High Volume Hiring and How To Handle It

Let’s say you have 200 applicants and Five positions and you have to fill them in less than a month. Your only support during this time is a giant cup of coffee to console you. You know that this is going to disrupt your daily routine at work and eat into your schedule for other tasks that need your attention. What call such a crazy situation? 

The word you’re looking for is High Volume Hiring, commonly known as -mass recruitment. This typically occurs when you need to fill up a large number of positions in a short period. High Volume Hiring doesn’t generally come with an exact number. This type of Hiring is where a single-job role has a downpour of a significant number of candidates, and by ‘significant’ we mean a few hundred candidates.

High Volume Hiring is no doubt a challenge. Sometimes it’s either you hire several good candidates in a short period or sometimes it's nothing at all or on a really bad day it's a combination of both. This type of hiring happens usually when the business or the organization is growing and there is room for growth and opportunities. 

Some sources say that on average, a job advertisement receives about 59 applicants. Whereas when the volume is high and there is a surge of applicants, this same job advertisement receives nearly 250 applicants.

Recruiters and hiring teams are sometimes hit with High Volume Hiring, and if you’re a newbie in the HR industry, you’re in for a ride. 

It's not easy but it’s not like it’s not doable. If you're someone facing some serious challenges in High Volume Hiring, this guide will help you. Here we are going to touch on topics like how to find top talent quickly and promptly at affordable costs with a well-coordinated hiring process from sourcing to hiring. 
Trust us! Dive in. 

So what are the most common challenges in High Volume Hiring?

There are quite a few, to begin with. Hiring a bulk of good candidates with the best skill sets in a really short period is no joke. You do not have the option to skim through the resumes by just looking at a few keywords or just by looking at the fancy academic credentials they carry. Trust us, it can be faked. 

Here are a few challenges that you need to be wary of:

• You’re fighting against time! 

Oh, the chaos it entails when timelines are tight and positions need to be filled! This is where you need to stop, rewind and access how your team can proactively assess numerous applications at once. Sometimes the most common challenge you face in a short period is advertising. Where you advertise and who you’re advertising to are important. So choose wisely. 

• Are you hiring or just filling up positions? 

We know the temptation is real. You want to just fill up the position with anyone and everyone in the hopes that they will learn the skill on the job. But sadly my friend, if only it were that easy. 

Often decisions related to hiring a candidate need to be quick and prompt. You must have all your resources in place, and on alert at all times to make sure you hire the right candidate.

But are you sure you want to jump to conclusions without a solid data-driven backup?
Welcome to the age of HR technology, where you can streamline your hiring processes from sourcing to hiring, quickly and cost-effectively a.k.a a budget-friendly completely automated process.

Think about it, in a usual situation like this, when you have a surge of applications for a few roles you manually sit down and screen all of these resumes pulling an all-nighter too.  
But where’s the fun in that? 

This is why skill assessment and talent-based testing come into play. How do you ask? 
It's Simple! 

These tools are designed in such a manner to test your candidate and their skills,  which will then tell you whether they are fit for the job or not. And if you're wondering about screening resumes, there is a tool for that too!

Automation has entered the hiring arena and is giving a serious fight to traditional forms of hiring. Gone are the days when you need to scan through every resume and screen if there are fit for the job or not. 

So instead of forecasting how many ‘face-palm’ interviews, you’re going to have to go through; switch to a smarter way of hiring.

Top 3 Strategies you can use in High-Volume Hiring

Let’s now take a look at a few key strategies that you can adopt during a phase of High Volume Hiring:

• Trust the process and give tech a chance

You now have a much more viable solution and that is: complete automation of the hiring process. You can now save up on time, resources and energy. Automation helps you reduce the time you take on tedious and manual recruiting tasks. When you deploy the use of HR tech tools like skill assessment and talent assessments you are able to draw decisions better on who you want to hire and who is fit for the role. These tools help you get a holistic and real-time view of your candidate pipeline. Automating your hiring process helps you, deep dive, into recruitment data which in turn helps you make better decisions when it comes to hiring. This also helps you save up on your mental energy. By adopting an automated hiring process you will be able to think better and offer the right kind of offers to the right candidates. 

• Bring them ‘back’ home

What better way to solve the problem of recruiting than by bringing back old talent? Talent rehiring is one way to tackle the problem of high-volume hiring. In the current economic climate, it's hard to find, attract and train new talent and prevent them from leaving. So, the best way to find and hire the best skill, especially during high-volume hiring is to tap into the goldmine of resumes that you have been sitting on the whole time.

It's more like this: you considered employing them at some time. Perhaps the offer was declined or withdrawn thanks to a variety of causes. But that shouldn't deter you from trying again. The advantage of this is that when you contacted them, they may not have been qualified or were engaged with other responsibilities. However, when you try to rediscover them and their talent after some time has passed, their skills may just be more chiselled than when you last left them. It is a leap of faith, but it’s always worth a try.

• Make it easier for them to apply for your job posting

A study shows that nearly 40% of job seekers found applications extremely lengthy and the mobile page for these applications not so responsive. This often  makes the candidate want to exit the entire job application process and try for something else.
In the world of HR in recruiting we call this a ‘candidate first’ job application. This works wonders in the hustle of high volume hiring. A good example of ‘candidate first job’ applications is McDonald's and their ‘Snaplications’. This was a fun and a simple way to attract young prospective employees who are not only talented but tech-savvy to join the team.

How ‘Snaplications’ worked: Uses would come across a 10 second video ad featuring any McDonald employee talking about how their employee experience has been so far. And upon watching me ad, if any young prospective employee was interested in applying for the job all they had to do was swipe up and they would be redirected to a McDonald's careers webpage which was integrated in the app.  this is where the applicant can virtual try on McDonald's uniform and send a 10  second video a cross explaining why would they be an excellent McDonald employee. 

This is a clear example of what a super speedy and a mobile first application process looks like.  another thing to keep in mind while designing ‘candidate first’ job applications is that you need to make sure your application is optimised and mobile friendly too.  This is because, in today's world, everybody is on social media.  A recent study conducted by the Aberdeen group show that 74% of people found a last job through social media channels. 
Another very important aspect to keep in mind especially when your practicing a ‘candidate first’ application process you have to keep it short and make sure it's one click application process. 

While for most organizations and enterprises High Volume Hiring may not be an everyday thing, it can come off as a surprise and leave you clueless about how to go about it. There maybe be times when you’re only hiring 10 people this month and in the next month *boom* a good 50 of them!

This is subjective. It entirely depends on how big your enterprise is and how many people are actually required to do the job. In some cases, as we mentioned earlier, as the organization grows so does the demand for skilled and talented employees to increase efficiency and productivity.

Here are typically THREE REASONS why recruiters and hiring managers use High Volume Hiring:

• Tis’ the season to be hiring:

A major factor for this type of hiring is the season. Yes, there are seasons for hiring too. The period between Thanksgiving and the winter holidays is when businesses slow down and then pick up steam somewhere in the middle of January. This type of seasonal hiring is also mostly influenced by business budget cycles, annual graduations, and many other factors. 

• In the event of franchising or expansion:

This is another reason and a prominent one too. This occurs when a company decides to expand or even open up a branch in a new town or even a city.

• Mass Restructuring:

Sometimes this is done when an enterprise or organization is looking at reorganizing their operations in order to increase efficiency. In some cases, it also means laying off employees to hire much more efficient ones.

Don’t let it scare you! High Volume Hiring is Not as Scary as it sounds.

High-volume hiring can be a daunting and a very stressful task especially when time is of the essence and you have to find the best talent of the best skill in the market. If you want to be ahead of the rest, your way of going forward in hiring especially high-volume hiring is a completely automated recruitment solution that helps you find quality candidates with skills and talents that you are particularly looking for.  These automated hiring processes deploy the use of skill assessments and talent assessment tools.  These tools are backed by data and deliver you an unbiased and completely genuine result of the assessments.