High-volume recruitment is like putting your treadmill on the highest setting – here's how you avoid tripping.
You want to hire as fast as possible, but you need to get it right. A bad hire could cost you as much as $240,000. And when you’re recruiting for hundreds (or thousands) of positions at once, that cost can multiply many times over.
So speed and quality are the names of the high-volume game. Here’s what we’ve seen working.
This makes sense – more people in, more chance of getting good people into the right roles.
Expanding your search also means you attract more diverse candidates – with different perspectives, skills, attitudes and experiences, which is a good thing.
But first, you need to understand exactly what you’re looking for so you can hone in on high-value recruitment methods and candidates that’ll work for you.
It’s also important not to dismiss employee referrals – in fact, you want to encourage them. Leveraging referrals to source candidates is an easy and effective way to quickly diversify your talent pool with little extra effort.
Not only is a giant pile of resumes a waste of time and paper, but resumes also rarely give you the insight you need to make informed choices.
Sure, they give you an idea of educational history and prior job experience, but most of the time, they’re just a highlight reel – and most of them contain lies. Resumes don’t tell you anything about a candidate’s personality and behaviours, their values or any number of soft skills that actually indicate how well they’ll do working with you. We also know they inject unconscious bias into the process.
So, get rid of them.
Pre-employment assessment software automates the longlisting process by spotting candidates with the right skills and characteristics. Here are a few things to look out for when choosing a solution for your organisation (FYI, Weirdly ticks a bunch of these boxes):
When you’re dealing with hundreds, even thousands, of candidates, eliminating unnecessary admin for your team is critical. Between booking interview times and sending out forms and contracts, there’s just too much paperwork that could slip through the cracks.
This is where automation saves the day (again). You need a system that can track and streamline your interactions with candidates. For example, Weirdly’s schedular tool lets candidates book their own interview times with hiring managers, while a drag-and-drop system lets recruiters bulk send documents and trigger email updates.
“This piece of getting candidates to interview is so slick and quick,” says Meisje Powley, Head of Talent Acquisition for Kmart and Target.
57% of applicants lose interest in a job if the hiring process takes too long. That only leads to one thing – you’re losing the best people.
Although the average time-to-hire is almost 24 days, only 30% of businesses can fill a role within this time. The reality is it can take months.
Get to know your own recruitment process and test how long it takes for a candidate to move through each stage. This will help you spot any bottlenecks so you can optimise your process further. Again, a decent piece of pre-selection software or candidate CRM should give you these live analytics.
A bad candidate experience? It creates a whole lot of issues. Not only will applicants not want to work for you (now or ever again), it could also put them off your brand altogether.
From day one, we’ve been all about developing a tool that delivers a fun and easy experience – for recruiters and candidates. Candidate experience should be a top priority for all recruiters – and should influence the way you optimise your process.
For example, our multimedia question functionality offers a more inclusive way of applying. It lets candidates choose how they answer – by video, audio, image or typed response.
Finally, once you’ve nailed your candidate experience, you need to start cultivating a talent community. Things like availability and location mean you won’t be able to place all great applicants in jobs straight away, so a talent community lets you save them for when the right opportunity comes up. That’s as simple as keeping in touch with applicants. As always, purpose-built software helps – Target and John Holland are using Weirdly to build and nurture talent communities, for example.
Recruiters and hiring managers have a lot on their plates – and the recruitment process is only just the start. Getting the right people in the right roles as quickly as possible is crucial – and achievable with a bit of attention and clever tech tools.
Ready to see how you could smash your high-volume recruitment targets? Book a demo with us today.
