For the fourth month in a row, the unemployment rate has remained steady at 3.6 percent, leaving many companies in the unenviable position of having to compete for talent in a tough, candidate-centric market.
Some organizations are struggling to win over candidates for a few essential roles. But for others, they are scrambling to fill hundreds if not thousands of open positions across multiple geographies with the compounded pressure of the Great Resignation, a context in which employees are quitting their jobs at record high rates.
This is making organizations rethink their high volume hiring strategies, seeking new ways in which they can make the most of their time and optimize processes. Without the proper tools, this manner of recruitment can leave companies overwhelmed and unable to handle the influx of job seekers. After all, with a great number of candidates comes great hiring responsibility.
In a recent webinar, we decided to tackle some best practices every organization may find handy when it comes to high volume hiring. Grab a pen, some paper and let’s dive in!
#1: Don’t Start High Volume Hiring From Scratch
We have two words for you: internal database. Plunging into it can seem like a time-consuming task; one reminiscent of Velma from Scooby Doo blindly looking for her glasses in total darkness.
But, a talent platform with comprehensive search functionality can be the key that helps you rediscover candidates that you’ve previously considered and been in touch with. Leveraging this database can prove incredibly helpful when tackling high volume hiring and racing against the clock because you’re not searching from scratch but instead tapping into talent that’s already aware of your organization and showed an interest in working for you.
There are different ways you might choose to leverage your database, but here are two strategies to get you started:
- Silver medallists: Often there are people who are qualified for the role but were beat to the post, and these candidates might be interested in hearing about a new opportunity. Within your talent platform, you can create a list of all those who almost made it in similar searches in no time.
- Contingent talent: If you’ve adopted a total talent approach, you might be lucky enough to have visibility of the contractors and freelancers that have worked well for you in previous projects. The most forward-thinking organizations are shifting ownership of this important talent segment from procurement to HR, gaining a total vision of available skills in their workforce and aligning the contractor experience with employees. By creating networks of the contingent workers that have been engaged and collecting feedback on performance, you’ll be able to reach out to this group when a new opportunity opens and engage the appropriately skilled individuals.
If your talent platform offers AI-powered tools, the task of finding hidden gems in your database becomes even easier. Once you’ve clearly defined the skills and experience you’re looking for, the technology can do the heavy lifting, making smart recommendations of candidates that might be the perfect match.
As well as saving your recruiters valuable time and speeding up the hiring process, powerful algorithms are likely to uncover suitable candidates that recruiters may have missed through a traditional search.
#2: Streamline Processes for High Volume Hiring
When facing large amounts of applicants, teams can end up completely overwhelmed and the experience can fall flat for both candidates and hiring teams alike. Having the right technology in place can make high volume hiring less of a scrambled and burdensome nightmare and more of an organized and streamlined dream. Let’s take a look at some specific examples:
- Recorded on-demand video interviews: Candidates can record their answers at a convenient time and hiring teams can review them whenever they choose. This eliminates any scheduling pain points and can help recruiters handle large amounts of candidates from anywhere in the world more efficiently.
- Knock-out questions: Eliminate unqualified candidates quickly, speeding up the search for the best talent and optimizing the use of your hiring team’s time.
- Automated communications: Empower your team to automate and send communications from the same platform. They’ll be able to mass send invites for candidates to record their interview via a unique link, using smart personalization tokens to ensure it seems like you’re just speaking to them sending instructions to multiple applicants at once.
- Auto scheduler: Streamline the interview process by implementing a tool that helps eliminate the hassle of back-and-forth emails and allows recruiters to overcome any scheduling challenges. It optimizes time and enables stakeholders to invite attendees without overbooking, bettering both the candidate and recruiter experience.
#3: Tailored Stakeholder Experiences
Successful high volume hiring relies on the collaboration of other stakeholders that don’t regularly participate in the recruiting process. Such is the case for hiring managers, who are just putting their recruitment hat on for a short period alongside their usual responsibilities.
When looking to lighten the load, technology can be leveraged to deliver a tailored experience that makes their lives as easy as possible. For example, when it comes to the retail industry, high volume hiring is a common practice due to the large numbers of entry-level candidates and seasonal demand. This is where store managers can use the extra help. Constantly on the move and busy taking care of their usual managerial duties, time is at a premium before they have to take care of recruiting responsibilities.
Creating an intuitive and easy-to-use store manager portal will speed up the interview process by acting as a one-stop shop where they can review and carry out any pending tasks as well as perform massive actions, such as dispositioning unqualified candidates, drastically speeding up the hiring process.
In order to understand if their high volume hiring efforts are working, the portal should also provide clarity into hiring progress through visual reports that can be understood at a glance. These might include time to fill (to better grasp how long it’s taking to fill each role),hires per source (to evaluate how well your strategies and traction tools are working) or seasonal openings (to understand how many have been filled).
Onsite events are another scenario in which high volume hiring can fail if the stakeholder experience isn’t up to par. To ensure event ROI and meet tough recruitment objectives, on-site staff need to interview huge numbers of candidates. But without the right technology, keeping track of feedback and identifying the most qualified candidates is an impossible task.
Implementing an events portal can transform the experience for those on the ground and drive positive hiring outcomes.Rather than drowning in a sea of paperwork, candidate data is recorded digitally and through mobile devices, feedback is collected centrally in real-time for your whole team to access and action can be taken quickly, such as inviting a strong candidate to the next step in the process. This way, everyone can keep up on the go, making the best out of time and resources.
#4: Power Tools That Nail the High Volume Hiring Experience
As we’ve mentioned, companies are competing to attract talent in time-sensitive scenarios such as seasonal hiring or hiring for a new location. When turning to high volume hiring, one way to reach large numbers of candidates and find top talent is by leveraging your power tools, such as campaigns.
You’ll be able to get a lot more from your campaigns by making use of a platform where you can carry out all your recruitment marketing activities centrally and operate in a holistic way across channels. As such, you’ll gain better visibility of all of your planned email engagements, SMS and social media campaigns and landing pages, as well as being able to keep track of campaign performance and current status.
The best platforms provide robust but intuitive reports that capture your audience’s response and the effectiveness of each channel so you can optimize efforts as you go along.
You can even take it one step further and pair all of this with smart automation, allowing the technology itself to do lots of the heavy lifting – a particular useful tool in the context of high volume recruiting. The main benefit here is that you optimize stakeholders’ time and free them up to engage new leads without the hassle of managing the entirety of all their campaigns on top of it.
Bankers Life’s story is just one of the many examples of how automation can help with the heavy lifting. Being a leading health and life insurance company, they looked to Avature to help with the hiring process of insurance agents across the country by building a strong, fully automated sourcing and pre-screening process.
Through our websources feature, they were able to develop a configuration of saved searches with specific filters to target their ideal talent. They also carried out scheduled searches of 10 thousand candidates that ran automatically, even after office hours. As a result of this process, all the new candidates were added to their database through automation and were linked to a specific branch according to their location.
They were also very interested in the candidate journey, which is why they customized emails that were sent at each stage of the process; some of them even included an invitation to self-schedule informational sessions through a portal. Automated communications were also sent to dispositioned candidates, which ensured they’d never be ghosted and stayed engaged in future communications.
The results? Bankers Life is nowadays housing 10 million candidates in their Avature instance and all of them are 100 percent engaged.
#5: Measure, Track and Review Your High Volume Hiring Efforts!
But efforts can’t end at implementation. Once you’ve deployed your high volume hiring strategies, it’s essential to understand how they’re performing. Without this information, you won’t be able to recognize where you’re succeeding and where you’ll need to rework your efforts. So what can your organization do to measure, track and review them? We recommend a three-pronged approach!
- Report on candidate source data and career site metrics. Understanding how things are working at the top of the funnel lets you figure out how best to allocate resources. If most qualified candidates are coming from Facebook campaigns, you might want to allocate more budget to that channel.
- Report on processes. This helps to identify bottlenecks and places where you might want to streamline and potentially incorporate more automation.
- Report on experience. Surveys can help you better understand how to improve the experience and build trust for smoother collaboration, ultimately enabling more efficient recruiting. You can ask candidates, hiring managers and other stakeholders involved to provide their feedback on each part of the experience.
To Conclude…
The current talent landscape is one that can overwhelm even the most experienced of recruiters. Companies are constantly looking to innovate in order to compete for the right talent that meets their business needs.
Together with a smart talent platform, implementing these high volume hiring best practices can make the entire experience one that makes a difference for all stakeholders involved. It’s not enough to find the right people; the entire process and experience needs to be as smooth as possible for your talent strategy to succeed.
