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 recruiting and get better with a high volume recruiting strategy each time? Here are our pro tips.
What is high volume hiring?
High volume hiring, often termed high-volume recruiting, is the process of 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, making high volume recruiting tools crucial.
Volume hiring in recruitment, also known as volume recruitment or bulk recruitment process, 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 organizations often falls under high volume recruitment, as does hiring for nurses, other health workers, and call centre staff. A proper high volume hiring strategy is pivotal in these sectors.
During C-19, we saw the emergence of surge hiring – again, another form of high-volume hiring 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.
- 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, all are scenarios that underscore the importance of volume hiring.
In a perfect world, recruitment requirements can be anticipated and planned for using the right high volume recruiting tools, but that’s not always the case. That’s why a scalable, repeatable high volume recruiting strategy is essential.
- Cost invested in high-volume hiring
When you’re attracting, screening, selecting and hiring 250+ people at once using the bulk recruitment process, 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 high volume recruiting tools are your allies.
- 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 the future.
- 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 using an effective high volume recruiting strategy. Your competitors will be using their EVP to try and snaffle your candidates.
- Balancing diversity in your hiring pool across high-volume roles
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.
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 scalable, 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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).
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.
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 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.
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. Embracing such high volume recruiting tools ensures efficiency.
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!
It’s worth considering a candidate engagement survey for your high volume recruiting strategy. 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 as part of your bulk recruitment process.
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 high volume hiring, 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 in high volume recruiting has never been faster, fairer, or more scalable.
Establish your own volume hiring best practices and keep optimizing your volume hiring strategies. It takes some time to set up, but the rewards are well worth the effort.
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Mirrored diversity: why retail teams should look like their customers
Walk into any store this festive season and you’ll see it instantly. The lights, the displays, the products are all crafted to draw people in. Retailers spend millions on campaigns to bring customers through the door.
But the real moment of truth isn’t the emotional TV ad, or the shimmering window display. It’s the human standing behind the counter. That person is the brand.
The missing link in retail hiring
Most retailers know this, yet their hiring processes tell a different story. Candidates are often screened by rigid CV reviews or psychometric tests that force them into boxes. Neurodiverse candidates, career changers, and people from different cultural or educational backgrounds are often the ones who fall through the cracks.
And yet, these are the very people who may best understand your customers. If your store colleagues don’t reflect the diversity of the communities you serve, you create distance where there should be connection. You lose loyalty. You lose growth.
We call this gap the diversity mirror.
What mirrored diversity looks like
When retailers achieve mirrored diversity, their teams look like their customers:
- A grocery store team that reflects the cultural mix of its neighbourhood.
- A fashion store with colleagues who understand both style and accessibility.
- A beauty retailer whose teams reflect every skin tone, gender, and background that walks through the door.
Customers buy where they feel seen – making this a commercial imperative.
How to recruit seasonal employees with mirrored diversity
The challenge for HR leaders is that most hiring systems are biased by design. CVs privilege pedigree over potential. Multiple-choice tests reduce people to stereotypes. And rushed festive hiring campaigns only compound the problem.
That’s where Sapia.ai changes the equation: Every candidate is interviewed automatically, fairly, and in their own words.
- Bias is measured and monitored using Sapia.ai’s FAIR™ framework.
- Outcomes are validated at scale: 7+ million candidates, 52 countries, average candidate satisfaction 9.2/10.
- Diversity can be measured: with the Diversity Dashboard, you can track DEI capture rates, candidate engagement, and diversity hiring outcomes across every stage of the funnel.
With the right HR hiring tools, mirrored diversity becomes a data point you can track, prove, and deliver on. It’s no longer just a slogan.
Retail recruiting strategies in action: the David Jones example
David Jones, Australia’s premium department store, put this into practice:
- 40,000 festive applicants screened automatically
- 80% of final hires recommended by Sapia.ai
- Recruiters freed up 4,000 hours in screening time
- Candidate experience rated 9.1/10
The result? Store teams that belong with the brand and reflect the customers they serve.
Read the David Jones Case Study here 👇
Recruiting ideas for retail leaders this festive season
As you prepare for festive hiring in the UK and Europe, ask yourself:
- How much will you spend on marketing this Christmas?
- And how much will you invest in ensuring the colleagues who deliver that brand promise reflect the people you want in your stores?
Because when your colleagues mirror your customers, you achieve growth, and by design, you’ll achieve inclusion.
See how Sapia.ai can help you achieve mirrored diversity this festive season. Book a demo with our team here.
FAQs on retail recruitment and mirrored diversity
What is mirrored diversity in retail?
Mirrored diversity means that store teams reflect the diversity of their customer base, helping create stronger connections and loyalty.
Why is diversity important in seasonal retail hiring?
Seasonal employees often provide the first impression of a brand. Inclusive teams make customers feel seen, improving both experience and sales.
How can retailers improve their hiring strategies?
Adopting tools like AI structured interviews, bias monitoring, and data dashboards helps retailers hire fairly, reduce screening time, and build more diverse teams.
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The Diversity Dashboard: Proving your DEI strategy is working
Why measuring diversity matters
Organisations invest heavily in their employer brand, career sites, and EVP campaigns, especially to attract underrepresented talent. But without the right data, it’s impossible to know if that investment is paying off.
Representation often varies across functions, locations, and stages of the hiring process. Blind spots allow bias to creep in, meaning underrepresented groups may drop out long before offer.
Collecting demographic data is only step one. Turning it into insight you can act on is where real change and better hiring outcomes happen.
What is the Diversity Dashboard?
The Diversity Dashboard in Discover Insights, Sapia.ai’s analytics tool, gives you real-time visibility into representation, inclusion, and fairness at every stage of your talent funnel. It helps you connect the dots between your attraction strategies and actual hiring outcomes.
Key features include:
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- Representation highlights – Identify the top five represented sub-groups for each demographic, plus the three fastest-growing among underrepresented groups.
- Track trends over time – See month-by-month changes in representation over the past 12 months, compare to earlier periods, and connect the data back to your EVP and attraction spend.
- Candidate experience metrics – Measure CSAT (satisfaction) and engagement rates by demographic to ensure your hiring process works for everyone. Inclusion is measurable.
- Hiring fairness – Compare representation in your applied, recommended, and hired pools to spot drop-offs. Understand not just who applies, but who progresses — and why.
From insight to action
With the Diversity Dashboard, you can pinpoint where inclusion is thriving and where it’s falling short.
- See if your EASL candidates are applying in high numbers but not progressing to live interview.
- Spot if candidates with a disability report high satisfaction but have lower offer rates.
- Track the impact of targeted campaigns month-by-month and adjust quickly when something isn’t working.
It’s also a powerful tool to tell your success story. Celebrate wins by showing which underrepresented groups are making the biggest gains, and share that progress with boards, executives, and regulators.
Built on science, backed by trust
Powered by explainable AI and the world’s largest structured interview dataset, your insights are fair, auditable, and evidence-based.
Measuring diversity is the first step. Using that data to take action is where you close the Diversity Gap. With the Diversity Dashboard, you can prove your strategy is working and make the changes where it isn’t.
Book a demo to see the Diversity Dashboard in action.
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Neuroinclusion by design. Not by exception.
Why neuroinclusion can’t be a retrofit and how Sapia.ai is building a better experience for every candidate.
In the past, if you were neurodivergent and applying for a job, you were often asked to disclose your diagnosis to get a basic accommodation – extra time on a test, maybe the option to skip a task. That disclosure often came with risk: of judgment, of stigma, or just being seen as different.
This wasn’t inclusion. It was bureaucracy. And it made neurodiverse candidates carry the burden of fitting in.
We’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet.
Shifting from retrofits to inclusive-by-design
Over the last two decades, hiring practices have slowly moved away from reactive accommodations toward proactive, human-centric design. Leading employers began experimenting with:
- Sharing interview questions in advance
- Replacing group exercises with structured simulations
- Offering a variety of assessment formats
- Co-designing assessments with neurodiverse candidates
But even these advances have often been limited in scope, applied to special hiring programs or specific roles. Neurodiverse talent still encounters systems built for neurotypical profiles, with limited flexibility and a heavy dose of social performance pressure.
Hiring needs to look different.
Insight 1: The next frontier of hiring equity is universal design
Truly inclusive hiring doesn’t rely on diagnosis or disclosure. It doesn’t just give a select few special treatment. It’s about removing friction for everyone, especially those who’ve historically been excluded.
That’s why Sapia.ai was built with universal design principles from day one.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- No time limits — Candidates answer at their own pace
- No pressure to perform — It’s a conversation, not a spotlight
- No video, no group tasks — Just structured, 1:1 chat-based interviews
- Built-in coaching — Everyone gets personalised feedback
It’s not a workaround. It’s a rework.
Insight 2: Not all “friendly” methods are inclusive
We tend to assume that social or “casual” interview formats make people comfortable. But for many neurodiverse individuals, icebreakers, group exercises, and informal chats are the problem, not the solution.
When we asked 6,000 neurodiverse candidates about their experience using Sapia.ai’s chat-based interview, they told us:
“It felt very 1:1 and trustworthy… I had time to fully think about my answers.”
“It was less anxiety-inducing than video interviews.”
“I like that all applicants get initial interviews which ensures an unbiased and fair way to weigh-up candidates.”
Insight 3: Prediction ≠ Inclusion
Some AI systems claim to infer skills or fit from resumes or behavioural data. But if the training data is biased or the experience itself is exclusionary, you’re just replicating the same inequity with more speed and scale.
Inclusion means seeing people for who they are, not who they resemble in your data set.
At Sapia.ai, every interaction is transparent, explainable, and scientifically validated. We use structured, fair assessments that work for all brains, not just neurotypical ones.
Where to from here?
Neurodiversity is rising in both awareness and representation. However, inclusion won’t scale unless the systems behind hiring change as well.
That’s why we built a platform that:
- Doesn’t rely on disclosure
- Removes ambiguity and pressure
- Creates space for everyone to shine
- Measures what matters, fairly
Sapia.ai is already powering inclusive, structured, and scalable hiring for global employers like BT Group, Costa Coffee and Concentrix. Want to see how your hiring process can be more inclusive for neurodivergent individuals? Let’s chat.