High-volume recruiting is a popular hiring strategy, which recruiters bank on to fill vacancies at scale in an organization. Earlier, there used to be a lot of challenges and process inefficiencies in high-volume recruiting, but thanks to digitization of HR, in recent years things have evolved in favor of the HR space.
49% talent acquisition practioners say that use of technology helps reduce biases in different stages of HR workflows, including high-volume recruiting. And, it's imminent that the adoption of HR technologies in recruitment will grow further north and north. This is because talent heads, CPOs, and CHROs at SMBs, startups, and enterprises are cognizant of the impact emerging tech can have on effective talent management. In fact,
- Post-Covid, 55% of HR teams increased their investment in human resource (HR) technologies.
- 65% of recruiters now use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their recruitment processes.
Recruiters are continuously upskilling, and uses AI in all the stages of high-volume recruitment i.e., from intelligent candidate screening, to assessment, onboarding, and skill development at scale.
Read this Skima Insight to understand-
- What's high-volume recruiting?
- Why are recruiters keen on using AI for high-volume recruitment?
- How recruiters are streamlining their high-volume hiring strategies using AI?
Note: In this blog, we shall be interchangeably using high-volume recruiting, bulk recruiting, high-volume hiring, mass hiring, bulk hiring, and high-volume recruitment. You don’t need to be confused, they are all the same.
What's High-volume Recruiting?
High-volume recruiting, aka bulk hiring or mass hiring, is when you're hiring candidates in large numbers to fill positions at your organization. There is no standard definition to qualify a recruitment drive or hiring cycle as high-volume recruitment. In general, this number could be anything; 100s and 1000s, or tens of thousands. But at the core, high-volume recruiting is a relative term. Here are two high-volume recruiting examples-
- At large enterprises, with a 10,000+ headcount, a recruitment drive of 200 people might not be labeled as high-volume recruitment. For them, it might be a regular affair to hire those many people every quarter. But if the target number of talent to be hired spikes up in a particular quarter or time frame, let's say by 2x, it can be referred to as high-volume recruiting.
- On the contrary, at startups with a headcount of 50-70 people, a hiring drive of even 25 people can be labeled as high-volume hiring.
However, there is a faction of recruiters who like to define high-volume hiring in a different way. The alternative way to define high-volume hiring is when you get an unusually high number of applications for a job post position.
- As a hypothetical example, let's say, you received 1800 resumes to hire for 5 floor representatives at a retail store. To some recruiters, filling such positions by sifting through 1000s of resumes can also be called high-volume hiring.
We hope that gives you some clarity about bulk hiring. Continue reading this Skima Insight to dive deeper into different aspects of high-volume recruitment. For starters, why do organizations need to do high-volume recruitment? What are the challenges of bulk hiring?
Why Do Organizations Need To Do High-Volume Recruiting?
The demand for high-volume recruiting arises when-
- An organization is in a high-growth phase; when companies start or bulk up their onshore and offshore teams to balance the demand and supply.
- Enterprises venture into new domains, aka new business verticals to tap emerging opportunities.
- Businesses need to meet seasonal talent requirements in certain industries (retail during festive times, hospitality in spring, healthcare during a disease outbreak, etc.)
Also, some industries have high talent attrition, aka employee turnover rates. An inadequate pipeline of workforce for such industries can result in the business getting disrupted (in an undesirable fashion). Nobody wants that to happen. Thus, the companies operating in such industries need to maintain a continuous hiring pipeline to maintain a healthy talent pool. And so, they too turn to bulk hiring. Examples of industries with high turnover could be BPOs, logistics, retail chains, hotel chains, quick services restaurants (QSR), etcetera. In fact, as per research,
- In the UK, sales and marketing professionals have the highest turnover rate (31%), followed by finance (19%).
- In the US, the staffing domain has a whooping employee turnover of 352%. Hotels (300%), supermarkets (100%), and QSR (100%) are not too far behind either.
Imagine keeping the lights on for these businesses without engaging in bulk hiring. However, it's not just a benefit game. High-volume recruitment for maintaining a large candidate pool, while keeping high-quality standards, poses considerable challenges too.
Challenges Associated With High-Volume Recruitment
High-volume hiring does help businesses maintain a continuous stream of talent, but as already mentioned, there are some associated challenges that you need to tackle to ensure that your high-volume recruiting drives are truly successful. Here we've listed some of the key challenges recruiters must solve-
Candidate Drop Rates
Research indicates that during bulk hiring campaigns:
- 46% of candidates drop out due to poor candidate experiences
- 44% exit the process when they find out the pay
- 25% lose interest during the interview process
When candidates drop out of your high-volume recruiting workflow, you lose the time you invested in attracting, engaging, and interviewing that candidate, and of course, the potential talent too.
Avoiding Bad Hires
Finding qualified candidates among 1000s of applicants is no different than finding a needle in the haystack. Wading through all the candidate profiles, and manually assessing them based on what's in the resume is next to impossible. Not to mention, if you let manual inefficiencies weed your high-volume recruitment process, the outcomes could be highly inaccurate too. And do we need to tell you, how much a bad hire could cost?
Managing Time & Quality
Usually. high-volume recruiting strategy is deployed to close positions in shorter spans with a very low time-to-hire. Often, due to time constraints, some recruiters trade quality for quantity. In some cases, it might not be that bad, but in some industries, bad hires could be a disaster.
Consistent Candidate Experience
On an average, only 1 in 5 applicants ever get contacted for the interview. During high-volume hiring, in the absence of personalized communications or regular updates, candidates are often left out in a dark abyss, figuring out things on their own. This contributes to a negative candidate experience and damages your employer's brand.
Minimizing Bias In Hiring
When recruiters are tight on time & resource constraints, it is easy for inefficiencies like unconscious human bias and instinctive rushed decisions to creep into your hiring workflows. This could steer you away from DEI initiatives aimed at building a diverse workforce, and the gaps in the process may give way to bad hires too.
Additionally, recruiters are at risk of burnout, work-life balance issues, and productivity challenges. As obvious, there can be many challenges in high-volume recruiting. But they are not Bermuda Triangle, so you don't need to worry. Continue reading this Skima Insight, and you will find ways to mitigate all the challenges associated with bulk hiring.
Using Technology To Improve The Outcomes of High-volume Recruitment
Tech-savvy recruiters can overcome most of the listed challenges by incorporating the right technology in their HR workflows.
For example, the very first challenge you recruiters may face is to attract a good volume of applications for your job posts. To solve this, you can start using job posting and job aggregator platforms like Lever, SmartRecruiter, or LinkedIn Recruiter. You may use niche job boards as well. Additionally, you can use job advertising to get more applicants.
Similarly, let's see how you may address complex issues that we mentioned earlier which are related to high-volume recruitment.
Applicant Tracking System (ATS) & Job Boards
Use job description generator AI tools to create sound job posts. Using ATS & job board integrations, distribute the job postings to as many platforms as you wish. Pull relevant candidate data from diverse sources. You can view and process the aggregated candidate data from across platforms in a unified way on a single screen. This helps you get enhanced visibility into your high-volume recruitment drive. And also ensures you don't miss any candidate accidentally.
AI-powered Talent Intelligence Tools
Use resume parsing, aka AI resume-screening tools to process resume and CVs in bulk. AI resume parsing HR tools help you keep individual unconscious or conscious biases at a distance. Using AI talent screening tools for high-volume hiring, discover all the top matching profiles that are qualified for your job roles in the blink of an eye. Thus saving you a lot of money & time. Read the section on "Use Skima AI for Successful High-volume Recruitment" to dig deeper into this.
AI-led Skills Assessment Platforms
You may further sieve top candidates using AI-powered skill assessment software. These tools automate the technical evaluation of the applicant's hard skills and soft skills. They design assessments and exercises based on specific job requirements to test candidates on their subject matter expertise, as well as cognitive skills. Often, these tools progressively increase the complexity of the questions to adapt to individual candidate's proficiency. Thus, helps hire the right candidates through high-volume recruiting.
Communication Automation & Interviewing Tools
A big bottleneck to bulk hiring is communicating & engaging with the candidates in a timely fashion. Most ATS are equipped with tools to automate your candidate communication and engagement process. For interviewing candidates at scale, you can add interview scheduling, and video interviewing software to your HR technology stack.
Background Checking Solutions
Technology has solved this to an extent, but the software serving this field still needs some time to be usable at scale. For now, you would need to have manual human verification as part of your recruitment automation workflows.
Onboarding Tools
Welcome your new hires to the team with a robust onboarding tool that assists candidates upload all the tax documents, benefit enrolment forms, and other important paperwork. This helps save the recruiters time that would have been spent on the same mundane administrative tasks. Besides, you can also use email tools to share welcome emails, company resources, training materials, etcetera.
At every stage, technology helps recruiters save a lot of time, which otherwise would have been spent on repetitive tasks that even zombies would get bored doing.
But none of the tasks are as time-intensive and boring as going through individual resumes of candidates to check if they are a right fit. Please don't read us wrong. It might be the most time-consuming task, but it is the most crucial part as well. If you get this wrong, your entire high-volume hiring workflow can be useless. So, it is very important to make the right choice for your resume intelligence software. Next, read how Skima AI maximizes the value you squeeze from a tech-savvy high-volume recruitment workflow.
Use Skima AI For Successful High-volume Recruiting
If you've not been living under a rock, you would already know that AI is completely transforming the recruitment industry. Tools like Skima AI are equipping recruiters with superpowers. Powers that unlock unforeseen recruiter efficiency & productivity. Here are 5 different ways how Skima AI helps talent acquisition specialists with high-volume recruiting-
Create Job Descriptions Using Skima AI For Bulk Hiring
Grrr! Why are good things in life not for free? If this is something that you've been grumbling about, you need to stop. Because Skima AI's Job Description Generator is completely free for recruiters. Use it to create JDs that attract maximum applications from candidates. Try it for free. No login is required. Use its extensive customization options to truly realize its power.
Reduce Time-to-Hire Using Skima AI Matching Score
- Skima AI's resume parser outperforms any other parser in the market. We understand a candidate's resume much better than any other HR software. Therefore, with Skima AI, you get accurate talent intelligence information to act on.
- Our AI algorithms process every candidate's resume and assign a score to each one of them based on how good a fit they could be for your specified role and job description. The higher the score, the better the fit.
- You can use Skima AI to find the right talent among 100s and 1000s of applicants. Thus saving your crucial recruitment hours, and reducing your average time-to-hire.
Improve Quality of Hire
Unlike other talent intelligence tools, Skima AI is not just about keyword matching or relevance matching.
Our AI algorithms are advanced, and unsurface hidden signals in candidates' resumes. Skima AI assesses candidates' resumes not just based on their suitability for the core skills, but other factors as well, including but not limited to diverse work experience, volunteering work, open source contribution, languages known, and non-work related activities. This helps you spot your purple squirrels (the right candidate) for the role.
Reduce Recruiter Bias and Help Accelerate DEI Initiatives
Reducing bias in your high-volume recruiting process is one of the top priorities of every recruiter. We are sure that you too want to build a diverse, inclusive, and balanced team. With the Skima AI matching score, there is zero to minimal scope for hiring bias to slip in the recruitment process.
Automation, Candidate Experience, and Employer Branding
Skima AI isn't limited to talent intelligence. We provide you the infrastructure to create your own custom workflows- from job post creation to attract resumes, to intelligent scoring of candidates, sending them email invites to schedule their own interview/assessment, and engaging them with job-relevant updates. This improves recruiter experience, and candidate experience, and enhances your brand's perception among candidates.
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