High-volume hiring is the process of sourcing, screening, interviewing, and onboarding a large number of candidates in a short time period. It typically involves hiring dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of employees within a few weeks or months. High-volume hiring is common in industries such as retail, hospitality, customer service, and manufacturing. Many staffing agencies and organizations that recruit seasonal or temporary employees also participate in high-volume hiring.
High-volume hiring is back in a big way. Recent economic data shows that there has been a major surge in the job market, with about 200K-300K new jobs added to the U.S. economy each month since the start of 2024.
But more open jobs means more competition for organizations that have ambitious workforce goals. The Sense team recently collaborated with the CandE Benchmark Research Program to understand how recruiters are approaching high-volume hiring in 2024. Through a survey of nearly 250 talent acquisition professionals and organizational leaders, we learned that:
These themes will be prevalent throughout this blog post. We’ll touch on each one and cover everything you need to know to create a winning high-volume hiring strategy.
Making your organization an appealing place to work goes a long way in capturing the attention of a high volume of job seekers. That requires investing time and effort in crafting a positive employer brand. Your brand is your reputation among the talent you hope to hire and it can make great candidates genuinely excited about the idea of joining your team. Let’s explore how a strong employer brand contributes to high-volume hiring success:
Investing in employer branding is an investment in your organization's long-term workforce needs. It empowers you to always be attracting, engaging, and converting top talent—and gives you a substantial edge in the competitive world of high-volume hiring.
There is little room for error in high-volume hiring. A slow recruiting process and/or a high candidate drop-off rate can derail your strategy and cause you to fall short of the lofty goals you’re responsible for.
High-volume hiring requires moving fast, being as efficient as possible, and providing every candidate with an outstanding experience. In this blog post, we’ll explore specific tactics for creating a successful strategy and provide an overview of the high-volume hiring software and tools needed to execute it.
The key to high-volume hiring success starts with creating a detailed and realistic plan. This plan will act as your start-to-finish roadmap, ensuring you fill every role by the required deadline.
Start by defining every step in the recruiting process and setting dates for when each one will need to be completed. This will need to be done for every position and location you’re tasked with staffing.
Then go a step further and account for the number of candidates you’ll need to have at each stage of the hiring funnel in order to successfully fill every role. We recommend taking advantage of historical hiring data when building your high-volume hiring plan since it will help you effectively set goals and prepare for any roadblocks that might arise.
Once your high-volume hiring plan is laid out, consider what it’s going to take to realistically accomplish it. Specifically, how much budget and peoplepower will you need, and how will you allocate all your resources?
Take your plan to organizational leadership, hiring managers, and other stakeholders and ask for the support you need to make it a reality. This is also the perfect time to make the case for any high-volume hiring software that can drive success (more on that later on). Remember, the more detailed your plan, the more likely you’ll get the green light from decision-makers.
Defining candidate qualifications upfront (for every role) will help you efficiently execute your high-volume hiring roadmap. Skills, experience, and job requirements for most high-volume roles are straightforward so be sure to work with hiring managers to get these qualifications on paper before you start sourcing talent.
Clearly defined qualifications ensure you identify suitable candidates from the start and smoothly advance them through the recruiting pipeline. However, it’s an absolute must that everyone involved stays committed and focused on these qualifications throughout the process. Be clear with your hiring managers that you can’t afford to change or add new requirements once the recruiting process kicks off.
Before you put your high-volume hiring strategy into action, invest time in building an employer brand that makes your organization appealing to talent. Start by crafting a high-level value proposition that summarizes what’s great about being part of your team, then prepare to use that messaging in all your hiring communications.
Next, take the time to modernize your careers website, collect more employee reviews and testimonials, and build up your recruiting presence on social media. Really strive to have a presence everywhere online that a potential candidate might explore during their job search.
A strong employer brand will bring an organic boost to your high-volume recruiting efforts. You’ll not only generate a larger pool of candidates—you’ll attract people who are genuinely excited to join your team.
A great employer brand is going to bring a lot of curious job seekers to your website, many of whom will be hoping you have the right job for them.
If you're recruiting for roles across different teams and locations, don't make these potential candidates search for relevant opportunities. Instead, find out what they want to do and where they live and match them with the right role.
This prevents candidates from getting frustrated and leaving your site before discovering that you have the perfect job waiting for them. Again, high-volume hiring requires removing inefficiencies and that means you need to instantly direct candidates to the jobs they want.
Simply hanging up a “hiring” sign and advertising on job boards won’t be enough to accomplish your high-volume hiring goals. You need to cast a wide net and attract candidates from multiple sources.
The more candidates you bring into the top of the funnel, the more hires you’ll ultimately make. The key here is to get creative and think about how you can generate the largest possible pool of qualified applicants for each role. Consider ideas like participating in recruiting fairs, offering incentives for employee referrals, and engaging passive talent.
Speaking of creative sourcing ideas—try reaching out to the talent you already know and sharing relevant jobs with them. You likely have an ATS/CRM full of candidates who have already expressed interest in working for your organization (or perhaps worked for you previously if you hire seasonal or temporary employees).
Reconnecting with past talent can help you source multiple candidates at once who would jump at the opportunity to join your team. You will need AI-powered recruiting automation to search your database for candidates who are the right fit (e.g., live near the locations you’re recruiting for and meet the role requirements) and to reengage the talent pool at scale with personalized messaging.
Offering a fast and simple application process is crucial to high-volume hiring success. Complex, multi-step applications are incredibly outdated and discourage great candidates from moving forward with applying.
Think about what information you really need to collect and only include those questions on your application. In all likelihood, you really just need to ask for contact information and a few pre-screening questions that help you learn if the applicant is worth moving forward with. The whole process should take less than 10 minutes, and candidates should be able to submit an application from their computer or mobile phone.
"Can you work around my school schedule?" “Do you offer employee discounts or benefits?” Candidates have all kinds of questions on their minds before they can decide if a job opportunity is right for them.
Some job seekers are willing to apply and get their questions answered later on but others will assume the role doesn’t meet their needs and move on with their job search. You can’t afford to lose candidates in high-volume recruiting because you don’t provide them with the information they’re looking for.
Strive to instantly answer any question a candidate has about the role. You’ll not only attract more applicants, you’ll have excited candidates moving through the high-volume hiring process who know that the job checks all their boxes.
Reviewing piles of applications and conducting countless phone interviews is a colossal drain on time. And it’s simply not feasible when you’re facing tight deadlines and have hundreds or even thousands of candidates in the running for multiple positions.
But here's the good news: you've already made your life easy by setting clear job requirements upfront. You can now automate the pre-screening process and instantly determine if an applicant is qualified for the job. This increases efficiency and takes a lot of work off your recruiting team’s plate.
If a candidate is a good fit for a job, they shouldn’t have to wait a few days to hear back after submitting an application. Instantly scheduling an interview not only fast-tracks the recruiting process, it also keeps the momentum going with an eager candidate.
When a candidate accepts an interview request, it's a clear sign that they're genuinely interested in the position. Plus, it signals to them that you’re interested in hiring them, which keeps them from exploring other opportunities.
With automated pre-screening and interview scheduling, a candidate can have an interview on their calendar within minutes of submitting an application, substantially reducing time-to-hire and elevating the talent experience.
Connecting with candidates for an initial screening call is an important step in the hiring process. But it’s also one of the most time-consuming parts of a recruiter’s workday. In some cases, recruiters spend as much as half of their time continuously calling candidates to learn more about them and move the hiring process forward.
One of the newest advancements in AI is automated voice conversations. This innovative technology automatically calls candidates—without any human intervention required—and collects information, answers questions, conducts pre-screening, and schedules interviews. It will then create and send a summary of the conversation to the recruiter and hiring manager so they have the context they need to further engage the candidate.
Conversational Voice AI completely transforms how recruiting teams conduct outreach calls. It empowers them to connect with a high volume of candidates faster and more efficiently than ever before.
At this point in the high-volume hiring process, you efficiently sourced talent, screened applicants, and scheduled interviews. But you can’t afford to let the progress stall now that it’s time to meet candidates in person.
Your hiring-volume hiring strategy needs to include a well-planned interview process. Work with your hiring managers to decide how many interviews will be needed for each role. If multiple interviews will be required, establish a maximum number of days between each one to keep your plan on track.
When conducting the interview, ask every candidate the same questions and evaluate their responses using a consistent rubric. This can be as straightforward as confirming they meet the required qualifications and adding a few questions to gauge the soft skills relevant to the role. Overall, if they meet the role requirements and seem enthusiastic about the job, you should feel comfortable hiring them.
Staying in touch with candidates is essential in high-volume recruiting. Consistent updates and reminders keeps them interested in the role and prevents them from dropping out of the recruiting process.
This can be as simple as sending a message after an interview that says, "The team enjoyed meeting you today. I'll be in touch by Friday with next steps." By being transparent about when they’ll hear from you again (which is defined in your high-volume hiring plan), candidates will always know exactly where they’re at in the process.
Additionally, always send reminders to the candidate as their interview approaches so you reaffirm their commitment to the process. Shooting off a quick reminder reduces interview no-shows and gives the candidate the opportunity to reschedule if needed.
Getting a candidate to accept your offer is a big win, but it's not the end of the road. There is still a chance that they might not show up on their first day, undoing all the hard work your hiring team has done to that point.
This issue can be avoided by taking a smart approach to onboarding. Sending regular updates before the new hire’s start date calms their nerves, gets them excited, and prepares them to be successful from the get-go.
For example, you can send a quick message letting them know when to arrive, where to go, and what to wear on their first day while giving them the opportunity to ask any lingering questions they have.
The journey continues once new hires have joined the team. It's time to switch gears from offering a great candidate experience to providing an awesome employee experience. This is how you ensure that your high-volume hires are not only productive but also happy, and more likely to stick around.
To achieve this, think about what it takes to make your organization a great place to work. You can even ask your current employees for their insights since they're often the best judges of what makes a workplace truly exceptional.
A great employee experience also enhances your employer brand and sets you up for success in future high-volume hiring cycles. If you’re tasked with recruiting temporary or seasonal employees, providing them with a positive experience increases the likelihood they’ll want to return in the future.
As you’ve learned, there is a lot that goes into high-volume hiring. The reality is your recruiting team needs to leverage the right technology to hire multiple people in a short time period. With the power of recruiting AI and automation, you can reach more candidates, accelerate hiring, increase recruiter productivity, and provide a great talent experience.
AI chatbots are your 24/7 recruiting assistants. Here’s how you can use conversational AI to engage every candidate in real-time:
Recruiting teams that use AI chatbots experience 3X more hires, a 55% faster hiring rate, and a 35% decrease in job board spending.
Generative AI has been the hottest topic in tech over the past year. But how can recruiters use it to meet their hiring goals?
Sense recently launched a host of new generative AI features. You can learn more about Sense AI Copilot here.
Text messaging empowers recruiters to connect directly with candidates on their phones. Below are the different ways you can use text messaging in your high-volume hiring strategy:
If you’re ready to learn more about the benefits of text messaging in high-volume hiring, check out our comprehensive ebook titled “Texting for Talent: 🌟How Text Messaging is Transforming Candidate Engagement.”
There are numerous other ways you can use AI-powered recruiting automation to drive high-volume hiring success. Let’s take a look at a final few examples:
Any recruiting team responsible for high-volume hiring certainly has their work cut out for them. But with the right strategy and technology, you can attract, engage, and ultimately hire countless people who will make a positive impact on your organization.
Ready to meet and exceed your high-volume hiring goals? Get a live demo of Sense today!
