High-Volume Hiring: Experts Tips to Help You Succeed
Hiring the right talent is hard enough—doing it at a pace that meets the needs of high-volume organizations is even harder.
Challenges like scheduling, workload management, and candidate experience are compounded when you’re hiring at scale, and they can quickly add up to bottlenecks, missed opportunities, and unfulfilled potential.
But it doesn’t need to be this way.
In this Willo guide, we explore five strategies that can help you overcome the challenges of high-volume hiring and succeed in building a strong workforce.
What Is High-Volume Hiring?
High-volume hiring (or mass hiring) is a recruitment strategy that’s used to process a large number of candidates.
Source: Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report
Workforce expansion is the leading cause of mass hiring. According to the Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report, 32.9% of organizations have significant workforce expansions planned for the coming year—and many will need to rely on high-volume hiring tactics to fill their growing teams.
EDF (UK) is a great example of this.
Source: How EDF Fills 400+ Roles Per Recruiting Season
In a given recruiting season, their nine-person recruiting team needs to fill 400+ roles and screen 17,000+ candidates. To keep up, they use Willo to cut out time-consuming tasks like interview scheduling, recruiter screens, and more.
What Are the Common Challenges of High-Volume Hiring?
While high-volume hiring is a necessity for a wide range of organizations, it often presents many challenges. According to Jobvite, 65% of recruiters report that mass hiring is more stressful for them in today’s market.
Let’s take a look at the most common high-volume hiring challenges:
Keeping up with screening
Screening is usually the first step in the high-volume hiring process. And since pretty much every applicant needs to be screened, it can be extremely time-consuming for recruiters.
Without a screening process that scales, you may find yourself drowning in resumes and struggling to identify the top candidates. WillowTree, a consulting company that builds custom apps for clients, had a challenge like this when they received thousands of applicants for their open roles.
Source: Why WillowTree Switched To Willo From A Bigger Competitor To Help Screen 17,000+ Candidates Per Year
Now, their recruiters can effectively screen 17,000+ candidates each year without worrying about things like:
- Scheduling conflicts
- Phone tag
- Inconsistent information and notes
Maintaining the quality of hires
When organizations recruit at scale, they run the risk of sacrificing quality for quantity. The main reason for this is—once again—recruitment strategies that don’t scale well.
When you force recruiters to work beyond their capacities, you’re more likely to struggle with:
- Biased decision-making
- Rushed interviews
- Poor placements and high turnover
- Missed opportunities
Poor candidate experiences
On a related note, candidate experience can also suffer when recruiters are struggling to keep up with a high volume of applicants. Communication can become less frequent, job postings may not be updated regularly, and candidates may feel like they’re just another number in the hiring process.
Additional challenges
We don’t have the space to list all the potential challenges that come with high-volume recruitment, but here are a few more to consider:
- Biased candidate selection
- Inadequate onboarding
- Difficulty maintaining company culture
- Burnout and fatigue among recruiters
- Inaccurate data and reporting
5 High-Volume Hiring Strategies
Now, let’s take a look at effective strategies you can implement to make sure your high-volume hiring process is successful.
1. Save time with high-quality technology
Recruitment involves all kinds of repetitive tasks that eat up valuable time—and these tasks compound when you’re dealing with a high volume of candidates. The solution? Recruitment tech that’s designed to scale.
Willo is a great example.
Our async video interviewing platform is designed to allow lean recruiting teams to handle high volumes of candidates without sacrificing quality. Candidates record responses on their own time, eliminating tasks like scheduling or live interviews. Recruiters are free to review interviews whenever they want, so they can prioritize tasks more effectively.
Willo is just one example, though. You should also look out for ATS solutions that can automate tasks like:
- Candidate communication
- Job posting distribution
- Pre-employment assessments
- Resume screening (note: async video screening can take the place of resumes in high-volume recruitment)
Willo offers native integrations with tons of major ATSs, like Greenhouse, Jazz HR, Workday, and more, so that your recruitment process doesn’t have to skip a beat.
2. Work on reducing bias systematically
Diversity and inclusion in recruitment should always be a top priority—but especially in high-volume hiring situations. Why? Because bias tends to creep into recruitment when recruiters are pressed for time.
The bias issue can be partially addressed by relying on tools like Willo to eliminate (or at least cut down on) time-consuming tasks. But beyond that, you’ll also need to:
- Establish evaluation criteria for recruiters to follow.
- Standardize screening and interviewing processes for every applicant.
Willo offers recruiters intuitive solutions for both of these tasks.
The first is Scorecards—a feature that lets you create and share a rubric for evaluating candidates. You can choose which requirements matter most in the role you’re hiring for, and recruiters can quickly fill them in and share them during evaluation.
Willo Scorecard
The second is that Willo interviews empower consistency across all candidates. With async interviews, every candidate gets the same set of questions, the same order, and the same amount of time. Nothing about the process changes based on the candidate, limiting the opportunity for bias to creep into the screening process.
3. Enhance your candidate experience
Each candidate who interacts with your organization should have a positive experience. This will give your employer brand a much needed boost and allow you to compete in the high volume recruiting market.
Source: Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report
Employer branding is something that the vast majority of recruiters take seriously—and that means you need to be actively improving your employer brand by providing a positive experience for every candidate.
You can improve your candidate experience by:
- Being transparent about your recruitment process
- Simplifying the application process (e.g., not asking for unnecessary info)
- Sharing personalized and timely updates about the recruitment stages
- Providing candidates with constructive feedback after their interviews
- Making sure to inform declined candidates
These actions are a small way to show candidates that you respect their time and effort, which can leave them with a favorable impression of your company. For more tips, check out our guide on how to keep a great candidate experience while mass hiring.
4. Use talent rediscovery
Talent rediscovery means using your candidate database to recover past contenders for new roles.
This is great for high-volume hiring because in previous rounds you may have had to exclude some qualified candidates. Others may have received offers during your recruitment process, and some applicants may have had a different set of skills that are more valuable to the current open role.
This process usually starts by filtering your ATS (or candidate database) to find candidates who weren’t selected in the past—but who have the skills and experience you’re looking for. You want to prioritize candidates that made it to the final stages, since they’ve already been vetted to some degree.
5. Track important recruitment metrics
To make sure you keep improving your high-volume hiring strategy, there are a few metrics you need to keep an eye on:
- Interview-to-hire ratio: This measures the number of interviews you conduct, relative to the number of hires you make. It’s useful in indicating how effective your interview process is, and highlights any inconsistencies in your selection criteria.
- Time to hire: This metric will help you understand if your recruitment process is allowing you to meet your hiring goals.
- Quality of hires: This evaluates the performance of the candidates that you hired through your recruitment process. There are all kinds of ways to measure this, like retention rates, output, and performance reviews.
Achieve High-Volume Hiring Success With Willo
High-volume recruiting and hiring can be an uphill battle. You have to maneuver through a flood of applicants, often within a tight deadline. So, it comes as no surprise that ensuring you make the best hiring decisions is often a major challenge.
Hopefully, by implementing these five strategies, you’ll be on your way to hiring the best candidates at scale.
Ready to see how our award-winning software can help you achieve your high-volume hiring goals? Try Willo for free today!
