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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New Research Proves the Value of AI Hiring
A new study has just confirmed what many in HR have long suspected: traditional psychometric tests are no longer the gold standard for hiring.
Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the research compared AI-powered, chat-based interviews to traditional assessments, finding that structured, conversational AI interviews significantly reduce social desirability bias, deliver a better candidate experience, and offer a fairer path to talent discovery.
We’ve always believed hiring should be about understanding people and their potential, rather than reducing them to static scores. This latest research validates that approach, signalling to employers what modern, fair and inclusive hiring should look like.
The problem with traditional psychometric tests
While used for many decades in the absence of a more candidate-first approach, psychometric testing has some fatal flaws.
For starters, these tests rely heavily on self-reporting. Candidates are expected to assess their own traits. Could you truly and honestly rate how conscientious you are, how well you manage stress, or how likely you are to follow rules? Human beings are nuanced, and in high-stakes situations like job applications, most people are answering to impress, which can lead to less-than-honest self-evaluations.
This is known as social desirability bias: a tendency to respond in ways that are perceived as more favourable or acceptable, even if they don’t reflect reality. In other words, traditional assessments often capture a version of the candidate that’s curated for the test, not the person who will show up to work.
Worse still, these assessments can feel cold, transactional, even intimidating. They do little to surface communication skills, adaptability, or real-world problem solving, the things that make someone great at a job. And for many candidates, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, the format itself can feel exclusionary.
The Rise of Chat-Based Interviews
Enter conversational AI.
Organisations have been using chat-based interviews to assess talent since before 2018, and they offer a distinctly different approach.
Rather than asking candidates to rate themselves on abstract traits, they invite them into a structured, open-ended conversation. This creates space for candidates to share stories, explain their thinking, and demonstrate how they communicate and solve problems.
The format reduces stress and pressure because it feels more like messaging than testing. Candidates can be more authentic, and their responses have been proven to reveal personality traits, values, and competencies in a context that mirrors honest workplace communication.
Importantly, every candidate receives the same questions, evaluated against the same objective, explainable framework. These interviews are structured by design, evaluated by AI models like Sapia.ai’s InterviewBERT, and built on deep language analysis. That means better data, richer insights, and a process that works at scale without compromising fairness.
Key Findings from the Latest Research
The new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, put AI-powered, chat-based interviews head-to-head with traditional psychometric assessments, and the results were striking.
One of the most significant takeaways was that candidates are less likely to “fake good” in chat interviews. The study found that AI-led conversations reduce social desirability bias, giving a more honest, unfiltered view of how people think and express themselves. That’s because, unlike multiple-choice questionnaires, chat-based assessments don’t offer obvious “right” answers – it’s on the candidate to express themselves authentically and not guess teh answer they think they would be rewarded for.
The research also confirmed what our candidate feedback has shown for years: people actually enjoy this kind of assessment. Participants rated the chat interviews as more engaging, less stressful, and more respectful of their individuality. In a hiring landscape where candidate experience is make-or-break, this matters.
And while traditional psychometric tests still show higher predictive validity in isolated lab conditions, the researchers were clear: real-world hiring decisions can’t be reduced to prediction alone. Fairness, transparency, and experience matter just as much, often more, when building trust and attracting top talent.
Sapia.ai was spotlighted in the study as a leader in this space, with our InterviewBERT model recognised for its ability to interpret candidate responses in a way that’s explainable, responsible, and grounded in science.
Why Trust and Candidate Agency Win
Today, hiring has to be about earning trust and empowering candidates to show up as their full selves, and having a voice in the process.
Traditional assessments often strip candidates of agency. They’re asked to conform, perform, and second-guess what the “right” answer might be. Chat-based interviews flip that dynamic. By inviting candidates into an open conversation, they offer something rare in hiring: autonomy. Candidates can tell their story, explain their thinking, and share how they approach real-world challenges, all in their own words.
This signals respect from the employer. It says: We trust you to show us who you are.
Hiring should be a two-way street – a long-held belief we’ve had, now backed by peer-reviewed science. The new research confirms that AI-led interviews can reduce bias, enhance fairness, and give candidates control over how they’re seen and evaluated.
Blog
AI Maturity in the Enterprise
Barb Hyman, CEO & Founder, Sapia.ai
It’s time for a new way to map progress in AI adoption, and pilots are not it.
Over the past year, I’ve been lucky enough to see inside dozens of enterprise AI programs. As a CEO, founder, and recently, judge in the inaugural Australian Financial Review AI Awards.
And here’s what struck me:
Despite the hype, we still don’t have a shared language for AI maturity in business.
Some companies are racing ahead. Others are still building slide decks. But the real issue is that even the orgs that are “doing AI” often don’t know what good looks like.
You don’t need more pilots. You need a maturity model.
The most successful AI adoption strategy does not have you buying the hottest Gen AI tool or spinning up a chatbot to solve one use case. What it should do is build organisational capability in AI ethics, AI governance, data, design, and most of all, leadership.
It’s time we introduced a real AI Maturity Model. Not a checklist. A considered progression model. Something that recognises where your organisation is today and what needs to evolve next, safely, responsibly, and strategically.
Here’s an early sketch based on what I’ve seen:
The 5 Stages of AI Maturity (for real enterprises)
- Curious
- Awareness is growing across leadership
- Experimentation led by innovation teams
- Risk is unclear, appetite is cautious
- AI is seen as “tech”
- Reactive
- Gen AI introduced via vendors or tools (e.g., copilots, agents)
- Some pilots show promise, but with limited scale or guardrails
- Data privacy and sovereignty questions begin to surface
- Risk is siloed in legal/IT
- Capable
- Clear policies on privacy, bias, and governance
- Dedicated AI leads or councils exist
- Internal use cases scale (e.g., summarisation, scoring, chat)
- LLMs integrated with guardrails, safety reviewed
- Strategic
- AI embedded in workflows, not layered on
- LLM/data infrastructure is regionally compliant
- AI outcomes measured (accuracy, equity, productivity)
- Teams restructured around AI capability — not just tech enablement
- AI-Native
- AI informs and transforms core decisions (hiring, pricing, customer service)
- Enterprise builds proprietary intelligence
- FAIR™/RAI principles deeply operationalised
- Talent, systems, and leadership are aligned around an intelligent operating model
Why this matters for enterprise leaders
AI is a capability.And like any capability, it needs time, structure, investment, and a map.
If you’re an HR leader, CIO, or enterprise buyer, and you’re trying to separate the real from the theatre, maturity thinking is your edge.
Let’s stop asking, “Who’s using AI?”
And start asking: “How mature is our AI practice and what’s the next step?”
I’m working on a more complete model now, based on what I’ve seen in Australia, the UK, and across our customer base. If you’re thinking about this too, I’d love to hear from you.
Blog
Beyond the Black Box: Why Transparency in AI Hiring Matters More Than Ever
For too long, AI in hiring has been a black box. It promises speed, fairness, and efficiency, but rarely shows its work.
That era is ending.
“AI hiring should never feel like a mystery. Transparency builds trust, and trust drives adoption.”
At Sapia.ai, we’ve always worked to provide transparency to our customers. Whether with explainable scores, understandable AI models, or by sharing ROI data regularly, it’s a founding principle on which we build all of our products.
Now, with Discover Insights, transparency is embedded into our user experience. And it’s giving TA leaders the clarity to lead with confidence.
Transparency Is the New Talent Advantage
Candidates expect fairness. Executives demand ROI. Boards want compliance. Transparency delivers all three.
Even visionary Talent Leaders can find it difficult to move beyond managing processes to driving strategy without the right data. Discover Insights changes that.
“When talent leaders can see what’s working (and why) they can stop defending their strategy and start owning it.”
Metrics That Make Transparency Real (and Actionable)
🕒 Time to Hire
What it is: The median time between application and hire.
Why it matters: This is your speedometer. A sharp view of how long hiring takes and how that varies by cohort, role, or team helps you identify delays and prove efficiency gains to leadership.
Faster time to hire = faster access to revenue-driving talent.
💬 Candidate Sentiment, Advocacy & Verbatim Feedback
What it is: Satisfaction scores, brand advocacy measures, and unfiltered candidate comments.
Why it matters: Many platforms track satisfaction. Sapia.ai’s Discover Insights takes it further, measuring whether that satisfaction translates into employer and consumer brand advocacy.
And with verbatim feedback collected at scale, talent leaders don’t have to guess how candidates feel. They can read it, learn from it, and take action.
You don’t just measure experience. You understand it in the candidates’ own words.
🔍 Drop-Off Rates, Funnel Visibility & Automation That Works
What it is: The percentage of candidates who exit the hiring process at different stages, and how to spot why.
Why it matters: Understanding drop-off points lets teams fix friction quickly. Embedding automation early in the funnel reduces recruiter workload and elevates top candidates, getting them talking to your hiring teams faster.
Assessment completion benchmarks in volume hiring range between 60–80%, but with a mobile-first, chat-based format like Sapia.ai’s, clients often exceed that.
Optimising your funnel isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing smarter, with less effort and better outcomes.
📈 Hiring Yield (Hired / Applied)
What it is: The percentage of completed applications that result in a hire.
Why it matters: This is your funnel efficiency score. A high yield means your sourcing, screening, and selection are aligned. A low one? There’s leakage, misfit, or missed opportunity.
Hiring yield signals funnel health, recruiter performance, and candidate-process fit.
🧠 AI Effectiveness: Score Distribution & Answer Originality
What it is: Insights into how candidate scores are distributed, and whether responses appear copied or AI-generated.
Why it matters: In high-volume hiring, a normal distribution of scores suggests your assessment is calibrated fairly. If it’s skewed too far left or right, it could be too hard or too easy, and that affects trust.
Add in answer originality, and you can track engagement integrity, protecting both your process and your brand.
From Metrics to Momentum
To effectively lead, you need more than simply tracking; you need insights enabling action.
When you can see how AI impacts every part of your hiring, from recruiter productivity to candidate sentiment to untapped talent, you lead with insight, not assumption. And that’s how TA earns a seat at the strategy table.