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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How leading retailers are using AI-Native Hiring
Retail leaders have embraced AI to improve supply chains, automate checkout, and enhance customer experience. But what about finding the people who deliver that customer experience?
AI brings incredible possibilities to supercharge how retailers hire, develop, and retain talent.
At Sapia.ai, we helped iconic retailers like Woolworths, Starbucks, Holland & Barrett, and David Jones reimagine hiring from the ground up – replacing resumes, ghosting, and gut feel with structured, ethical AI that delivers performance and fairness at scale.
The Retail Problem: Volume, Turnover, and Ghosting
Retail is high volume. It’s high churn. And it’s high stakes for candidate experience:
- Candidates ghosted during slow hiring cycles
- Store managers are overloaded with admin
- Recruiters are overwhelmed with 100,000+ seasonal applicants
- Talent is overlooked due to bias or unfair screening processes, not a lack of potential
And yet, most hiring still relies on broken tools: resumes, forms, manual processes, and outdated systems.
Sapia.ai: The AI-Native Hiring Engine Built for Retail
Our platform automates the entire “apply to decide” journey, leveraging AI & automation to streamline the hiring process & bring intelligence into retail hiring.
Smart Interviewer™: Mobile-first, chat-based, structured interviews for a holistic candidate assessment.
Live Interview™: AI-driven bulk interview scheduling without calendar chaos.
InterviewAssist™: Instant interview guide generation.
Discover Insights: Embedded analytics to track hiring health in real-time.
Phai: GenAI coach for career and leadership potential.
Unlike resume parsing or generic chatbots, Sapia.ai assesses soft skills, communication, and culture fit using natural language processing and validated psychometrics. It’s ethical AI built in, not bolted on.
From Application to Interview in Under 24 Hours
Candidates don’t want to wait. They don’t want to be ghosted. And they don’t want resumes to define them.
> 80% of Sapia.ai chat interviews are completed in under 24 hours.
We see consistently high completion across categories: grocery, merchandising, home improvement, and luxury retail.
“It was fast, fair, and I actually got feedback. That never happens.” – Retail Candidate Feedback
Real Impact, Across Every Retail Category
Sapia.ai powers hiring for millions of candidates across diverse retail environments:
| Impact of Sapia.ai on Retail Hiring in 2024 | |||
| Category | Hours Saved | FTEs Saved | Cost Saved |
| Grocery | 272k | 131 | $6.5m |
| General Merchandise | 193k | 93 | $4.6m |
| Specialty Retail | 133k | 64 | $3.2m |
| Home Improvements | 103k | 50 | $2.5m |
| Merchandising | 22k | 11 | $0.5m |
| Luxury | 9k | 4 | $0.2m |
The savings created by intelligent, AI-native automation have unlocked team capacity, impacted retailers’ P&L, and improved store readiness.
Speed That Delivers Real ROI
Every candidate gets interviewed instantly. No waiting. No bias. Just fast, fair, data-backed decisions. This generates real impact for retailers who previously relied on slow, outdated processes to handle thousands of applicants.
- Woolworths: 5,000 hours saved in a single week
- Starbucks: Doubled hiring capacity, 91.8% completion
- Holland & Barrett: Time to hire cut from 20 to 7 days
- Woodie’s: 3x more ethnic minorities hired in 3 months
DEI by Design, Not by Mandate
With Sapia.ai:
- 98% of candidates opt in to demographic questions
- Zero adverse impact detected across gender, ethnicity, and disability
- 1.5–3x improvements in diverse hiring rates
DEI Fairness Scores (based on actual hiring data):
Gender: 1.03 (vs customer baseline of 1.01)
Ethnicity: 1.15 (vs customer baseline of 0.74)
Why? Because ethical AI removes what humans can’t unlearn: bias. With a candidate experience that is inclusive by design, retailers can ensure fairness in screening, and measure it in hiring.
Candidate Experience = Brand Experience
Retail candidates are your customers. And the experience you give them matters. We have built a brand advocacy engine that delights candidates and gives you the data to prove it.
- 9.2/10 CSAT across 2.6 M+ retail candidates
- NPS: 78 (30+ points above industry benchmark)
- 87% more likely to recommend the company’s products post-interview
Responsible, Explainable AI Built for Retail
Not all AI is created equally. Since 2018, Sapia.ai has been built on a foundation of responsible AI:
- No use of resumes or scraped data
- Hosted securely via AWS Bedrock
- Claude-powered LLM scoring with model cards and explainability
- Independent audits on bias, privacy, and methodology
“We can’t go back to life before Sapia.ai. We used to spend half the day reading resumes.”
— Talent Lead, Starbucks AU
What’s at Stake: Time, Brand, and Revenue
Every day spent using outdated hiring methods costs retailers:
- Wasted recruiter hours
- Lost revenue from unfilled roles
- Bad churn that drains training budgets
- Lower customer satisfaction from poor-fit hires.
With Sapia.ai, you get the productivity unlock retail hiring demands, and the intelligence your talent deserves.
Want to see how fast, fair, and human retail hiring can be?
Book a demo
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Reinventing the Competency Framework: A Data-Driven Approach for the AI Era
We can’t hide from reality anymore. Talent needs are shifting overnight, and AI is redefining what it means to work. Traditional talent frameworks are no longer fit for purpose. At Sapia.ai, we believe the future of talent strategy lies in a smarter, fairer, and more adaptive way of defining what great looks like.
Our AI hiring platform is built on the largest proprietary dataset of interview answers globally – we’re a data company at heart, and we’ve seen the power of data-driven people methodology in transforming how organisations hire and retain good talent.
So, when it came to building a new Competency Framework that could be leveraged globally for hiring for any role at any scale, of course, we used a ground-up, data-led methodology that bridges the gap between organisational psychology and AI.
Why Rethink Competency Frameworks?
Conventional frameworks are typically crafted through expert interviews and focus groups. While valuable, they tend to be subjective, static, and too slow to keep pace with evolving job demands. As roles become more fluid and technology augments or replaces task-based skills, organisations need a new way to understand the human capabilities that genuinely matter for performance.
We wanted to identify enduring, job-agnostic competencies that reflect what drives success in a modern workplace – capabilities like adaptability, resilience, learning agility, and customer orientation.
(Why competencies and not just skills? Read why here.)
Our Approach: Where AI Meets I/O Psychology
Sapia.ai’s methodology is rooted in the science of human behaviour but powered by cutting-edge AI. We asked two core questions:
- Can we make competency discovery agile, scalable, and evidence-based?
- Can we use AI to automate the process without losing the rigour of traditional psychology?
The answer to both: yes.
We began with a rich dataset of over 37,000 job descriptions across industries and role types. Using large language models (LLMs) and advanced NLP techniques, we extracted over 200,000 behavioural descriptors. These were distilled down through a four-step process:
- Behavioural Descriptor Extraction
- Clustering and Labeling
- Cluster Analysis by I/O Psychologists
- Thematic Categorisation and Definition of Competencies
This resulted in a refined list of 25 human-centric competencies, each with clear behavioural indicators and practical relevance across a wide range of roles.
Built to Scale. Built to Adapt.
Our framework is intelligent, but importantly, it’s adaptive. Organisations can apply this methodology to their own job descriptions to discover custom competencies. This bottom-up, role-data-led approach ensures alignment to real work, not just theoretical models.
And because the framework integrates directly with our AI-powered hiring tools, you get a connected system that brings your talent strategy to life.
Our framework comes to life in the following tools:
- Job Analyser – Starting with a job description, it creates a unique competency profile for each role to build tailored structured interviews in seconds.
- Structured Chat-based Interviews that assess candidates’ responses according to the competency profile for consistent candidate assessment.
- Talent Insights Reports from every interview with deep reasoning and explainability for fair and objective hiring decisions.
- Phai Career Coach for internal mobility and employee growth that considers their competency strengths and career aspirations.
The Future of Talent Acquisition & Development is Competency-First
Skills alone cannot predict success. Competencies do. As AI continues transforming how we work, Sapia.ai’s Competency Framework offers a scalable, scientific, and fair foundation for hiring and developing the talent of tomorrow.
Want to see how it works? Download the full framework.
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It’s Time to Stop Hiring for Skills, and Start Hiring for Competencies
If you’re a CHRO or Head of Recruitment at an enterprise today, chances are you’ve been inundated with messages about the importance of “skills-based hiring.” LinkedIn’s recent Work Change Report (2025) is full of compelling data: a 140% increase in the rate at which professionals are adding new skills to their profiles since 2022, and a projection that by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs today will have changed.
This is essential reading. But there’s a missed opportunity: the singular focus on “skills” fails to acknowledge the real metric that talent leaders need to be using to future-proof their workforce — competencies.
Skills vs Competencies: The Crucial Distinction
- Skills are task-specific capabilities. Think Python programming, Excel, or even negotiation.
- Soft skills refer to interpersonal or behavioural qualities like adaptability, communication, and resilience.
But skills on their own — even soft ones — are generic, disjointed, and often disconnected from real-world performance. In contrast:
- Competencies are clusters of skills, knowledge, behaviours and abilities that are observable, measurable, and context-specific.
Put simply, competencies answer the all-important question: Can this person apply the right skills, in the right way, at the right time, to deliver results in our environment?
Why Competencies Matter More Than Ever
The Work Change Report outlines a future where job titles are fluid, roles evolve quickly, and AI is a constant disruptor. This creates three massive challenges for hiring at scale:
- Roles are changing faster than static skill frameworks can keep up
- Job candidates may have non-linear, cross-functional backgrounds
- The shelf-life of technical skills is shrinking rapidly
Skills alone don’t tell us whether someone can succeed in a role that will look different 12 months from now. But competencies can. Because they measure not just what a person knows, but how they apply it.
Adaptive Talent: The New Competitive Advantage
The LinkedIn report highlights a critical insight: organisations now prioritise agility in entry-level hiring. And there’s a good reason for that. With professionals expected to hold twice as many jobs over their careers compared to 15 years ago, adaptability is not just a nice-to-have. It’s core to success.
But you can’t measure agility with a keyword on a CV. You measure it by looking at competencies like:
- Learning agility
- Change resilience
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Problem-solving in ambiguous contexts
When you shift the focus away from skills to behavioural competencies that can be defined, observed, and assessed in structured ways, you open yourself up to a much more dynamic and more useful way of managing talent.
Building a Competency-Based Talent Framework
To hire effectively at scale, particularly in a technology-driven world of work, talent leaders must shift their lens:
- Define Role-Specific Competencies: Move beyond job descriptions based on qualifications or vague skill sets. Break roles down into measurable competencies that reflect current and emerging performance expectations. This step is crucial for organisations to be able to accurately assess role-fit in the next stages. Sapia.ai does this automatically, taking job descriptions and building role-specific competency models in seconds.
- Assess Competencies Fairly and Objectively: Use structured behavioural interviews, ideally at scale. These provide a much more accurate picture of a candidate’s readiness than self-reported skills or credentials. Sapia.ai’s AI powered interviews enable competency assessment, at scale.
- Build Pathways for Development and Internal Mobility: A competency framework makes it easier to identify transferable strengths, development gaps, and future-fit potential. It gives employees clarity on how to grow within the business. Using an AI-powered coach can help ensure that talent is being continuously developed against the organisation’s competency framework.
The Future of Work Requires Depth, Not Just Breadth
LinkedIn’s data shows that people are learning more skills more quickly than ever. But the real question for talent leaders like you is: Are those skills being applied in ways that drive value? Are we hiring for task proficiency or performance?
The truth is that the organisations that will thrive in an AI-driven, skills-fluid economy aren’t the ones chasing the next hot skill. They’re the ones designing systems to identify, develop and scale competence.
Keen to Shift to Competencies, but Lacking a Framework?
Sapia.ai has developed a comprehensive Competency Framework using a data-driven approach. Download the full paper here.