A Guide For High-Volume Hiring

Adrian Dixon

January 30, 2019

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Is 2019 the time to improve your high-volume hiring?

Amazon is perhaps the biggest player in the high-volume hiring game among established enterprise companies, to the point that Googling “high-volume hiring” gets you their Force site for that exact function.

They’re not the only player in the high-volume hiring world, though: Lockheed Martin recently met a high-volume commitment, and it’s very common seasonally.

So, if you’re in that world and need hundreds — or thousands — of people within a narrow time window, what do you need to do to be successful?

The obvious buckets

As with any recruiting process, you need to make sure you:

  • Communicate: This means being clear with candidates about timelines and expectations, but also making sure you are clear about times and locations for any large-scale events.
  • Make sure you are mobile: Oftentimes in high-volume contexts, some of the employees you need won’t be from traditional hiring backgrounds. They may not have a desktop/laptop, but they likely have a smartphone. Make sure there’s a way for them to apply easily on said phone. Make the process not suck. If a mobile application drops from 15 minutes to complete to 5 minutes to complete, you save 250 percent on sourcing costs.
  • Onboard well: People always miss this step, but you need to have a plan in place for onboarding a massive amount of new hires as well. If you don’t, many will leave, and then you need to go through the whole process all over again. No bueno.

The tech

You need the right tech. That’s very important in high-volume hiring situations.

First, consider talent rediscovery.

Talent rediscovery is the practice of mining your existing resume database to find previous candidates for open reqs.

Although your ATS may allow you to use keywords and Boolean strings to search through existing resumes, the results are usually limited and error-prone. This makes it difficult or even impossible to match previous applicants to an open req, unless you’re using a dedicated talent rediscovery tool.

This type of technology works by you entering a job description of a current req and the talent rediscovery algorithm will automatically screen every resume in your ATS to find the most qualified matches.

Oh, and screening? High-volume hiring often means 250+ resumes. You need some degree of automation on the screening process.

Software that uses AI to screen resumes analyzes the resumes of existing employees to learn the qualifications of a job and then ranks and grades new candidates who fit the criteria (e.g., from A to D).

Using AI for high volume hiring makes sense because AI requires a lot of data to be accurate. By automating manual resume screening, organizations such as retailers have reduced their time to hire by 75%.

We do all these things at Ideal, if you’d be interested in talking more.

A final piece on the tech puzzle is chatbots and candidate communication. While they can’t replace the human-to-human connection inherent in recruiting, what you can do is use the chatbots for FAQ in high-volume situations, i.e. the location of a local event, general timelines, links to more info, etc. This can free up recruiter time to actually be attending those events, having conversations with people, and finding best fits.

What other questions do you have about high-volume hiring and how to manage it?