High volume recruiting is no easy task for every company. Dealing with a gigantic amount of applicants is really time consuming, and if you’re not careful, you might fail to meet the deadline and fail to ensure the candidates’ experience. With hundreds of positions to fill and thousands of applications to screen, you have to make extra effort to stay organized and keep tracks of all of them.

While job seekers have the freedom to access all the data they need about you from your sites, social media, online reviews, you don’t necessarily have their essential information. In other words, we can all agree the need to have proper high volume recruiting strategies.

But Before We Start, What is High Volume Recruiting?

High volume recruiting is in essence recruiting a large quantity of candidates to fill a lot of positions in a short period of time. The number of job openings might vary based on your business’s scale, for instance, Amazon once had 50,000 positions to fill in 2017.

There are 3 types of businesses that are most likely to enter a high volume recruiting scenario: Gig companies hiring gig workers like Uber, TaskRabbit, Grab, etc. Retail businesses like Amazon and Alibaba. Staffing firms.

11 High Volume Recruiting Best Practices and Strategies

The Essential Steps

Before you get to the savvy stuff, you must have all the basics in mind. A high volume recruiting strategy no matter how complicated and original cannot succeed without the bedrock to support

1. Assemble a Team Set for Success

First and foremost, you need a capable team who can work well together and is right for the job. On average, one single job opening generates 250 applications, and when you have hundreds of open positions, your team will be swamped in resumes for weeks on end. If you don’t have the right people, the team cannot function as best as they can, leading to a catastrophe and the loss of many desirable applicants

2. Automate the Process

Next thing to do is to equip them with the right tools. The manual work in high volume recruiting is exhausting, and it’s so much easier to have the process more automated . What’s more, deploying a recruiting software can save you a whale of time. For example, with advanced AI technology, you can tailor chatbots that know how to answer your potential candidates’ most frequently asked questions, or even some more specific ones, enabling your recruiting team to spend time on something else. What’s more, you can also automate the resume scanning and communication process, saving time, and making applicants less likely to abandon applications.

Most importantly, in times like this when everyone is indoors social distancing, you can use softwares to schedule and organize online interviews with ease, all the while keeping track of all the high volume recruiting metrics from the comfort of your house.

3. Align with Hiring Managers

Everyone involved in the high volume recruiting process should internalize the objectives and goals of the team. There’s no room for miscommunication, because the cost per hire in a high volume recruiting campaign is amplified due to the massive amount of applicants. Managers and team members not seeing eye to eye is going to cost the company a lot of time and money.

So take the time to set meetings with hiring managers and set the ground for the hiring process. Make sure everyone is able to answer the very basic questions: Who are we hiring? What basic criteria do they need to meet? What specific skills and qualities do they need to have in order to fit the position? What tasks do we have to ensure to be complete to achieve our goals?

In other words, before hiring anyone, you need to build an ideal talent profile beforehand.

4. Make Sure The Branding Game is on Point

High volume recruiting requires a plethora of applicants, which cannot be achieved without attracting a good amount of job seekers. And remember, branding is a never ending task, appealing to a certain audience whose taste and needs change rapidly.

Being the first step in any recruitment funnel, attraction requires some certain attributes to be effective. It poses the big question: “Why should a candidate want to work for you?” and your job is to answer it. So how can you do it? There are 2 main steps, which can be dissected into many smaller steps.

• Step 1: Figure Out Your Identity as a Company

84% of job seekers deem the reputation of a company significant, how you portray yourself is crucial to making a good impression. You need to show them:

-What you do

-Why you do what you do

-What it’s like to work for you, i.e what your office environment is like.

• Step 2: Broadcast Your Image as a Business

There are myriad ways to promote your company as an employer, but there are 2 channels that are on the rise in recent years: social media and word-of-mouth marketing.

Social media is considered to be the most useful resource for job searching, compared to rather traditional channels like job boards and job ads. Influential social networks such as Facebook and Instagram are good starters., In this 4.0 era, however, there are copious others to choose from, so it’s important to choose one that fits you the best and be the master of it. You’ve seen what social media can do with the world, so you’d better learn how to utilize it. Make it your playground. And don’t forget the power of word of mouth marketing, considering how credible it makes you look.

5. Improve Your Career Page

63% of job seekers go to a company’s career page after learning about a job opening. And it takes an average of 177.20 visits on a career site to make one hire. So to achieve a good reach for high volume recruiting, your career site should be as on point as possible.

So what should you pay attention to in a career page?

Visual is a fundamental aspect of every website to decide whether it captivates people or not. Your career page should be simplistic with easy-to-read typeface. And don’t forget photos and videos, no one likes to read lengthy paragraphs for the task is really time-consuming for a job seeker.

Also, another feature that you might want to add in is “Quick apply”. Not everyone has a CV or keeps it updated, so it’s best you provide them with an alternative that saves time and effort, and subsequently proves that you care.

6. Keep the Application Short

71% of applicants would give up on an online application form if it took 15 minutes or more to complete, and 10% would quit the process completely just after 5 minutes.

So keep it brief, especially in the context of high volume recruiting, you don’t want the processes to be time consuming. Stick to the basic questions, don’t ask about what’s already in their resumes and you should be just fine. And while it is encouraged to be creative with the application process, you should still keep it to the point and save the fun for the actual interview. Knowing the basics is just the first step to ensure your high volume recruiting process is fail-proof. But in order to achieve the best results possible, you need to incorporate the best practices to max out your campaign. With that in mind, next up we have 5 more advanced high volume recruiting practices you can employ right now!

7. Define Categories of Roles

High volume recruiting poses a vast amount of positions to be filled, with a variety of job types and required skill sets. The recruiter’s job becomes a lot more complicated and more prone to mistakes, while for the job seekers, it becomes time consuming and less intuitive to browse for job openings. If your career site isn’t organized, many positions will be missed and so will a big number of talents available.

To smooth the process, the job descriptions should be sorted into categories with which the job seekers can look for jobs that fit their requirements. It should be as intuitive as shopping online, but instead of searching by brand and price, you’re searching by type of work, level, and salary range.

One perfect example of this method can be seen on Foot Locker’s career page. Their job lists resemble a site of a footwear shop list (they sell footwear in case you haven’t noticed). Candidates search for jobs just like how they would buy sneakers - by customizing; they can choose what category they want to work in, the job type, the brand, and the specific location. This process offers candidates a chance to reflect on what they can do and therefore, primarily sets expectations.

8. Take Down Listings When Positions are Filled

It’s simple, when a role has been filled, do away with it. You don’t want to have more people applying for it than necessary, it’s a waste of their time and yours, and it also costs you money. So since you’re not going to employ them anyway, why not spare them the trouble of applying and getting rejected?

This is also a reminder for every other aspect of your business, just try to keep everything up to date.

9. Widen The Pool by Offering Training

Many job seekers choose to skip a job opening because they don’t have the required skills and qualifications, or in some cases, they assume they don’t have what it takes. Skills are undeniably important in an employee, but so are their mindset and commitment. You can never know what you’re missing out on if you let your company come across as exclusive.

So for jobs that require little to no experience, it’s a good idea to offer training for newcomers. By doing this, you’re also doing a good deed to society on a whole, since you’re also providing opportunities to people with less education, an unfortunate background or just those who are new to the field. In the end, this high volume recruiting tip brings about a win-win situation, everybody gets what they want.

10. Contact Past Candidates

One crucial step of sourcing is to keep in touch with past candidates. When someone is turned down because they aren’t suitable for the positions they’re applying for, it doesn’t mean they aren’t suitable for every position available. And you can never know if there’s an opening in the future for which they are perfect.

When the time comes, and you do turn out to have the right position to fill, you can give them a ring and see if they’re still available. Even if they’re unavailable, they will appreciate the concern and might even consider applying again when they are considering switching job. By effectively sourcing like this, you can develop a good pipeline of talent and you will mostly always have a safety net to fall back on.

11. Pay Attention to Recruiting Metrics

In the era of information, you can’t succeed without statistics. During the high volume recruiting process, there are always some metrics that correctly reflect your progress and performance.

Just by paying attention to a few keys measurements, you can already make changes to optimize your campaign. Here are a few key recruiting performance metrics that you should focus on:

• Source of hire: By identifying which platforms generate the most applications, you can choose to invest in it more and cut costs spent on the others.
• Time to fill: This is the number of days between the day a job requisition is approved and the day the job offer is accepted by a qualified applicant. This one should be short, no one likes to wait too long for an interview.
• Cost per hire: This one measures how effective your recruiting process is. Examine and analyze your cost by department and position regularly and then strategically plan optimizing how you spend money on hiring.
• Quality of hire: This metric tells you the effectiveness of the recruiting function. Quality of hire is particularly difficult to measure, since it’s an amalgamation of other metrics, such as turnover rate and cost of turnover, longevity of hires, time to productivity, etc.

Conclusion

While high volume recruiting is quite a challenge, it can be done beautifully with the right strategies. By clarifying the criteria for open positions, keeping the process short and up-to-date, polishing your brand and maintaining great relationships with your candidates, you can rest assured your plan is fail-proof. And with further implementation of strategies and practices, you are going to crush high volume recruiting, no matter how high your goals are.

This blog post originally appears on Rakuna's blog.