Mass hiring is often associated with ineffective and unproductive employees. However, hiring more than one person at a time doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice hiring high-quality staff members. This article is full of excellent tips and tricks for mass hiring to get the best people possible for your organization.

Why Do Companies Use Mass Hiring?

Mass hiring can save a lot of time that would usually be spent on recruitment. It is often used in situations when a company is expanding rapidly. For example, when you open a new branch of your company, you will need a whole lot of new staff all at once.

Another example of when you might need to use mass hiring is when you employ seasonal workers. Maybe your company always hires some casual staff to help out in the busy shop during the Christmas rush. Owners of farms and orchards also frequently perform mass hiring when it comes to harvesting time.

Close to half of hospitality businesses expect to hire 100 or more people in the next year, and it’s the same in many other industries. In this case, it is unsustainable to run 100+ hiring processes in a year. Rather than advertising again and again for the same position, it makes more sense to put up one job ad. Then you can just do one round of interviews, from which you will hire multiple people. Even if the jobs you need to fill aren’t all the same, you can still use mass hiring. Just group similar positions and put them together in a job ad, as similar people will apply for these roles.

Top Tips and Ideas for Effective Mass Hiring

Social Media

One of the best things you can do to help get a qualified talent pool for your mass hiring process is to expand your search for candidates. Use a variety of different methods so that you can reach more people with your job ads.

If you don’t already use social media to advertise these roles, it’s a great idea to start. Social media can reach a far wider range of people, including passive candidates who may be tempted to apply. You can even sponsor the post so that more people see it. If you do this, you will be able to select certain demographics to show your job ad to, for example, people who live in the city the jobs are in.

Employee Referrals

If you’re not finding enough of the right type of candidates for these positions, ask your current staff. They know better than anyone what the role entails and what it takes to work in your organization. This means that when they recommend someone for the role, they believe that this person has the skills required.

People usually won’t recommend people they don’t believe in for a role, because it puts their reputation on the line. If the new hire underperforms or is unsatisfactory, it shines a negative light on that employee. So, people will only suggest people that they think will be fantastic in the role.

Resume Parser

By automating as much of the hiring process as you can, you will save yourself lots of time. Use a resume parser to organize candidates into categories by their qualifications and experience. You can even use resume parsers to search by keywords through the applications to find certain skills or qualities that you’re looking for. This makes it far faster to filter through applications, as the resume parser essentially does this for you.

Use Pre-Employment Assessments

Getting the applications down to just the qualified candidates with the right skills is one of the most time-heavy components of the process. After you have filtered out any applications which don’t meet your criteria, you could send the remaining candidates a pre-employment assessment. This will test them on the skills required for the job, enabling you to create a shortlist for interviews.

These types of tests include cognitive abilities tests, personality assessments, verbal reasoning tests, and problem-solving tests. The most important thing is that the test given relates to the traits required for the role. For example, if you’re mass hiring for administrative roles, you might test for typing speed and organization skills. If you’re hiring bar staff, you might find personality tests more useful.

Group Interviews

Another time-consuming part of this process will be the interviews. If you’re hiring dozens of people, you simply won’t have time to interview everyone individually. That’s where group interviews can be extremely useful.

At a group interview, you will be interviewing more than one person at a time. You’ll ask a question and give everyone the chance to answer it. This is much quicker, and you will still get a good feel for how good the candidates are, as you get to meet them in person.

Notify Candidates of the Outcome

A step that is often forgotten during mass hiring processes is letting all the candidates know about the outcome. Because you’re hiring so many people, you may forget to get back to those who were unsuitable for the position. It is important to follow up, even with those who were unsuccessful, to maintain your brand’s good reputation.

Something else that often happens is that those who were interviewed first must wait an extremely long time to hear back while you interview all the other candidates. While you may not have an answer for these people yet, at least get in touch to let them know when they can expect to hear back about whether they were successful or not. Otherwise, you risk losing great candidates to other companies while you’re still finishing off your mass hiring process.

Mass hiring doesn’t have to take you months to complete and you certainly don’t have to compromise on hiring quality candidates. With just a few changes to your recruitment process, you can still get wonderful new hires who will perform well in the job, without spending all of your time on mass hiring. Follow the above advice and you will find that the entire process is far easier and more manageable for you.