At certain times of the year, many industries need to hire a lot of workers at one time. This may be because of an influx of customers, such as at Christmas time, or changing seasons for those in farming industries. Either way, as a recruiter or hiring manager, you need to perfect your high volume hiring process to make it as efficient as possible.

Why Use High Volume Hiring Methods?

For many industries, high volume hiring is unavoidable. Due to the nature of your industry, you will either need to do it or you won’t. Using volume hiring methods to gain a mass of applications at once can be far more time-effective for you. If you’re hiring for 200 available positions, for example, that are all the same, that’s the perfect time to use volume hiring processes. There is no point putting up 200 job ads all for the same position and doing 200 different recruitment rounds. So, by using high volume hiring methods, you save yourself not only time but also money spent on recruitment.

Ideas to Make Your High Volume Hiring Process More Efficient

Use Technology

Stop spending hours upon hours, manually reading through and screening resumes. Around 75% of resumes come from unqualified applicants. That’s a lot of CVs to read through for no reason. If you’re hiring for many positions at a time, think of how many hours you will waste reading the resumes of unqualified candidates. AI can take care of all of that for you; it’s time to go high-tech with your volume hiring process.

AI and resume parsing can crawl through any applications, searching for specific keywords and whether the applicant is qualified for the role. Many will even give each candidate a rank from A to D depending on how well they fit the defined criteria, making your decision process even simpler.

Not only will you save yourself hours of work, but AI can significantly reduce the overall time to hire. This means that you can get new staff into your business sooner, and you will improve candidate experience in the process.

Create Your Application Process for the Candidate

When recruiters design an application process, they are often doing this while thinking about what will be the easiest for themselves. However, if you need a high volume of applications, then you need to create the application process with the candidate in mind. Research shows that job seekers often find that the most frustrating thing about applying for jobs is long applications.

Your volume hiring process needs to be mobile optimized so that candidates can apply directly from their phones. Up to 65% of those looking for work do so on their phones – to gain more applications, you must allow people to apply on their mobiles. Many people don’t even have access to a desktop computer anymore, so it’s time to update your processes for the technology your potential applicants have.

Use Your Candidate Pool

Have you ever turned down an excellent applicant because you didn’t have enough positions available? It’s time to contact those people and reconnect. People who were suitable for your business, but you previously turned down, should make up part of your candidate pool. Get back in touch and see if they are still looking for work. As you have already screened these people, this is a much easier process and can significantly reduce your time to hire.

You don’t always need to advertise excessively to find suitable new applicants when you might have some existing ones in your system already.

Analyze the Data

Wherever you can save time and optimizing your volume hiring process, you should. Due to the volume of your hiring, one minor change can save you many hours or make the process much cheaper. Every recruiter should have some basic recruiting metrics that they can refer to, to find out how well they are doing.

These metrics are also a valuable source of information that allow you to make improvements to your processes. If you are using many different job advertising methods, keep track of the results from each avenue. This allows you to see where it is worth spending your time and which fail to produce applicants. There are other metrics you can track for your volume hiring process as well, such as how accurate reference checking is, how valuable candidate screening processes are, and more.

Group Interviews

One small change that can save you a ton of time is using group interviews to filter applicants. Group interviews are used far less commonly than individual ones. However, they are ideal for volume recruitment as you can meet many candidates at once and find out more about all of them in one go. Why interview each person separately when you can meet them all together? This switch will save you many hours spend on interviewing, preparing to interview, and arranging interviews.

Communicate with Candidates

When you have so many candidates in the process at once, it can be overwhelming and time-consuming to keep all of them up to date with the process. However, engaging candidates is one way to keep them interested in the roles you are offering.

Let them know exactly what your hiring timeline is. Many businesses do not share these details with job applicants, leaving them in the dark about when they will find out whether or not they got an interview or whether they got the job. It’s particularly important to communicate if there have been delays in the recruitment process. If people know not to expect an outcome just yet, they will be far less stressed and have a better candidate experience.

Many high volume hiring processes don’t let the unsuccessful applicants know about the outcome at all. People just slowly give up hope and are left with a negative impression of your company. Letting the unsuccessful applicants know that they didn’t get the job is as easy as a mail merge email or the click of a button in an ATS. It’s worth doing so that these people can continue to look favorably on your company.

By changing just a few things in your volume hiring process, you can drastically reduce the cost and time it takes you. Try out some of the above tips and see how much easier it makes your recruitment rounds.