Volume hiring headaches? Here's how to simplify your recruitment

When it comes to hiring candidates in volumes, regular hiring practices just don’t hit the mark.

When you’re recruiting in the hundreds – or even thousands – of roles, efficiency is key. Lack the right processes and hiring managers can quickly become overwhelmed, seeing their candidate pipeline fall apart. Like having a bucket with a big hole in it.

Volume hiring is a different beast from regular hiring; It’s driven by automation, streamlined processes and utilizing data and insights to ensure you are owning your volume hiring vs being drowned by it.

We’re looking at some of the most common challenges companies face when it comes to volume hiring – and the strategies you can implement to deliver successful recruitment campaigns.

Challenge: Attracting Top Talent

Year after year – and especially in a challenging labor market – we hear from companies how attracting high-quality, top talent is one of their biggest challenges in volume recruitment.

So when finding high-calibre candidates is a premium, how can companies stay ahead of the curve?

Solution

When volume hiring is the name of the game, it’s important to think about awareness; how you can amplify your employer brand, how you can improve the reach of your job ads, and where you can leverage existing channels to squeeze every last drop of potential out of the talent pool.

Invest in your employer brand to attract those engaged candidates while standing out against your competition and becoming top-of-mind for candidates
Introduce a referral program within your business to incentivise current employees, while ensuring a higher quality of candidates
Leverage social media recruiting, taking to traditional platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. With the rise of #careertok on Tik Tok, companies are flocking to the platform to hire emerging talent, specifically around Gen Z and millennials.
Maintaining your talent pool. Don’t forget your potential pool of candidates that expressed an interest in your company – or progressed through the pipeline previously
Partner with job search engines like Adzuna, experienced at delivering in high volumes (well, we couldn’t leave ourselves out, could we?!) With more jobs than anywhere else and millions of monthly visitors searching for high-volume jobs and can ensure you receive a stream of additional high-quality candidates for your roles. You can find out more here or speak to the team about your hiring needs for the year ahead.

Challenge: Misaligned hiring needs

A challenge that can cause major headaches for recruiting teams is a lack of clarity around exactly what the hiring needs are for your roles. Define your hiring needs before you get started.

Solution

Align your hiring goals with your business objectives. Take the time to clearly define and identify the specific roles – and skills – you need to achieve them
Set expectations together with hiring managers. Before recruitment begins, it’s important you’re all on the same page. Work with hiring managers to clearly define exactly what they – and you – are looking for, to speed up efficiencies in the process further down the pipeline
Define the critical skills and competencies for each role to make way for more efficient (and effective) hiring. Instead of time spent evaluating candidates’ potential, you can focus on assessing whether they meet your established criteria whilst improving the quality of the hire and reducing turnover rates.

Challenge: Streamlining Processes

With businesses struggling with high-drop off rates and citing it as one of their biggest volume recruitment challenges, it’s no surprise that streamlining processes features as a big challenge.

Solution

In a world where clunky and slow recruitment processes can cost you valuable time, money and great candidates, streamlining processes can help you eliminate gaps in your hiring. Looking to improve your processes? We’d recommend:

Investing in an ATS (applicant tracking system). Take some of the manual stress out of your search by utilizing an ATS to help track and organize CVs, ranging them against your critical skills and competencies and ultimately, help identify the most qualified candidates from your pool.
Making automation your friend. You likely don’t have the luxury of focusing on each candidate, and each step of the process individually, you need to think about how you can automate CV screening, scheduling interviews and sending follow-up emails to the candidates.
Use data to inform decision-making. Collecting and analyzing your recruitment data can help you identify areas for improvement and continuously improve your recruitment process.

Challenge: A poor candidate experience

The overall candidate experience one of the top priorities for companies looking to improve their volume hiring in 2023. After all, when you’ve done the hard work to attract high-quality candidates in volumes, the last thing you want to do is let them down with a poor experience that means they look elsewhere – or worse still, ghost you.

Solution

As more companies place a priority on the overall experience, we look at ways you could do the same:

Simplify your hiring process. In a volatile job market, every hire counts and you don’t want to lose candidates by having an unwieldy, unnecessary 10-stage interview. Reduce and refine your process to become more efficient.
Provide timely feedback. Don’t want to be ghosted? Make sure you don’t do the same. You can automate your process to ensure candidates are kept in the loop at each stage of the process
Set expectations of what’s to come. Be open and transparent with candidates about what they should expect at each stage of the process
Remember to ask for feedback. Whether good or bad, candidate feedback can have a significant impact on your future process and help you optimize your recruitment moving forward

Making volume recruitment work for you in a tough environment

Hiring in large volumes is no easy task. It can be overwhelming, full of road bumps and let’s be honest, frustrating. From misaligned expectations to manual processes and poor experiences (for all involved), it’s important your company is putting its best foot forward in the war for top talent.

In the year ahead, it’s time to tackle these challenges head-on to help you rise above the competition

Need some help hiring high-quality candidates? We’re on hand to help. You can read more here or speak to one of our team about your hiring needs here.

Looking for high-quality candidates in volume for your company? We’d love to help. You can learn more about how we can help or chat with us here.