Mastering High-Volume Hiring: 5 Winning Strategies for 2024

Hiring a large number of candidates is indeed a tedious task for every HR manager and hiring manager. It is an extremely difficult task as it often involves many activities such as: E.g., tedious and manual candidate contacts, mass mailings, managing disorganized information and complex Excel spreadsheets, reviewing thousands of resumes, and interacting with many applicants.

Additionally, due to the rapidly changing market, the trend of hiring talent in bulk has increased exponentially. But wait, what's the setting in bulk? Let's understand it together.

What is bulk hiring?

High-volume hiring, also known as mass hiring, is the process of hiring candidates for a large number of employees in a specific period of time. It also means hiring a large number of applicants for a single position or multiple applicants for multiple positions. Companies perform mass hiring for the following reasons:

• The company is setting up an office at a new location
• Due to a seasonal hiring need - for example, the need for retail customer support managers during the holiday season
• Rapid growth or sudden exponential product demand in the market
• Restructuring of the company
• Need for new departments to improve products

However, there are a number of challenges that companies face when hiring employees on a large scale. Let’s take a look at these obstacles.

The most common challenges when hiring at scale

The hiring team must overcome many difficulties to find the best people for the position. According to an Inc. survey, 67% of recruiters say finding talent is harder than ever.

Below are the most common problems recruiters face when hiring large numbers of candidates.

• The simultaneous assessment of quality and quantity.
• When companies are hiring en masse, increasing efficiency during high hiring volumes can be a major problem for recruiters. It is a time-consuming process that requires a lot of resources and teamwork.
• Cutthroat competition for the best employees on the market.
• Assessing and deciding which applicants are suitable for which role.

Proven strategies for hiring top talent in 2024

1.Use of recruiting technologies for effective mass recruitment

Mass hiring of talent is hectic and full of complex workflows. However, today there are a variety of AI-based online recruiting tools that make mass hiring easy and effective. These hiring software and systems are the biggest saving grace for recruiters and hiring managers. Software like Applicant Tracking Software streamlines the hiring workflow through automation features.

Tools like resume parsers use keywords and Boolean strings to search through thousands of resumes and search for existing resumes to find relevant candidates.

A recruitment chatbot eliminates the pre-screening round by asking skills assessment questions and saves time for hiring managers and recruiters by scheduling interviews.

Using recruiting technologies and tools reduces costs and time to hire, helps engage candidates in the recruiting funnel, and increases candidate engagement by sending an automated response to candidates.

Additionally, the programmatic job posting technique is the best software approach to hiring large quantities of employees. This means relying on recruiting technologies (data, analytics and AI) to automate and simplify the entire mass hiring process.

2.Create and promote candidate-focused content

It's true that in today's world, content is king. It is a long-term marketing strategy for every business. The companies create compelling content to engage with their target audience and gain the trust and loyalty of customers, which will benefit them in the long run.

Therefore, the marketing team needs to work closely with the recruiting team and publish content like infographics using engaging infographic templates that appeal to the potential candidates. You need to design candidate-centric content. This way, it will be easy to attract more candidates to the recruiting pipeline. Additionally, recruiters and hiring managers need to create catchy job ads and clear job descriptions to attract a greater diversity of talent. Recruitment marketing features are the best solution to promote content efficiently and find the right talent across different platforms.

3.A strong network produces the best talent

Building a strong network is a long-term strategy for finding and hiring the best possible candidates. It offers benefits such as faster hiring, high-quality candidates, and less turnover. Therefore, employers need to build a strong reputation, seek out events and platforms to expand their network, and communicate frequently. This way they can attract more candidates for open positions.

It's also true that qualified people know qualified people. Therefore, employers need to use their employees' network and the database of former employees to find suitable candidates for the open position. Employers and HR managers need to set up a successful employee referral program to get the perfect candidates referred. You must mention the perks, benefits, or bonus incentives that employees receive.

ATS also offers features such as an employee referral portal to manage them and optimize referral programs. In this way the system becomes more transparent.

Additionally, companies receive numerous applications during hiring season. However, you cannot hire every applicant. Therefore, the company can store each candidate's key data in the talent database, which it can use for future hiring. It would be a good idea to check the applicant database to find suitable candidates.

4.Recruitment analytics are a lifesaver

The biggest obstacle companies face is scaling and optimizing the time and expense of the mass hiring process. However, recruitment analytics helps them improve the entire mass hiring process. It enables a feedback loop that allows hiring managers and employers to make feedback and data-driven hiring decisions.

Recruitment KPIs to measure mass hiring success

• Time to Hire - allows you to measure the effectiveness of the hiring strategy.
• Hiring Source - Calculate advertising spend and provide an answer to which channel is more efficient, which channel is expensive and ineffective, and which channel an employer needs to invest in the most.
• Offer Acceptance Rate - Calculate applicant dropout rate whether engagement is good or not.
• Cost-per-hire - measures internal and external recruiting costs with high hiring volumes.

5.Candidate experience and employer branding are crucial for recruiting in bulk

Consistent and effective interaction with applicants is the key factor for good employer branding, positive applicant experiences and a higher acceptance rate of offers. A CareerBuilder survey found that 22% of job seekers said they would discourage other candidates from applying to a company if they had a bad experience during the hiring process.

Things can become even more difficult when recruiters have to communicate with many applicants. But tools like Recruitment Chatbot remove this human limitation by providing 24/7 support and answering standard applicant questions. This constant commitment from applicants ultimately leads to positive employer branding.

To improve applicants' experience in the mass recruitment process, hiring managers must instill a positive work culture in applicants.

A survey from Indeed found that 42% of job seekers say lengthy applications are the most frustrating part of the job application process, and 78% of job seekers would apply via mobile if it were more accessible.

Case study on hiring large numbers of employees

Let’s look at an example of recruiting employees using AI recruiting technology and making efficient mass hires.

U.S. Security Associate uses technical solutions for recruiting employees on a large scale

U.S. Security Associate (USA) hires 50,000 employees annually in over 400 offices. However, the company faced many challenges such as: B. attracting qualified applicants, filling positions more quickly and higher hiring costs.

Instead of investing countless hours in the recruiting and assessment process, they chose a technology-driven approach to attract and hire high-quality candidates at the right scale and speed.

By using online recruiting tools, they achieved better results in mass hiring. They could see the benefits such as: increasing the volume of applicants, the selection rate and the offers. In addition, the time to fill the position was reduced.

Final thoughts on innovative hiring strategies for large volumes of applicants

In summary, companies today are growing and changing rapidly. Therefore, companies are constantly looking for talented employees for product improvement in order to survive the tough competition. For this reason, companies are looking for practical ways to effectively hire employees at scale. In this blog, we've looked at the challenges and practical solutions recruiters and hiring managers face when hiring at scale and attracting the best talent.

Innovative strategies are vital for handling large-scale hiring challenges. IceHrm offers solutions for seamless recruitment processes.