High Volume Hiring: How to Overcome the Most Common Challenges

Finding the right candidate for a position is difficult. Hiring a large number of people in a short amount of time can feel nearly impossible.

There are four high volume recruiting challenges that all talent acquisition teams face. Learn what those challenges are and how to overcome them with the following strategies.

Challenge #1: Time Crunch

• A lot happens between placing an ad for a job and onboarding a new hire. These are the common steps to consider:
• Applicant review and selection of qualified candidates
• Initial Interview/screening
• Final/formal interview
• Skill tests
• Gathering credentials
• Making offers and negotiation
• Background checks & references

Cutting corners to simply fill the positions quickly will not make the bulk hiring process easier. Skipping vital steps in the recruitment process could cost more money in the end. Hiring candidates that are not the right fit will lead to a low retention rate and can become costly to your organization.

An RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) provider specializes in recruitment and can make the bulk-hiring process a breeze. RPO professionals have high volume recruiting tools that can handle large volumes masterfully.
Also, consider your current resources. When a significant increase in hiring is in the works, you can’t just tell your talent acquisition to simply double up on their requisition load, there’s only so many hours in a day and you want to protect the quality candidate and hiring manager experience. It’s one of those key elements of company culture and your ability to attract the best talent for the organization. It can be a success to the candidates of choice accepting your offer or choosing to work for your competitors instead.

How To Overcome

Hire a solid RPO provider with a great industry reputation. Sourcing for large scale recruiting is time-consuming, tedious, and overwhelming. Yes, your ATS is probably great first go to place, but there will not be enough qualified talent, nor will your internal team be able to assess them for fit when the clock is ticking. Let your RPO partner find quality, passive candidates to build the talent pipeline and engage the talent communities for you, so that the talent acquisition team can assess skills, and manage the process with potential employees and hiring managers.
Using a reputable RPO partner, will help your organization not only hire faster, with better quality of candidates that a larger pool of skilled workers to choose from. This is one way to battle the time crunch challenge because part of your hiring steps are taken care of for you by your RPO recruiting partners by way of talent outreach and marketing your positions, initial interviewing/screening, and tedious reference checks. Let’s be real. There’s no time to waste when your CEO asks you to ramp up several manufacturing facilities, have a sales team penetrate a new market, or development team ready to work towards a new strategic opportunity.

Challenge #2: Application & Interview Process Overload

Successful high volume recruitment relies heavily on the application process. Applicant screening should be automated. This will streamline the interview process and ultimately put you on the fast track to making offers.

How To Overcome

Analyze your sourcing strategy and let the application work for you. This is where a quality RPO company will shine. Time is precious and the talent acquisition team should never waste it on data-driven tasks.
Efficiency and scalability are the two factors that will most likely be negatively impacted by high volume recruitment. Using an RPO service will diminish those concerns.
If your team has the resources in house, the application process will need to be structured in a way that can handle mass hiring. If the position has specific requirements, the application can ask these questions upfront.
Applicants that have the correct qualifications will automatically be screened in and scored, helping your team prioritize and reach out to as many qualified individuals you should progress to next steps, saving your team time and money during the interview phase.
On the other hand, be cautious when using a questionnaire. There is a fine line between screening candidates and having them complete a novel. Long applications may slow the hiring process. So, just ask only the most important, key questions that determine success, and avoid fluff.

Challenge #3: Analysis Paralysis

High volume recruitment needs to be strategically executed. Undoubtedly, planning is important, but spending too much time on this phase is unnecessary.

How To Overcome

Recruitment metrics are crucial when hiring in bulk. First, eliminating unnecessary steps is ultimately the goal. To do this, use your company metrics to create a marketing strategy. Second, understand where advertising funds are going.
Finally, use the metrics to spot the job boards that are duds and highlight areas for improvement.

Challenge #4: Providing A Positive Candidate Experience

It’s easy to be solely focused on getting the jobs filled. Nevertheless, you cannot forget about the human behind the application. One of the biggest challenges is giving a positive experience to candidates.

How To Overcome

Obviously, the bulk-hiring process shouldn’t be significantly different from filling a single position. Remember, the interviewing process is the first impression of the company. A new hire will always remember their interview experience.
Why should you care? Disorganization within the recruitment process will affect employee referrals and morale. Whether or not a candidate is offered the job, the applicant will tell others about their experience. A solid hiring strategy will be the only way to stay organized.
Overall, high volume recruiting can be stressful. Definitely analyze your team’s abilities and whether or not it’s something that is doable. Don’t be afraid to reach out to external sources if needed.