Articles 
Updated September 2024
Whether you’re in the midst of hiring a large number of seasonal employees, managing an influx of candidates due to your organization’s rapid growth or simply looking to optimize your high-volume recruitment strategy, the task at hand is significant.
Beyond attracting a considerable number of applicants in the first place, identifying the most suitable candidates consistently and at scale for multiple positions can be a time-consuming challenge.
Though organizations often look to technology to do the heavy lifting, the reality is that many of these solutions fail to live up to the challenge. In fact, a sizeable proportion of our applicant tracking system customers came to Avature in a desperate search for smart automation tools that could drive the efficiencies they really needed.
In one of our most popular webinars, we tackled some best practices that have helped Avature customers optimize their high-volume hiring strategies. Here are the key takeaways:
#1: Don’t Start Hiring From Scratch
We have two words for you: candidate database. We’ve heard from the Avature community that it can sometimes be challenging to resurface old candidates due to limited search functionality.
However, a market-leading talent platform should have comprehensive search tools to help you rediscover candidates you’ve already been in touch with. Leveraging this database can give you a headstart when tackling high-volume hiring since 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 just miss out against another applicant. These candidates might be interested in hearing about a new opportunity with your organization. Creating a list of all those who almost made it to the finish line in similar searches is a great place to start.
- Contingent talent: If you’ve adopted a total talent approach, you might be lucky enough to have visibility of the contractors and freelancers who have worked well in previous projects. The most forward-thinking organizations are shifting ownership of this vital talent segment from procurement to HR. By doing so, they gain a comprehensive vision of available skills in their workforce and align the contractor experience with that of employees.
By creating networks of contingent workers who have been engaged and collecting feedback on performance, you’ll be able to reach out to this group when a new opportunity opens up and engage appropriately skilled individuals.
If your talent platform offers AI-powered tools, 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, recommending candidates that might be the perfect match. Transparent technology lets you see the reasoning behind the recommendations so your hiring team can make a final decision.
In addition to saving your recruiters valuable time and speeding up the 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 numbers of applicants, if your recruiters get overwhelmed, the experience can fall flat for both candidates and hiring teams. Having the right technology in place will streamline the entire process. Let’s consider 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 feature eliminates any scheduling pain points and can help recruiters handle large amounts of worldwide candidates more efficiently.
- Knock-out questions: Eliminate unqualified candidates quickly, speeding up the search for the best talent and optimizing your hiring team’s time.
- Automated communications: Empower your team to automate and send communications from the same platform. They’ll be able to send mass invites for candidates to record their interview via a unique link, using smart personalization tokens to ensure an individualized tone while providing 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. This tool optimizes time and enables stakeholders to invite attendees without overbooking, improving candidate and recruiter experience.
#3: Tailored Stakeholder Experiences
Successful high-volume hiring relies on collaborating with other stakeholders who don’t regularly participate in the recruiting process. Such is the case for hiring managers, who put on their recruitment hat temporarily while attending to their usual responsibilities.
When looking to lighten the load for relevant stakeholders, technology can be leveraged to deliver a tailored experience that makes their lives as easy as possible. For example, in the retail industry, high-volume hiring is a common practice due to the large number of entry-level candidates and seasonal demand. These situations are where store managers can use extra help. Time is valuable as managers are constantly on the move and busy taking care of their usual managerial duties while tasked with additional recruiting responsibilities.
Creating an intuitive and easy-to-use store manager portal will accelerate the interview process by acting as a one-stop shop where they can review and carry out any pending tasks and perform massive actions, such as disqualifying candidates. This was certainly one of the positive impacts fast-food franchisee GPS Hospitality saw since overhauling its high-volume recruitment strategy with Avature and introducing the Hiring Manager Portal.
To measure results in real-time, 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 roles have been filled).
Onsite events are another scenario where high-volume hiring can fail if the stakeholder experience isn’t up to par. To ensure event ROI and meet challenging recruitment objectives, on-site staff must interview a vast number of candidates. But, without the right technology, tracking feedback and identifying the most qualified ones is impossible.
Implementing an events portal can transform the experience for those on the ground and drive positive hiring outcomes. Rather than drowning in 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. An events portal helps everyone keep up on the go, preserving time and resources.
#4: Take Advantage of Candidate Engagement Tools
As mentioned, companies compete to attract talent in time-sensitive scenarios such as seasonal hiring or when opening a new location. When turning to high-volume hiring, one way to reach large numbers of candidates and find top talent is by leveraging effective engagement campaigns.
Rather than carrying out different campaigns on isolated channels, drive exponential impact by using a centralized platform for all your recruitment marketing channels. As such, you’ll gain better visibility of all of your planned email engagements, SMS and social media campaigns and landing pages and be able to keep track of campaign performance and 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 progress.
You can even take it one step further and pair all of this with smart automation. The main benefit here is that you optimize stakeholders’ time and free them up to engage new leads without the added hassle of managing all their campaigns.
Let’s take a look at a real-life example. Bankers Life, the leading health and life insurance company, looked to Avature to help with the sourcing and hiring process of insurance agents for its multiple branches nationwide.
Through our WebSources feature, they conducted scheduled searches every night that automatically brought ten thousand candidates into their database. Without recruiters having to lift a finger, the system also linked them to a specific branch according to their location, so hiring managers would have a pipeline of relevant talent at their fingertips.
They were also very interested in enhancing the candidate journey, which is why they built customized emails that would be automatically sent at each stage of the process. Some even included an invitation to self-schedule informational sessions through a portal. Automated communications were also sent to dispositioned candidates, ensuring they’d never be ghosted. This approach has allowed them to engage with 100% of the ten million candidates that were added to their database.
#5: Measure, Track and Review Your High-Volume Hiring Efforts
Efforts shouldn’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 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 work at the top of the funnel lets you figure out how best to allocate resources. If most qualified candidates are 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 to provide feedback on each part of the experience.
To Conclude…
The current talent landscape can overwhelm even the most experienced of recruiters. Companies are constantly looking to innovate to compete for the right talent that meets their business needs.
Alongside 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. Finding the right people is not enough; the entire process and experience must be as smooth as possible for your talent strategy to succeed.
