Volume Hiring 101: Create an Amazing Candidate Experience

Volume hiring can be difficult for many teams. Providing a stellar candidate experience at scale is hard. These tips can help you prioritize your future people.

Whether you are new to hiring or you’ve been a recruiter for decades, volume hiring isn’t for everyone. Many talent leaders face problems hiring at scale, but this experience doesn’t need to be scary. With the right tools and tips, you can scale your hiring experience and meet more candidates in less time. If your talent leaders are burnt out due to volume hiring, today’s article should help put things into perspective.

What Is Volume Hiring?

As your organization grows, you might find that recruiting becomes more complicated. Instead of hiring for 1-3 roles, you might have to hire for dozens or hundreds of roles at once. As businesses become more complex, you might even find yourself hiring in different states or countries. Volume hiring is an art for recruiters and hiring managers. It’s striking a balance between filling roles while finding high-quality talent to fill seats at your organization. It’s a new way of thinking, but it’s something that many organizations need to do to scale.

Why Does the Candidate Experience Suffer During Volume Hiring

Candidate experience can suffer as hiring volume picks up. While many employees work for large companies, they might not feel the pinch of working for a large organization. For example, fast food employees might not feel like they are working for a big company, even though a company like McDonald’s has nearly 2 million employees. Franchises stop these companies from facing the same volume hiring issues.

If you don’t plan to franchise your company, you need to find candidate experience hacks ASAP. How you treat the employees who work for you and the candidates applying for your positions impacts how others perceive your employer brand.

5 Strategies to Improve Your Volume Hiring Candidate Experience

Next, let’s go over five strategies that will help your team improve the volume hiring candidate experience at your organization.

1. Take a High-Level Look at Your Current Candidate Experience

Before you make any changes to your current process, you’ll want to do an overall audit of your current candidate experience. What’s working? What’s not working? Do some pre-recruitment workforce planning. Starting with an explicit knowledge of what’s currently happening in your organization will help you make better changes to your company’s candidate experience.

Here are a few items you might want to check out:

  • The flow of candidates from initially starting your application to accepting a job offer. Where are the biggest dropoffs during this process?
  • Time to fill a position. How long did your recent jobs take to fill? With volume hiring, you need to be able to make decisions and fill roles quickly.
  • The average number of interviews before a job offer. Is your job interview process too robust? Do you really need five interviews to make a decision?
  • Thoughts from candidates, new employees, and recruiters. Paint a more precise picture by collecting anecdotal or qualitative data from sources who know your candidate’s experience well. Where do they feel the company could improve things?

2. Hire the Right Kind of Help to Improve Your Experience

Sometimes you can’t do it all alone. Volume hiring isn’t an easy skill to pick up on. Learning from expert recruiters can help you see how to pick up your speed and recruit efficiently.

Leaning on the right outside help can drastically improve your hiring process. Candidates are constantly making judgments about your company. Start your experience on the right foot by getting help before you get too far down the recruitment rabbit hole.

3. Collect Proper Candidate Feedback

Candidate feedback is essential throughout the process of getting new employees onboard. Make sure you are taking the time to connect with candidates through surveys, calls, texts or other means of communication. Whenever you get feedback from a candidate, take a few minutes to read or watch it. You will gain more from that time than you might imagine.

4. Expand Your 1:1 Recruitment Mindset

You might have gotten into recruiting to make personal connections and recommend stellar candidates. Volume hiring requires a different mindset to succeed, especially if you don’t have the number of employees needed to recruit successfully. You might have to use a few tricks and techniques to recruit candidates without wasting hours. Get out of the 1:1 recruitment mindset, and start thinking about recruitment like a marketer. Marketers need to address many people at once; they can’t afford to create super-targeted experiences.

Figure out ways to get employees at scale. For example, meet several candidates at once with job fairs, group interviews and speaking to large communities where your ideal candidate hangs out. If an exciting resume comes across your desk and you love that candidate, you can create a plan to get their attention. Otherwise, you should focus your attention on larger candidate-winning opportunities.

5. Utilize Technology to Improve the Candidate Experience

Last but not least, think about the power of technology. Technology has shifted the way that we recruit and hire candidates. Every day a new company pops up that claims to solve HR problems. Find solutions that work for you and your team’s needs. Here are a couple of examples of how technology might impact your team during volume hiring:

  • Take advantage of applicant tracking systems to keep tabs on candidates as they go through the candidate pipeline.
  • Invest in pre-recorded video interview software to maximize the efficiency of the first interview.
  • Use scheduling software like Calendly to make booking appointments and interviews seamless.
  • Keep up with your ratings on sites like Glassdoor, where candidates might rate their experiences.
  • Create more communication touchpoints by using text messaging or email marketing.

Improve Your Volume Hiring Experience With Simple Tips

Volume hiring can be difficult for many recruiters. However, finding and interviewing hundreds or thousands of applicants doesn’t have to be a challenge for your organization. With the right tools and planning, any interview experience can be pleasant. When you seek opportunities to meet more candidates and continuously fill your candidate pipeline, you can hire amazing people no matter how many new employees you need.