How To Coordinate High-Volume Hiring

High-volume hiring is a stark reality of business now. Oftentimes the context is seasonal, i.e. retail hires near the holidays, but it doesn’t need to be that pronounced. If a company has a new product launch upcoming or other business needs, they might have a random “splurge” period of high-volume hiring, which is generally defined as processes with 250 or more applicants. (An average job posting receives about 59 applicants.)

Briefly Understand the Current Landscape

We all know the job market is tight right now. That narrative has been put forth a lot. High-volume hiring is harder in tight markets, for sure. Now you might need to find 200 needles in 200 haystacks, where 1 needle in 1 haystack seemed hard enough.

So it’s definitely hard, and we appreciate that. We’re here to help.

Consider These Points Above All

• Make sure your job application is mobile-friendly: Most know this by now, but mobile has replaced desktop as the first stage in the majority of applications. Keep in mind that some hourly workers don’t have access to a desktop computer in the first place.
• Recruit where your ideal candidates are: For many jobs, this is definitely LinkedIn. But certain positions (e.g., engineers, designers) may be on niche platforms like GitHub or StackOverflow, or even specific Reddit threads. We actually once saw someone get sourced for a job through Instagram DM. The possibilities are endless right now.
• Do not spend too much time on automatable top-of-funnel tasks: This means sourcing, resume screening, and scheduling. Note: Ideal does not presently directly address scheduling interviews, and in high-volume, that is tedious. We do, however, integrate with numerous ATS and HR systems of record that often can make high-volume scheduling easier.
• Use talent rediscovery: This means going back in your resume database of previous applicants to find matches. It saves you time as well, and puts math on your side in high-volume situations. If you need to find 200 employees in the next 6-8 months, and you have a database with even 100 that were qualified in previous application processes, you may be halfway to your goal before you even post job descriptions online.
• The power of referral: Tap your employee network by creating a short email for current employees to send to friends and contacts. You can encourage employees to share on social, but those posts can get lost via algorithm. A direct message from a friend/former co-worker will be more powerful.

The Actual Scheduling Logistics

Scheduling can be a pain. Rely on your ATS, or find the most logistically-minded person (or 3-4 people) within your recruiting function and have them map this out. You want to make sure you bring the right people in for interviews in front of the hiring managers/stakeholders, and admittedly this can be one of the biggest hiccups in the process.

Here’s the good news, though: if you reduced time in the front-end stages of the process by automating sourcing, automating screening, and using candidate rediscovery as mentioned above, you just saved yourself countless hours (up to full days) that you can use towards any issues in a bulk scheduling process.

You can automate scheduling within ATS and other tech platforms, too. Candidates get a link with interview times available for the recruiter or hiring manager, they select one, and it simply populates both their calendars with information about the meeting. By automating scheduling, this saves huge amounts of time in the early stages of a high-volume recruitment process.

The High-Volume Equation

The actual processes of scheduling, offering, and onboarding can largely be done with automation, often through your existing HR back-end. Those are not time-consuming processes inherently, although they can become time-consuming with people’s priorities and new employee questions.

In order to save time for anything that arises in the bottom of a hiring funnel, it’s even more important to maximize time and productivity in the earlier stages. That’s where Ideal works best for its clients. We help automate and maximize the acquisition portion, then we integrate with your back-end to move you towards seamlessly automating the lower-funnel portions.

The end goal is a logistically-sound, streamlined process that gets you the right people in the high-volume slots.

The original version of this article was first published on Ideal.