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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Sapia.ai certified to ISO/IEC 42001: Setting the global standard for Responsible AI in hiring
Ethical AI doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through transparency, rigorous science, and strong governance.
We are proud to share that Sapia.ai has achieved ISO/IEC 42001:2023, the world’s first international standard for AI management systems. This certification is independent proof that every part of our AI, from design to deployment, follows a framework of integrity, accountability, and fairness.
Governance before growth
While many providers rush AI features to market, we have taken a different path by putting governance first. Since 2018, our platform has been built on science and ethics.
In 2021, we introduced the FAIR™ Framework (Fair AI for Recruitment), setting a global benchmark for what responsible AI in hiring should look like: explainable, inclusive, and continuously tested for bias. Achieving ISO 42001 builds on that foundation, formalising years of responsible practice.
“Responsible AI isn’t new for us, it’s our foundation,” says Barb Hyman, CEO & Founder. “Our customers trust us with decisions that affect people’s lives. ISO 42001 provides further proof that our systems are built for accountability and transparency.”
Built on science and secure by design
Sapia.ai is the first AI interview company to achieve ISO 42001 certification, reflecting our approach to responsible data use, model training, and validation.
Our models are trained on behavioural data from more than eight million structured interviews and three billion words of human responses, measuring genuine skills and competencies rather than using inferred or scraped data. This foundation ensures that our AI is grounded in evidence and fairness.
We also maintain a full suite of enterprise-grade security and compliance credentials, including:
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ISO 27001 certification for information security management
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SOC 2 Type II attestation
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GDPR and UK DPA 2018 compliance
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AWS Bedrock data hosting, which ensures zero data sharing or retention with LLM providers
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Privacy by Design and regular third-party security audits
Each certification supports the same goal: giving customers confidence that innovation is backed by integrity.
What it means for HR leaders
With the EU AI Act about to reshape how enterprises govern AI, independent validation has never mattered more. ISO 42001 demonstrates that Sapia.ai already meets these standards: ethical, compliant, and explainable by design.
Our mission is to prove that AI can be both powerful and principled, helping organisations hire faster and fairer while preserving the dignity of every candidate.
Responsible AI is both good governance, good business, and it’s how brilliant hiring gets done.
FAQ: Responsible AI and ISO 42001 Certification
1. What is ISO/IEC 42001:2023?
ISO/IEC 42001:2023 is the world’s first international standard for AI management systems. It sets out how organisations should design, implement, and monitor AI responsibly. The framework ensures transparency, fairness, and accountability across all AI operations.
2. Why is ISO 42001 important for HR and recruitment?
For HR and TA leaders, ISO 42001 certification provides assurance that AI systems used in hiring meet global standards for governance and compliance. It reduces risk under new regulations such as the EU AI Act and demonstrates a commitment to fairness, transparency, and data protection.
3. How does Sapia.ai ensure ethical use of AI in hiring?
Sapia.ai’s platform is built on the FAIR™ Framework (Fair AI for Recruitment), a science-backed model for designing, testing, and monitoring AI that is fair, explainable, and inclusive. All models are validated, bias-tested, and audited regularly to ensure consistent fairness across candidate groups.
4. What other certifications does Sapia.ai hold?
In addition to ISO 42001, Sapia.ai holds ISO 27001 certification for information security management, SOC 2 Type II attestation, and full GDPR and UK DPA 2018 compliance. The platform is hosted on AWS Bedrock, ensuring that data is never shared or retained by LLM providers.
5. How does Sapia.ai differ from other AI hiring tools?
Sapia.ai is an AI-native platform built on behavioural science and more than eight million structured interviews. Unlike generic AI tools, Sapia.ai measures real skills and competencies using structured, conversational assessments that are inclusive and explainable by design.
6. What does this mean for candidates?
Every candidate who completes a Sapia.ai Chat Interview receives feedback and insights, ensuring a transparent and respectful experience. This approach restores fairness and dignity to hiring, aligning with our broader mission to humanise recruitment.
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Why generic AI belongs nowhere near your hiring process
If you’ve experimented with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you’ve probably experienced this: ask the same question twice and you’ll often get two different answers.
This is by design. Gen AI models are probabilistic. They generate answers by predicting the “next most likely word,” with an intentional dose of randomness (temperature, sampling) to make them feel more “human.”
When you use that design principle in recruitment, you’re playing with fire.
Variability = Risk
Imagine using generic AI for:
- Screening CVs for “culture fit”
- Generating interview questions
- Evaluating candidate responses
- Writing job adverts
If the same input produces different outputs depending on the day, you have a trust problem:
- Inconsistent screening = discrimination claims waiting to happen
- Variable interview guides = unfair candidate experiences
- Drifting evaluation criteria = missed talent
- Mixed messaging = damaged employer brand
Hiring decisions are high-stakes. Candidates deserve certainty and fairness. Employers need defensibility. Probabilistic creativity is great for drafting emails or brainstorming headlines. It does not belong where the output affects someone’s career.
Thin wrappers, big risks
What we’re now seeing in the market is a proliferation of “thin wrappers”. Hiring tools that are built quickly on top of open-source AI models. The logic is simple: take a model like Qwen, Mistral, or LLaMA, put a UI around it, and call it a recruitment solution.
The problem? These wrappers inherit all the instability of their foundation models. And worse, they add risk x10:
- Data governance: Who owns the candidate data once it touches that model? How is it being stored, trained, and reused?
- Bias & fairness: If outputs vary day-to-day, bias testing becomes impossible. What are you even testing against?
- Regulatory exposure: Under the EU AI Act, voice or biometric data misused in training is a compliance nightmare. Under GDPR Article 9, it constitutes a breach of sensitive data handling.
- Enterprise readiness: A startup wrapping an open model cannot match the scale, validation, or auditability that global enterprises require.
This is the hidden risk of generic AI in the hiring process. On the surface, it looks sleek, fast, and innovative. Underneath, it’s a house built on sand.
The alternative: A specialised AI system built for measurement, not inference
At Sapia.ai, we’ve taken a very different path. We’ve built a for-purpose AI system designed specifically for hiring, utilising methods published in peer-reviewed journals.
Over the last eight years, we’ve conducted more than 8 million structured, conversational interviews across 50 countries and 20 languages. Every response is scored against validated competencies, ensuring that our assessments are:
- Structured, not random: Every candidate gets the same questions. Every answer is scored against the same criteria.
- Transparent: You can see how scoring works. Every candidate gets personalised feedback.
- Governed: Our FAIR™ framework, ISO 42001 alignment, and regular bias testing mean enterprises can adopt AI responsibly.
- Loved by candidates: 91% completion rates, 9/10 experience ratings.
This isn’t a thin wrapper. It’s an AI system designed from the ground up for hiring, with fairness, science, and trust at its core.
Why should HR leaders care?
The convergence of Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, and Reskilling means the pressure on HR leaders has never been higher. Everyone wants internal mobility, but the default playbook (job boards, CV self-mapping) rarely delivers.
If the tools you adopt today are built on randomness and inference, you’re not just risking a poor candidate experience. You’re risking lawsuits, compliance failures, and reputational damage.
If instead, you invest in measurement, structure, and science, you create a workforce data asset that compounds in value, unlocking hiring intelligence, mobility pathways, and skills development at scale.
Variability is a liability
Generative AI has transformed how we create at pace and at scale. But let’s not confuse creativity with science. Recruitment isn’t about “good enough, most of the time.” It’s about fairness, rigour, and trust.
For those who want to understand more, check out our ebook Understanding Responsible AI in Recruitment.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Why is generic AI risky to use in hiring?
Generic AI models like ChatGPT or Gemini are probabilistic. They generate different answers to the same input. In hiring, that variability creates risk: inconsistent candidate screening, unfair interview questions, and drifting evaluation criteria. For employers, this opens the door to discrimination claims, compliance failures, and reputational damage. - What are “thin wrapper” recruitment tools, and why are they dangerous?
Many new hiring tools are “thin wrappers” built on top of open-source models like LLaMA or Mistral. They inherit instability from their foundational models and introduce additional enterprise risks, including unclear data ownership, a lack of fairness testing, and poor regulatory compliance. In contrast, purpose-built systems like Sapia.ai are validated, explainable, and designed for defensibility. - How does Sapia.ai ensure fairness in AI hiring?
Sapia.ai adheres to the FAIR™ Framework, a global standard that ensures AI-powered hiring is unbiased, explainable, valid, and inclusive. Every candidate receives the same structured questions, and responses are scored against validated criteria. Models undergo continuous bias testing. Independent research shows Sapia.ai reduces the gender gap in hiring by up to 36%. - Does purpose-built AI really help increase diversity in hiring?
Yes. A Monash/Gothenburg University study using Sapia.ai found that when candidates knew AI would assess their application, 30% more women applied, without reducing quality or volume. When paired with AI scoring, evaluators selected men and women equally, closing the gender gap by 36%. - How does AI improve the candidate experience?
Unlike CV screening or psychometric tests, Sapia.ai’s Chat Interview is untimed, text-based, and mobile-first. Candidates can respond in their own time and receive personalised insights, not just a rejection. Across 8M+ interviews, the average candidate satisfaction score is 9.05/10, with over 80% voluntarily leaving feedback. - Is Sapia.ai inclusive for people with disabilities and neurodiverse candidates?
Yes. Traditional hiring (video interviews, timed assessments) can disadvantage people with disabilities. Sapia.ai’s chat format removes those barriers: it’s untimed, compatible with screen readers, and designed for psychological safety. Research shows candidates with disabilities progress through the funnel at the same rate as others, ensuring hiring equity of up to 98%. - How does Sapia.ai protect candidate data?
All data is processed securely through AWS Bedrock, ensuring nothing is shared with or retained by model providers. Sapia.ai does not use demographic data (e.g., gender, age, race) for scoring, and complies with GDPR, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001 standards. Learn more about our security and compliance in our Trust Centre. - How is Sapia.ai different from generic generative AI tools?
Unlike generic GenAI, which is built for creativity, Sapia.ai is built for measurement. Every candidate is assessed against the same validated competencies, creating structure, transparency, and defensibility. This makes it enterprise-ready, compliance-aligned, and trusted by brands like Woolworths, Qantas, BT and Holland & Barrett
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Humanising hiring: the largest study of AI candidate experience ever
This is the state of hiring in 2025. Too often, candidates are ghosted, ignored, and reduced to a CV. Recruiters are forced to make decisions in data poverty, with scraps of information like grades, job titles, or where someone has worked before. Privilege gets rewarded; potential gets overlooked.
For the first time, we now have evidence that AI, when designed responsibly, brings humanity back to hiring.
The largest research study of its kind
Sapia.ai has released the Humanising Hiring report. The largest analysis ever conducted into candidate experience with AI interviews. The study draws on more than 1 million interviews and 11 million words of candidate feedback across 30+ countries.
Unlike surveys or anecdotal reviews, this research is grounded in what candidates themselves chose to share at one of the most stressful moments of their lives: applying for a job.
The findings are bold and unprecedented
- 9.05/10 average candidate satisfaction across all groups and industries
- 81.8% of candidates left written feedback — engagement at this scale has never been seen before in hiring research
- 8 in 10 candidates would recommend an employer just because of the interview
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30% more women apply when told AI will assess them, resulting in a 36% closure of the gender gap
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98% hiring equity for people with disabilities through a blind, untimed, mobile-first interview design
Candidate voices
Here’s what candidates themselves revealed:
“None of the other companies I’ve applied to do this sort of thing. It’s so unique and wonderful to give this sort of insight to people… whether we get the job or not, we can take away something very valuable out of the process.”
“That felt so personal, as if the person genuinely took the time to read my answers and send me a summary of myself… that was pretty amazing.”
Expert validation
“This study stands out as one of the most comprehensive examinations of candidate experience to date. Analysing over a million interviews and 11 million words of candidate feedback, the findings make clear that responsibly designed AI has the potential to fundamentally improve hiring — not just by increasing speed, but by advancing fairness, enhancing the human aspect, and leading to stronger job matches.”
— Kathi Enderes, SVP Research & Global Industry Analyst, The Josh Bersin Company
Proof that AI can be human
The research challenges the idea that AI dehumanises the hiring process. In fact, it proves the opposite: when thoughtfully designed, AI can restore dignity to candidates by giving them a real interview from the very first interaction, giving them space to share their story, and giving them timely feedback.
With Sapia.ai’s Chat Interview:
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Every candidate gets the same structured, role-relevant questions.
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Interviews are untimed, so candidates can answer at their own pace.
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Bias is monitored continuously under our FAIR™ framework.
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Every candidate receives personalised feedback.
This isn’t automation for the sake of speed. It’s intelligence that puts people first, and it works. Leading global brands, including Qantas, Joe & the Juice, BT Group, Holland & Barrett, and Woolworths, have all transformed their hiring outcomes while enhancing the candidate experience.
Why it matters now
Applicant volumes are exploding. Boards are demanding ROI on people decisions. And candidates expect fairness and agency. Sticking with the status quo — ghosting, inconsistent interviews, CV screening — comes at a real cost in brand equity, lost talent, and wasted time.
It’s time to move from data poverty to data richness, from broken processes to brilliant hiring.
Download the report
This is the first time candidate feedback on AI interviews has been analysed at such scale. The insights are clear: hiring can be brilliant.
👉 Download the Humanising Hiring report now to see the full findings.