Recruitment or talent acquisition is one of those aspects of your company’s growth that seems straightforward but really isn’t. It’s challenging and consumes a lot of time, effort, and resources. You don’t want to lose productivity and profitability due to vacancies in business-critical positions. Therefore, you have to recruit replacements as fast as possible.
However, what happens when you’re looking to attract top talent to fill a high volume of vacancies? Let’s look at the high-volume
recruitment process and how you can do it efficiently.
What is High-Volume Recruitment (HVR)?
The name pretty much gives the concept away. High-volume recruitment is any activity that involves hiring a large number of people at a time.
There’s no specific number of new hires that serves as a benchmark to determine if your recruitment is high volume. Generally, your recruitment process is high volume when you’re hiring a significantly higher number of people than you’d typically hire.
High-Volume Recruitment Challenges
Embarking on an activity of such magnitude is never straightforward. You’re going to come across specific challenges when recruiting in bulk.
1. Time restrictions
When your responsibility is to hire many employees to fill up vacancies as fast as possible, there’ll never be enough time.
You’ll have to examine, interview whether via online meeting or contacting them by a
plain old telephone service and assess many applicants within a limited amount of time. There’s no average handling time for screening and selecting applicants; it differs from business to business. The faster you can go without compromising the quality of hires, though, the better.
2. Budgeting cost per hire
All companies want to hire the best candidates possible, but not every company has the resources to invest in hiring those candidates.
You may find yourself having to recruit a high number of people but without adequate resources. For example, only a few companies provide premium video conferencing software and other tools such as cloud-hosted PBX that modern recruitment increasingly needs.
3. Keeping the recruitment team up to speed
Due to the sheer number of active participants, keeping the other recruitment team members on the same page will be difficult. However, this challenge is easily solvable by enabling real-time information sharing among team members using an
acid transaction database. This will ensure that the data you gathered is reliable and will keep your database updated for all your team members.
4 Strategies For Your High-Volume Recruitment Process
Every challenge of the high-volume recruitment process is easily solvable with the right HVR strategies.
Depending on your available resources, you can use any combination of the techniques below. But you’ll also need to consider the number and level of applicants you’ll be hiring, amongst other factors.
1. Select the right recruitment platform that works for you
Hiring for multiple positions means dealing with many candidates simultaneously applying for numerous positions. Dealing with all of those applicants can be overwhelming.
The right recruitment platform, however, can take care of a large part of the job. A pre-employment assessment software solution will select candidates that fit each role from the total pool and filter out the rest. It may even handle preliminary screening for selected candidates.
Then, you can take your time to get to know the best candidates via secure video conferencing or in person.
2. Set up a solid front for candidate engagement
Unemployment levels across the U.S are low, so most applicants have other employment options. Now, you need to entice the talents that you desire and make them want to work with you.
In other words, you need to engage with the candidates and make them develop a genuine interest in the job.
You may want to combine this strategy with the previous one for your HVR process. Leverage the recruitment platform to engage with a large volume of candidates simultaneously. You can also use a hosted contact center for handling individual engagements and inquiries.
Communicate consistently with prospects to spur their interest in the job.
3. Use external recruiters & recruitment agencies
Why go through all the recruitment trouble when you can have someone else handle the process for you?
Recruitment agencies make a living by helping other companies fill their vacant positions. You can be sure they’ll do an excellent job of it as they have loads of experience and also have their own reputation to protect.
Hiring external recruiters for HVR will cost money, so you need to assess how much investment you can afford. To save costs, you could choose to have external recruiters support your in-house recruitment team. Your
internal recruiting team will thank you for the assistance, but you may not have to pay so much to the outside contractor.
4. Eliminate hiring bias
You make biased decisions every day without realizing it, and it’s the same for every other person.
When you’re dealing with many candidates, this bias will probably find its way into your recruitment decision-making process, too. But you should avoid it as much as possible because it can negatively affect your hiring in several ways.
Try to be conscious of your decisions and weigh them carefully. Also, train your team members to avoid making biased decisions.
Recruitment software can also exhibit bias as it’s based on previous human input and algorithms. The best way to prevent recruitment tool bias is by constantly reviewing preset recruitment algorithms and using DevSecOps compliance to avoid a breach.
Additional Quick Tips to Keep in Mind
The strategies above should serve you well in the HVR process, but the following hiring tips are worth putting into practice, too.
1. Keep an eye on hiring trends
Do you know what’s going on in the job market? What are the new methods recruiters use for talent acquisition? Are there any new conversion funnel metrics that can impact recruitment positively? These are factors you should always consider when outlining your recruitment strategy.
2. Promote your brand as an employer
The job market today is an employee market. Most employees have options, and they get to choose whether they work for you or not.
Considering that, you want to put your brand out there and make your company attractive to talents. Try to bolster your brand, and develop a reputation as a great workplace.
Reach Out And Get The Best Talents to Work For You
There are many ways to go about improving your HVR process. You only need to identify what you want, make a suitable plan, and go out to get it. The talents you’re looking for are out there for you to go and acquire them.
Lastly, it may also be in your best interest to employ
payroll services and other similar solutions to take care of employee remuneration and other related aspects of the business.
Take the work off your HR and let them focus on talent acquisition.