7 Ways to Improve Your High Volume Recruiting Strategy
High volume recruiting is always a challenge. You either need to hire a lot of great people in a short space of time, or you have a large number of applicants or both. As a benchmark, the average job advert receives 59 applicants, whereas a high volume recruiting position receives over 250 applicants.
Attracting qualified candidates, looking at hundreds of resumes and making a ton of screening calls is extremely labor-intense and can make the whole process costly, time-consuming and can result in a negative experience for all involved.
Luckily, there are ways to make your high volume recruiting strategy stress-free, efficient and effective.
Here are our 7 suggestions:
- Employ programmatic job advertising (PJA)
- Use the right candidate selection platform
- Improve on the candidate engagement front
- Keep quality of hire in mind
- Track your time to hire
- Watch out for hiring bias
- Don’t forget to communicate your company culture
1. Employ programmatic job advertising (PJA)
On average, companies need approximately 180 people to visit their career site to make one hire.
So for high volume recruiting, you need to not only expand your reach in order to get a lot of eyes on your job advert, but you want to ensure that they’re the right kind of eyes to guarantee you a high quality of candidates.
PJA can help you with all of that AND get your job offer to appear at places where you maybe wouldn’t think to advertise. Because let’s face it, not all job seekers hang out in the same place, i.e. the main job boards.
Check out programmatic job advertising providers like OnRecruit, Appcast or Joveo to see how they can help you attract the best talent.
A programmatic job advertising platform
can help you find the most relevant talent in the shortest time.
2. Use the right candidate selection platform
The right candidate selection platform is essential for high volume recruiting as it allows you to automate parts of the selection process and shortlist candidates in a short amount of time.
Pre-employment assessment software helps match candidates with the right skills and characteristics to your roles. Simultaneously, recruiters save a lot of time that they can spend on building and nurturing relationships with candidates instead.
Here are a few things to look out for in a high volume candidate selection platform:
- Being able to handle large volumes of applicants
- Allowing you to customize the online assessment experience per role
- Option to set hiring benchmarks
- Comes equipped with situational judgment tests
- Creating a branded experience for your candidates
- Automating parts of communication
Have a look Harver and HireVue, pre-employment assessment software providers that help companies handle large volumes of candidates.
Pre-employment assessment tools can help recruiters
save a lot of time.
3. Improve on the candidate engagement front
Unemployment rates in many European countries and across the USA are at an all-time low. It is not an employer’s market out there, it is an employee’s market. So if you want your high volume recruiting to work for you, you need to find ways to engage with your candidates even if there are many of them.
In high volume recruiting, recruitment technology can be especially helpful in engaging candidates. A recent survey revealed that two-thirds of candidates are happy to communicate with a chatbot, as long as it provided them with the answers they sought.
For instance, TextRecruit leverages text messages and online chats to communicate with applicants, Jobpal is a chatbot assisting candidates 24/7 on numerous platforms including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Skype.
Other ways to improve your candidate engagement include:
- Communicating your hiring timeline. As soon as you receive an application, send an acknowledgment email letting candidates know when applications close and when they can expect to hear from you. Especially let candidates know if there has been a delay to your timeline. Never leave candidates in the dark, second-guessing what is going on at your end.
- Letting all candidates, both successful and unsuccessful, know the outcome. One of the most common candidate engagement issues is not being told if they are unsuccessful. Even worse, a Careerbuilder survey showed that 60% of employers don’t bother letting candidates know they’ve been unsuccessful even after bringing them in for an interview and meeting them face to face.
- Sending updates with relevant content. Don’t spam applicants with needless comms, that won’t reflect well on you, but do send them updates with engaging content about the company, its employees and activities.
Chatbots can be useful in keeping
candidates informed – and satisfied.
4. Keep quality of hire in mind
Even if you need to hire a lot of people during your high volume recruiting drive, you should never compromise on quality of hire.
An optimized recruitment process consisting of online assessments and the right interview questions will help you spot the qualified candidates faster, and thin out the less qualified ones.
Always keep an eye out for transferable skills such as active learning or communication skills, and don’t rule anyone out just because they don’t have your specific hard skills, those can always be taught.
Soft skills are more inherent, and you’ll find that a lot of people simply don’t have them. And who wants to work with someone who is incapable of communicating efficiently or who can’t manage their own time?
High volume recruiting doesn’t mean
compromising on quality of hire.
5. Track your time to hire
Knowing how long each stage of your high volume recruiting process takes will help you see where the bottlenecks are, allowing you to optimize your process further.
The time to hire metric is one of the key metrics you should be keeping an eye on because it is a clear indicator of how well your hiring team is doing. Side note – although the average time to hire is almost 24 days, only 30% of businesses are capable of filling a role in this time frame. The rest take between 1-4 months.
Why is this metric so important? Because it is also linked to cost – the longer you take to hire, the more it is going to cost. And on a reputation front, it doesn’t reflect well on a business if they can’t get people through their doors in a timely fashion. But worse, almost 57% of applicants reported to lose interest in a job if the hiring process took too long.
Companies know this and they’re starting to adopt various recruitment solutions to decrease their time to hire. One of the largest European supermarket chains, Albert Heijn, implemented software that allowed the store managers to review candidates and move them further in the process quickly and efficiently. Their average time to hire dropped by 40% while the number of new hires increased.
Check out the below video to see how they did this:
6. Watch out for hiring bias
Hiring bias, you might think you and your team don’t have it, but it is ingrained in us humans to make split-second decisions. In fact, we make almost 35,000 decisions each and every day. And most of those decisions we don’t even know we are making.
In an ideal world, even for high volume recruiting, the candidates that you hire would be the best people for the job. But that isn’t the world we live in, and try as we might, we can’t always escape hiring bias.
So the best way to mitigate against hiring bias is to be conscious of common biases and ensure your team are trained sufficiently to avoid them.
Hiring bias can manifest even if you’re using AI to help you whittle down applications. Be extra careful if you’re using algorithms in your preselection. Algorithms are based on previous human decisions and can thus replicate their biases as well.
There are lots of ways around avoiding bias, but some of the easiest to implement include:
- Consider blind hiring – removing all irrelevant information about the candidates.
- Use assessments to evaluate actual skills, not candidates’ background
- Base hiring decisions on data evidence, not assumptions.
- Have a consistent and transparent hiring process.
- Provide interview training to all hiring managers.
- Create a standard interview guide and don’t let hiring managers deviate from it.
7. Don’t forget to communicate your company culture
Candidates want to know what it’s like to work at your company before they work for your company. And if you want to get the best out of your employees, you want them to be fully on board, one hundred percent committed to achieving the company’s goals. That’s why you need to make sure your candidates understand what it’s like to work at your organization before and during the hiring process already.
Attracting candidates whose values and work styles align with those of your company will make your recruitment process smoother, as you won’t have to sift through candidate profiles that aren’t a match in any way. It also works the other way around. Candidates who don’t like what they see will deselect themselves from the selection process.
To ensure you’re getting candidates who fit in your company, showcase your company culture through as many channels as possible and communicate why you’re a great place to work.
- Utilize live streaming
- Make ‘day in the life of’ videos
- Employ VR to show candidates around your office
- Embrace Instagram
- Create content and share it across your social media platforms
For example, Zappos with their Zappos Culture Instagram and Inside Zappos Facebook page does a great job presenting their company culture to the outside world. Netflix hosts WeAreNetflix Podcast where employees talk about their work and life at the company.
Showcase your company culture
through various (social media) channels.
Conclusion
Did you know that you can actually make high volume recruiting a pleasant experience for both the recruiters and the candidates? If you use the right tools for job advertising and candidate selection, keep the process short and make sure to keep candidates engaged throughout, even the most challenging high volume recruiting process can become a smooth, enjoyable event.
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