Many factors can impact your overall business success. Having solid staffing is key to achieving this goal, and hiring the best talent guarantees a robust labor workforce.
Many recruiters, however, face challenges in managing their recruitment and selection process. These problems surface particularly during peak seasons when they need to conduct mass recruitment.
Keep in mind that high-volume hiring requires enough staffing, streamlined processes, and technological resources. But with limited human and material resources, the talent acquisition process can be a recipe for business disaster.
So, how do you go about addressing this problem in recruitment?
This page shares some expert tips on handling high-volume hiring. Read on to see how you can make your recruitment work—and yes, successful for your business!
Recruitment is vital to business operations for attracting the best talent and winning potential employees.
It’s easy to see companies and organizations find, screen, and hire candidates regularly. However, some businesses need to establish a massive labor workforce. Hence, they face the challenge of high-volume hiring.
The New York Times cited how Amazon, for instance, handled mass recruitment during the pandemic:
Amazon hired 427,300 employees between January and October 2020, hitting its global workforce to over 1.2 million people. This figure was more than a 50% increase from 2019.
Mass hiring has become apparent among big companies or large corporations even after the pandemic. It usually comes from the following industries:
Business process outsourcing (BPO)
Corporate
Retail and e-commerce
Hospitality
Global brands with multiple locations
The problem? Mass recruitment requires enough human and material resources and demands time, money, and energy. Hiring the right employees, however, will bring a great return on investment (ROI) for your company or organization.
Explore and understand the challenges encountered by businesses in high-volume hiring below.
The Challenges: 5 Obstacles Encountered in Mass Recruitment
Running a business inevitably comes with several obstacles. Along with HR insights and data analytics, recruitment or hiring is the number one challenge human resources (HR) professionals encounter today.
The recruitment process, however, can be more complex with high-volume hiring. If unaddressed, it can compromise your labor workforce, negatively impacting your entire organization. Your team might eventually need a productivity detox or take personal time off (PTO).
Let’s tackle some of the challenges in mass recruitment:
Time constraints: High-volume hiring takes time. The more people you need for your workforce, the more applications you get and the more applicants you need to screen. If you lack staffing, technology, and resources, the whole recruitment process might get delayed, causing downtime in your business operations.
Recruitment costs: High-volume hiring requires ample financial resources. The recruitment department must be financially prepared for mass recruitment. Your team must have already invested in the tools, technology, and resources required to make the talent acquisition process more efficient, seamless, and effective.
Limited workforce: High-volume hiring requires enough recruitment staffing. However, some companies make the mistake of mass hiring when they don’t have enough HR personnel. Consider working with a staffing agency to accommodate applicants effectively and get the best talent efficiently.
The lack of resources: Using digital tools and technologies is imperative in today’s business landscape. In recruitment, the application submission, interviews, and assessments are usually performed digitally or via the web. Investing in an applicant tracking system, talent acquisition analytics, and communications technology is best to optimize your recruitment process.
In the next section, learn how to address the high-volume hiring problems and challenges.
The Resolutions: How to Optimize Your Recruitment
There’s a need to optimize your recruitment process, especially for high-volume hiring. The Human Resources Director cites the top five priorities of hiring professionals as follows:
Improving hiring quality (52%)
Increasing retention rate (24%),
Improving hiring efficiency (23%)
Growing talent pipeline (22%)
Establishing recruitment diversity (22%)
Earlier, we recognized the challenges involved in high-volume recruitment. Now, let’s tackle practical ways to optimize the whole recruitment process. Here’s how:
1. Align recruitment goals with hiring department needs
Hiring becomes necessary when a particular unit needs additional staff or when a new department is launched. But before hiring, assess the department’s needs first and then, you can set your recruitment goals.
Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches, suggests aligning recruitment objectives with those of the hiring department.
Webber explains, “The recruitment strategies should match the departmental needs. To ensure this, break down the organizational silos between the HR and operations. An active collaboration is imperative between the recruitment team and the management team.”
2. Set recruitment metrics
As with any business function, setting key metrics is imperative for success. And this applies to recruitment.
Jesse Hanson, Content Manager at Online Solitaire & World of Card Games, cites the importance of critical metrics for your recruitment process.
Hanson argues, “These metrics help your recruitment team gauge your hiring capabilities, track your progress, and improve your process.”
He then recommends the following metrics vital in recruitment:
Recruitment source: This metric shows where your hired applicants come from, whether through an online job portal, employee referral, recruitment agency, or internal hire.
Timeframe: This metric measures the efficiency of your recruitment process, from receiving job applications to successfully hiring employees.
Hiring cost: This metric can be calculated by the total recruitment cost divided by the number of hired employees within a particular time frame.
Hire quality: This metric measures how effective the recruitment is in getting and keeping a quality workforce.
3. Simplify your screening process
It doesn’t make sense to complicate the entire recruitment. Instead, it’s best to simplify each stage of the screening process to make recruitment more effective.
Generally, the hiring process involves the following phase:
The initial interview is a preliminary screening performed after receiving applications. Stephan Baldwin, Founder of Assisted Living, explains how the initial interview sets the key requirements and attributes required for the role. “This will allow you to filter those who aren’t fit for the job from those who are worthy prospects right at the onset.”
Hiring assessments are typically a series of tests that check the applicant’s knowledge, skills, and attributes for the available jobs. Some exams include personality tests, cognitive ability tests, skills tests, emotional intelligence tests, and physical ability tests.
The final Interview is the last stage of the recruitment process. It is typically an interview with the hiring manager remotely or face-to-face. While passing the assessments means that applicants are fit for the job, the hiring manager will make or break the final decision.
4. Resort to talent rediscovery
Another practical approach for high-volume hiring is talent rediscovery, which is precisely what it is.
But how do you go about rediscovering talent? Check your recruitment database and connect with old applicants who are potential employees. But this time, offer something attractive like worker’s compensation for WFH employees.
Ryan Hammill, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Ancient Language Institute, recommends focusing on talent rediscovery to save time, money, and effort.
Hammill explains, “”Your recruitment database is a goldmine of great talent. It consists of potential candidates you might not have considered at some point or those who might have backed out from the screening.”
He continues by providing an example: “At some point, we were having a hard time looking for mentors, especially for less popular languages. We realized we already had some prospects on our records who had previously applied to our agency. So, all it took was to tap into our database and see who has the passion to provide language training to interested students.”
5. Leverage digital tools and technology
Leveraging digital tools and technologies can be your best course of action for optimizing recruitment. You don’t have to do things manually to track applicants or meet them face-to-face to conduct interviews.
Volodymyr Shchegel, VP of Engineering at Clario, recommends leveraging digital tools and technologies for recruitment.
Shchegel explains, “Technology has become such a game-changer in today’s business landscape. Capitalize on technological resources to streamline your hiring process and improve efficiency and productivity.”
Shchegel suggests leveraging the following technologies:
Artificial intelligence (AI): Invest in AI recruitment software and allow the algorithms to screen applicants based on your input data. This technology can help with data analysis, hiring forecasts, and HR reporting.
Intelligent automation: Use automated tools to track and sort applicants in your system to make things more organized, efficient, accurate, and seamless. That allows you to end your mass hiring on time and have team building for hiring success.
Communications technology: Utilize audio and video conferencing, online channels, and even social media for recruitment. These technologies help you communicate with applicants and interview them online.
Optimizing Recruitment and Hiring the Best Talent
High-volume hiring is no easy feat. It’s important to identify the problems and understand the challenges involved in the recruitment process. Then, you can optimize it to accommodate the applicants and hire the best talent.
That said, consider the expert recommendations above. Start by aligning your recruitment goals with the departmental needs. Likewise, set critical metrics, simplified screening, and talent rediscovery. Ultimately, end by leveraging digital tools and technology.
When hiring quality people in mass quantities, you’ll build a robust labor workforce for your company. These valuable assets will ultimately contribute to your business success!
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