How to Master High Volume Recruiting to Grow Your Business

High-volume recruiting can be a constant state for companies in high-growth industries, or those with regular employee turnover. Others may be luckier, experiencing volume recruiting as an episodic occurrence (perhaps seasonality, or some sudden expansion such as acquisitions, staffing new facilities, added shifts to meet demand). But regardless of how one experiences these phases, high-volume recruiting periods are an inevitability for all businesses.

This level of recruiting also comes with some unique challenges. Recruiting at scale can quickly become chaotic. Well-defined, highly efficient processes are essential—as is the technology that helps automate time-intensive and tedious tasks.

In a world in which candidates “shop” for employers, it’s critical to communicate the value of your company and be highly responsive to candidates—no matter how they prefer to interact.

Mastering high-volume recruiting depends on five key steps:

1. Clearly Convey a Compelling Employment Value Proposition
2. Expand Your Outreach
3. Rapidly Engage and Prioritize Good-Fit Candidates
4. Use Technology to Scale High Volume Recruiting
5. Track and Review Key Performance Metrics

Let’s dive deeper into each!

1. Clearly Convey a Compelling Employment Value Proposition

In the rapidly evolving world of high volume recruiting, both candidates and employers expect certain standards from one another. That’s why it’s important for values to align on both sides. After all, an employee who shares your company’s values and vision will be better engaged and more productive.

To ensure your values match, start by clearly defining and communicating your company’s goals and mission to attract the right candidates. You can incorporate questions in the recruitment process that help clarify a candidate’s values, such as:

• How adaptable are you in different work situations?
• Are you collaborative? Do you have a positive attitude?
• How strong is your work ethic? Are you dependable? Do you take ownership of your work?
• Are you curious, open to feedback, and willing to take on new challenges?

Candidates may also have questions about values such as company culture, work-life balance, and advancement opportunities. Openly discussing your values will ensure you attract quality candidates and increase your hiring yields. Prospective new hires that are excited by the purpose and vision of your company are likely to experience high job satisfaction and productivity.

When employees feel aligned with the company’s values and goals, they’re less likely to leave. Higher job satisfaction also means you’ll experience higher productivity and low turnover rates, resulting in lower costs of recruiting. In addition, employees who share your vision will help create a positive and unified work culture.

Highlight Your Work Culture

Attracting new hires is a two-way street. While you scrutinize their resumes, they’re also scrutinizing your company and what others say about your brand. After all, it’s currently a job seeker’s market.

With plenty of opportunities available, they now look for more than monetary benefits when applying for a job. They value companies with a strong culture and work-life balance. So, take this as an opportunity to brand your culture. This will go a long way toward attracting the right candidates.

Follow these small but valuable steps to immediately improve your credibility:

• Create a “Why Work For Us” section on your hiring page
• Ask employees to leave positive reviews on Glassdoor and respond politely to any reviews you get—positive or negative
• Share photos and videos of team-building activities on your social media
• If you have a hybrid or remote culture, ask employees to share pictures of their remote offices on LinkedIn
• Update and improve your website’s “About Us” section

In short, candidates are looking for what you do, why you do it, and what it’s like to work for you. Answering these questions adequately will help you increase your brand’s reputation and attract better candidates.

2. Expand Your Outreach

When it comes to high-volume recruiting, you want to tap into as many channels as possible to expand your reach. Employ a programmatic job advertising (PJA) strategy to make your job posting reach as many potential candidates as possible.

PJA uses automated software and algorithms to distribute your job post across different platforms. It also increases the visibility of your job openings and streamlines the recruitment process for employers.

Leading job boards such as Indeed are still critical in sourcing candidates. But best-of-breed recruiting efforts include more extensive use of social media to find and engage so-called “passive” candidates, often among key affinity groups whose interests align closely with your company’s purpose, vision, and culture.

Another way to expand your reach is to optimize your job page with search engine optimization (SEO). Add keywords and optimize your job description with clear headings that list the job title, role description, and required qualifications. You’ll also need to add a meta description, so your job posting appears in search results.

Want to rank even higher with SEO? Include interactive elements, such as videos with embedded keywords.

A dynamic and up-to-date job page backed by a comprehensive PJA strategy will help you attract more qualified candidates. You can also tap into employee referrals and talent rediscovery.

3. Rapidly Engage and Prioritize Good-Fit Candidates

One challenge with high-volume recruiting is keeping quality consistent. Sifting through large numbers of applications for the perfect fit is tedious and time-consuming. You need a tech-forward, optimized recruitment strategy to prioritize quality over quantity. Let’s unpack some key strategies to help implement one.

Improve Top-of-Funnel Recruiting

Create comprehensive job descriptions that thoroughly convey the position’s responsibilities and requirements, while also enhancing appeal to underrepresented populations. As mentioned earlier, while job boards remain relevant, it’s critical to utilize social media platforms and target advertising to reach a wide audience. This way, you’ll also be able to attract “passive” candidates—those who aren’t actively looking for a job but have relevant skills and experience—to build a pool.

Weed Out Low-Quality Candidates with Online Assessments

An online assessment can provide valuable insights into the candidate’s qualifications and temperament. For instance, you can test interpersonal skills and technical knowledge in an objective way. It can also serve as a screening tool to filter out candidates who don’t meet the job requirements, which will save you time and resources.

Provide a Positive Candidate Experience

First and foremost, prioritize speed and professionalism in your interactions with candidates. Your recruiting process should offer the technology options that enable candidates to engage when and how they prefer—text, phone, email, chat, and so on.

The application should be streamlined and easy so as to minimize fallout. Candidates abandon job applications that take more than 20 minutes to complete; considering this, keep yours simple—and write high-converting job descriptions to attract the right crowd. Also, ensure your application form is accessible and easy to fill out via mobile.

Follow-up to applications, questions, and other communications must be rapid—ideally, in real time.

When it comes to the initial screening interview, keep the process flexible and adaptable to the role. Your candidate’s time is valuable too—so avoid too many generic questions. Instead, structure the interview in a way that brings out their knowledge and transferable skills.

Good candidates can be few and far between. So when you spot a quality applicant, fast-track their hiring. Hiring can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months. This creates a wide window for drop-off, as 39% of job candidates say a hiring process that takes one to two weeks is too long. Avoid this by keeping candidates engaged and updated.

Hiring managers’ commitment may be the single most important determinant of a successful high-volume recruitment process. Hiring managers must prioritize recruiting and the need for rapid engagement with quality candidates. They must buy in to the fact that the real solution to their staffing challenges—such as chronic understaffing, extensive overtime, and turnover—can only be solved with a first-rate recruitment process.

4. Use Technology to Scale High-Volume Recruiting

Technology can significantly impact your recruiting success. The artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and data analytics tools now available can provide a competitive advantage for finding, attracting, and retaining top talent.

Leverage an Advanced Applicant Tracking System

An applicant tracking system (ATS) can automate tedious manual tasks. For instance, you won’t have to waste hours sifting through resumes. Instead, an ATS can scan resumes for relevant keywords and qualifications and automatically filter out unqualified candidates.

With just a few clicks, you’ll also be able to automate emails to schedule interviews and keep candidates posted on the hiring process.

Turn to Online Interviews and Assessments

Companies may utilize online interviews and assessments to weed through a significant number of applicants. These can range from screening questions to ensure candidates meet the basic qualifications (education, experience) to first-round interview questions—“Why do you want to work here? What are your career goals?” Essentially, anything you plan to ask an applicant.

Onboarding Platforms Can Alleviate HR Strain

Onboarding platforms relieve your human resources (HR) team by moving tasks like benefits enrollment and tax forms to a self-service dashboard. Use the platform to communicate essential information about your company to applicants, such as your mission and any workplace guidelines. It also standardizes your onboarding process, so all new hires get the same experience.

Analytics Can Boost Your HR Efforts

HR is increasingly data-driven. With robust analytics software in place, your team can chart key metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire, as well as how long it takes to train and onboard employees. Its uses go beyond recruiting and can help you track employee performance, attendance, and engagement, turnover risk and rate, and more.

Think Mobile-First When Hiring

Meet job candidates where they are with mobile recruitment. Common tactics include ensuring your website is optimized for mobile and recruiting via text, apps, or social media. Your hiring team will love this as well—mobile recruitment gives them more flexibility when communicating with applicants.

5. Track and Review Key Performance Metrics

It’s important to track the success of your high-volume recruiting. However, the metrics go beyond whether the jobs have been filled. Use these additional metrics to determine your hiring return on investment (ROI).

Time-to-Hire

How long did it take you to spot good candidates and move them along the recruitment pipeline? This metric determines the efficacy of your hiring strategy.

One good way to speed up the time-to-hire is to be transparent about the salary. It ensures the candidates’ expectations align from the very start.

Cost-per-Hire

How much does it cost you to hire one candidate? High-volume recruiting often requires higher spending. But through automation and outsourcing to professional agencies, you can reduce hiring costs by 25–50%.

Rate of Conversion

Calculate the rate of conversion by dividing the number of candidates who accepted the job offer by the total number of candidates who applied. The conversion rate shows areas for improvement and where to invest your budget. For example, you can track which channels have the best conversion rate and invest more in these job boards or aggregators.

Tracking metrics is the only way to optimize your high-volume recruiting. Often, large companies make the mistake of distributing their recruiting budgets across various platforms. However, if you track these metrics, you’ll get better ROI when it comes to both candidate quality and volume.

An RPO Can Transform Your High-Volume Recruiting Efforts

A recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner takes the stress out of high-volume recruiting. Hiring a large number of candidates is a tall task, and it can be difficult to maintain quality across the entire pipeline. An RPO can save you time and resources and help you optimize each step.

In addition, an RPO partner can help businesses reduce recruitment costs by leveraging their expertise, networks, and technology to identify and attract qualified candidates at a lower cost-per-hire. RPO partners can also help businesses reduce turnover rates and avoid the costs associated with rehiring and training new employees. For instance, Source2’s clients have reported a nearly 50% drop in costs.

Make Your High-Volume Recruiting Hassle-Free with Source2

High-volume recruiting is about more than just getting bodies in the door. With the right RPO partner, you can draw quality candidates who align with your company’s values. Source2 stays by your side at every step of the recruiting cycle, so you attract and retain top talent at reduced costs.

Source2 is different from other RPOs:

• We identify and eliminate waste in your recruiting process. In fact, we show results in 30 days!
• Our tech stacks include AI, machine learning, automation, targeted social media, and other advanced technologies to optimize the process.
• We’re low-risk. You won’t have to pay until a candidate is hired. You pay for performance—not effort.

Looking to optimize your recruiting process? Contact us now.