High volume hiring means a greater quantity of job applications with a higher number of open roles to fill. That will usually occur as a consequence of company expansion, seasonal hiring, graduate intake or a large organisation with potential high staff turnover. This can cause great pressure on a talent acquisition team and strain on resources when managing a high increase in job applications and vacancies on a potentially global scale.
Defining high-volume hiring
Glassdoor determines that the average corporate opening attracts 250 applicants. Whilst this is valid, it is still difficult to pinpoint a specific number that classifies as ‘high volume’.
Last month Amazon claimed they had over 30,000 open jobs in the US alone. Whereas a smaller company may only acknowledge 100 vacancies during the holiday period as a high volume recruitment case. Therefore, the term high volume will vary from one company to the next.
Challenges
- Limited resources – the more open job vacancies there are, the greater the strain on resources. This includes an increase in expenditure and a potential expansion of talent acquisition teams.
- Time pressures – a looming pressure to fill multiple roles is intensified when dealing with high-volume recruitment.
- Risks to the candidate experience – compromising candidate experience derives from a lack of care, attention and investment in a hiring experience. That can occur when recruiters feel overwhelmed with a high volume of applications.
- Maintaining high-quality hires – high-volume hiring negatively affects a recruitment process when decisions are rushed, and bad hires are made.
3 actions to tackle high-volume hiring
1. Leaders are continually connected to the hiring process (and their employees)
A successful recruitment leader will remain connected to the hiring process throughout the whole experience. From the moment a job advert goes live, a leader will have invested the time into overseeing the creation of the ad ensuring the requirements reflect the ideal candidate. As well as planning distribution, into what will be the most effective advertising outlets (if an external role).
To then set application requirements that a candidate must meet in order to progress further. To implement an interview structure for consistency amongst candidates and lastly, to develop strategies to make those all-important final hiring decisions.
If a recruitment leader oversees these key stages and remains involved and present in the hiring process it makes it much more manageable to develop a homogeneous recruitment process. As well as maintain strong levels of organisation and planning ability – which are KEY to managing high volume recruitment.
2. Leaders automate key recruitment stages
After careful planning and consideration, in some cases, it becomes apparent that manual processing will not suffice in dealing with a high influx of job applications, for multiple different job roles. Take, for example, 50 live vacancies that attract 350 job applications each – a resourceful leader will identify this as an inefficient task to complete alone without technological assistance.
Therefore, in order to undertake this mammoth task, automation is a great solution. As CV/resume screening is a process that requires great administrative manpower, it benefits hugely from an automated solution. The tech initiative is designed to scan a job application for keywords related to skills and experience. In the process of doing so, it removes any possible human bias influences and creates consistency by reviewing every single application equally and fairly. The recruiter is then presented with a list of job matching candidates, whereby it is then their decision to decide which candidates will progress further, based on the automated recommended results.
With hiring automation, the key is to determine areas where it would most benefit. Fully automating a recruitment process poses too much risk of losing human interaction, damaging human and candidate relationships and in turn sacrificing the candidate experience.
3. Leaders are masters in data interpretation
A successful recruitment leader knows the true value of data.
Data improves decisions.
Data improves future hiring methods.
Data predicts; trends, potential failures and of course potential successes.
In order to make strategic hiring decisions, a resourceful leader will gather evidence collated through CV screening technology and an interview scoring system to analyse and determine the best matching candidates.
Data interpretation enables recruitment teams to carry out more strategic practices. Spotting patterns, trends as well as inconsistencies within the data are vital for making subsequent improvements. This will usually occur within key recruitment metrics such as; roles that acquired the most attraction, application length, time to fill as well as dropout and job acceptance rates.
Take, for instance, the data surrounding ‘candidate drop-out’ – understanding where this happened can be a key indicator of why it happened. Allowing recruiters to make those all-important changes to prevent it from happening again.
