4 Innovative Strategies For High Volume Hiring

Adrian Dixon

August 4, 2021

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High volume hiring is a daunting task in the era of The Great Resignation where employees are quitting their jobs at record high rates. HR leaders are expected to respond to the very tight labor market with new strategies to attract, hire, and retain talent who are in high demand and high turnover roles. 

Employers are getting creative. The popular social media platform TikTok is betting big on video resumes, with companies including Chipotle, Shopify, Target, Great Clips, and Sweetgreen already trying out the new platform for hiring entry and mid-level positions.

Organizations are looking to expand as global economies slowly reopen, but the talent acquisition strategies of the past have become outdated. In order to succeed in digitally transforming your organization’s operations, talent intelligence is an important tool for innovating your application process, candidate experience, as well as talent management across the full employee lifecycle.

Here are 4 innovative strategies to optimize your high volume hiring. 

What is high volume hiring?

High volume hiring is the practice of hiring for a large number of open positions in a given time frame. This can range from hundreds to thousands of positions a year.

Common in industries such as retail and hospitality, the need for a large volume of new employees can be due to seasonal hiring, new store openings, or rapid growth in the organization.

Jobvite reports that while the average job posting attracts less than 50 applicants, the average high volume hiring attracts more than 250 applicants.

high volume hiring attracts more than 250 applicants

This means the main challenge for high volume hiring is the time spent screening and shortlisting candidates. Keeping your high volume hiring process efficient and strategic – for both candidates and recruiters – is the name of the game.

Strategy #1: Create a “candidate-first” job application process

Indeed found 42% of job seekers found lengthy applications the most frustrating part of the application process.

So while McDonald’s Snaplications may seem silly at first glance, they’re being very smart by creating a super speedy and mobile-first application process.

Best practices for a “candidate-first” job application for high volume hiring include:

  • Be where your candidates already are: Whether that’s Snapchat, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Talent intelligence can drill down on where your top applicants are sourced for, by job role and region. 
  • Make sure your application is mobile-optimized: According to Indeed, 65% of job seekers use their mobile devices to look for jobs. The ability to apply on mobile is especially important for hourly workers who might not have access to a desktop computer. Being mobile-optimized includes a job application site that’s both mobile-friendly (no more pinching the screen!) and allows job seekers to upload their resume using their phone.
  • Keep it short: If possible, reduce candidate friction by creating a 1-click application process. If that doesn’t work for you, keep your qualification questions to a minimum (e.g., five and less), enable social profile apply, and pre-populate text boxes as much as possible.
  • What’s in it for them: Write your job posting from the applicant’s perspective, as opposed to creating a wishlist of your ideal candidate. What are the benefits of working at your company? How should they expect to be compensated based on their performance? What are the core tasks candidates will need to be able to do to be successful in this role?

Strategy #2: Speed up your sourcing with talent rediscovery

Talent rediscovery is the practice of mining your existing resume database to find previous candidates for open reqs.

A CareerBuilder survey found that one of the biggest complaints employers have about their recruiters is the failure to look at candidates in their own database. This complaint is a bit unfair when you consider that a typical ATS just wasn’t designed to have this type of internal search functionality.

Although your ATS may allow you to use keywords and Boolean strings to search through existing resumes, the results are usually limited and error-prone. This makes it difficult or even impossible to match previous applicants to an open req, unless you’re using a dedicated talent rediscovery tool.

How does this technology work? Upon entering a job description of a current req, the talent rediscovery algorithm will automatically screen every resume in your ATS to find the most qualified matches.

This type of HR technology is especially useful in today’s unpredictable labor market. Many organizations are focused on reskilling and developing internal talent to fit open job requisitions. Gain better visibility into your workforce with talent intelligence to understand the skills already within your current talent pool. 

4 Innovative Strategies for High Volume Hiring

Strategy #3: Use technology to automate resume screening

On average, 75% of the resumes a typical high volume job posting receives are considered unqualified.

When you’re hiring for thousands of open positions a year, this adds up to hundreds of wasted hours skimming through unqualified resumes. While screening hundreds of resumes can be mind-numbing for human recruiters, it’s exactly the type of pattern matching AI was designed for.

Talent intelligence software uses AI to screen resumes by analyzing the resumes of existing employees to learn the qualifications of a job. From there, candidates who fit the criteria are then ranked and graded from A to D.

Using AI for high volume hiring makes sense because AI requires a lot of data to be accurate. By automating manual resume screening, organizations such as retailers have reduced their time to hire by 75%.

In his Forbes article on how AI is being used in retail, Bryan Pearson of LoyaltyOne notes reducing time to hire gives high volume retailers a better chance of winning the best talent.

Strategy #4: Use recruiting metrics to find shortcuts

High volume hiring is a problem of scale and optimizing your time and spend. Reduce your manual workload while keeping your visibility on all of the candidates progressing through different stages of the interview process. Automating certain steps, such as screening and triggering assessments allows recruiters to focus their time on higher-value, strategic work. 

Recruiting metrics are essential for understanding where process improvements are needed and justifying investments into specific recruiting functions.

Some recruiting metrics you can use to find shortcuts in your high volume hiring include:

  • Track source of hire to optimize advertising spend: Silkroad’s data finds the most common source of hire are job boards and aggregators, which account for 31% of hires. Get granular by assessing which job boards and aggregators lead to more hires and invest more money into them while dropping underperforming sources.
  • Track conversion rates to eliminate unnecessary steps: LinkedIn’s interview process for customer success representatives used to include three interviews. The first interview was a phone screen with a recruiter who rated candidates on a scale of 1-3. When their data showed 90% of candidates who scored a 3 in their phone screen made it to the final interview round, they eliminated the second interview for these candidates.
  • Set diversity goals for every step of the hiring process: The manual resume screening process is riddled with unconscious bias. Expand your talent pool at the interview stage by reducing bias during screening with blind shortlisting. Set internal diversity goals for the number of underrepresented demographic groups that are interviewed, sent a job offer, and ultimately hired. 
  • Follow engagement patterns to find the drop-off point: Find the weak points in the candidate experience at your specific organization. Whether that requires a more interactive careers page, increased touchpoints between the recruiter and candidate, or a faster time to offer to stay competitive with other opportunities, identifying these weak points is a key part of optimizing your hiring process. 

Data is crucial to the digital transformation of your hiring process and will allow your organization to create a better candidate experience. Large-scale recruitment requires generating quality hires quickly, which starts with nurturing a prospective talent pool. Deepen the scope of your search to find great people in your high volume hiring process with the aid of talent intelligence.