements have become super easy to implement.  

For those who have tried in the past, you may well know that it can take an extraordinarily long time to ‘define’ a Candidate Experience strategy, create its metrics, find a budget and then execute on it.

Have a look inside the ‘too hard’ basket and there you may well find many thousands of well-meaning ‘candidate experience’ initiatives, that are still lying dormant! So many want to focus on candidate experience, but may shy away from doing so. This is because it’s perceived as time-consuming and expensive.

Plus, right now there is so much on which CHROs need to focus. From ensuring workers’ wellbeing to enabling remote working. Who has the time to also worry about the experiences of candidates?

However, that has changed. Boosting candidate experience is no longer too hard, too expensive, nor too time-consuming. Technology becomes more manageable, quicker and cheaper over time. Also (borrowing from Moore’s law), its value to users grows exponentially.

Candidate Experience Playbook: Hire with Heart

The good news is that for those organisations who genuinely want to improve candidate experience, it has become much easier to do so. Finally, it is possible to give great experiences at scale while also driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

Win-win is easily attainable. In the Sapia Candidate Experience Playbook, read how organisations are hiring with heart. All by creating positive experiences for candidates while also decreasing the workload for the hiring team.

A good candidate experience doesn’t cut it in the current recruitment climate. It’s the most basic thing that hiring managers need to fulfil, but if that’s all you are delivering you are going to miss out on talent. 

You need to hire fast (interview-to-offer in 24 hours) and your process needs to be frictionless – ie. you can’t be asking candidates to jump through hoops to prove themselves to you. No games, no CVs, no third interviews, no asking them to make time for an interview when you are free. 

Those days are over. The global talent shortage is being felt across every industry and recruitment needs to be re-imagined.

And, there’s only one solution: automation. 

Woolworths Hiring Process: Automation is the key

Yes, it can be hard to cut through a lot of hype around automation, but it is possible that leaders can develop a  clear-eyed way to think about how these technologies will improve their organizations.

This is not about replacing jobs of HR managers, but giving them the tools to help them grapple with the challenges in the current hiring environment.  It’s about empowering HR teams to be able to do the seemingly impossible – and be good at it. Or to put it another way, help them create a human-centric organization with super-human intelligence.

Introducing Video Interview

This was the challenge that Woolworths Group brought to us.  Even before the pandemic, the Group was realising that they needed to invest in more efficient processes to keep up with the recruitment demands of the company. But remaining fair about who they hired and treating candidates with respect was not up for compromise. 

They had just recovered from surge hiring needs brought on by COVID and wanted to make sure they never had to go through that as a team again. The task had been slow and manual,  took too long to hire and the tech they had used was not reliable. 

They were looking to redefine their whole approach and realised they could not deliver a positive experience to candidates without the help of technology. 

Sapia’s current chat-based candidate assessment was chosen as a front-runner after an extensive search for tools, given the fact that it meant that bias was removed from reviewing candidates and because it also meant they could give every candidate constructive feedback – even if they didn’t get the job.

However, there was still an opportunity to solve for the sheer volume of video interviews that had to occur in the next step.

This made Woolworths a perfect candidate to roll out Sapia’s Video Interview product, a video interview delivered via conversational chat that candidates can do in their own time, and doesn’t require any scheduling input from hiring managers.

Woolworths Interview Process: 24-hour time to decision

This means anyone can now run a fully automated hiring process that is both fair, candidate-friendly and insanely fast. Woolworths was the first customer to go live with Video Interview and as the largest private employer in Australia it was a true test of the effectiveness of the product.

Within one week of going live Smart Interviewer, our text chatbot, had interviewed more than 10k candidates, all without bias. The introduction of an end-to-end fully automated chat based assessment process where every candidate is interviewed and every candidate receives personalised feedback transformed their recruitment for candidates.

But, what was transformational for hiring managers was that the top candidates were then able to do Video Interviews through the platform by video recording answers to a set of questions on their phone. No-one had to schedule an interview and hiring managers could quickly assess the best candidates for the role by simply watching a video – also, in their own time. 

Time-to-decision is as little as 24 hours in some cases with the Group achieving an NPS score of 8.8. 

Automation the answer for the current climate 

The issues that Woolworths faced are felt by most large companies hiring at scale. With the introduction of Video Interview, Sapia can now create and deliver a solution that streamlines the Woolworths recruitment process and improves the efficiency of large-scale recruitment for other companies as well.

• Giving everyone a fair go at getting the job 
• Giving every candidate feedback 
• Keeping it frictionless for candidates
• Removing the need to schedule any follow up interviews asynchronously 
• Empowering hiring managers with objective intelligence about every candidate 
• Enabling hiring managers to have the final say by watching a simple video in just a few minutes.

If you’d like to know more about Video Interview and how we have integrated video into our product suite without compromising fairness, please get in touch.

You can also download our Woolworths case study.