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High Volume Recruiting: The Recruiter's Guide

What Is High Volume Recruiting?

As the name implies, high-volume recruiting is about recruiting a large number of job applicants in a narrow time frame. It is also often referred to as bulk hiring or mass hiring.

A high-volume recruitment strategy is required when a company is growing rapidly or when a lot of new employees are needed at the same time (e.g., when opening a new facility).

Finding the Right Hiring Strategy

Recruiters who hire large numbers of employees face a challenging task, especially in a shrinking talent market. But with the right hiring strategy, tools and processes in place, you can manage an effective mass hiring process and achieve your hiring goals. This can give your company an edge in the fierce competition for top talent.
Whether it’s filling seasonal hiring requisitions or nurturing your talent pipeline, the work you do drives your company forward. Implement high-volume hiring best practices to move ahead of your competition.

This blog post breaks down the 14 golden rules to create an extraordinary, candidate-centric experience for managing volume and high-volume recruiting.

1. Specify the Job Requirements

Every recruiter should ask themselves “Am I recruiting the right people?”, but that question becomes even more critical when scaled to high-volume hiring processes.

For each role, there are certain competencies and job-related characteristics that you expect from your applicants. In addition, there are values you want them to have to ensure they fit into your organization.

The best way to identify these factors is to analyze the skills, behavior and characteristics of good performers in your organization and create a “success profile” of a qualified candidate. Think about how this person would differ from a “bad” candidate.

Understanding the job requirements, how these may evolve and what “good” and “bad” look like means you’ll know what to look for in potential candidates. You can start to recruit the right people by assessing against the job-relevant abilities and competencies that are needed to perform well.

2. Integrate Your HR Systems

Technology underpins effective volume recruitment.

Your life will become much easier when you’re able to link your different systems together. Look to connect your applicant tracking system (ATS), video interviewing system and HR information system so that candidate details can move seamlessly between them. This puts all the information you need to make a decision at your fingertips.

It also enables you to mine candidate and employee data in ways that were not possible before. For example, you can enhance the “success profile” that you’re recruiting against by using pre- and post-hire performance data to get a better understanding of your talent. These insights can be used to predict future job performance and to support development initiatives and succession-planning activities.
With a good ATS you can also make use of talent rediscovery, which means that you screen candidates who have applied for a job in your company before and match them with a current job vacancy by using your candidate resume database.
In either way: Find ways to automate as much of the recruitment process as possible. If you can clearly articulate your needs, AI tools can support much of the low-touch work, such as searching and screening for candidates, and inviting them to apply to openings. When you’re dealing with high-volume recruitment situations, you need to prioritize your team’s time well.

3. Target the Right Candidate Pools

Once you know who you are looking for, make sure you’re reaching out to them in the right places. Depending on your budget, this may involve TV, radio and/ or print media advertising, posters, banners, your website, job boards and social media promotions.
And don’t forget your current employees as they can be an important source of referrals for other great candidates.
Without enough talent in the pipeline, your entire mass recruitment process will fall apart. Prioritize building relationships and nurturing talent pools to attract the employees you need.

4. Provide Your Applicants With the Right Idea About the Job

In the desire to create an enticing careers site, some organizations oversell their open positions. This can lead to new recruits arriving with false expectations.

Technology now allows you to set the right expectations about the job and your organization by creating a “realistic job preview” that’s presented even before candidates apply. It allows candidates to self-assess their suitability and to get feedback on whether their abilities are right for the role. If this stops unsuitable people from applying, that helps them and you, as it increases the proportion of suitable candidates in your applicant pool.

A realistic job preview also enables you to communicate your brand proposition and to showcase your culture and values. Situational-judgement scenarios, simulations and games/gamification can be included, too. This will help to populate your applicant pool with better-suited candidates and makes your application process more attractive.

5. Use Pre-Hire Assessments for Data-Driven Decisions

Deciding which pre-hire assessments for your high-volume recruiting process will work best for you depends on the skills and abilities you require in your candidates. Options include ability tests, personality assessments, situational-judgement assessments, video-interview assessments, technical skills tests, values and motives assessments, and gamified assessments. These should all be available in multiple languages and norm groups to help multinational employers achieve globally consistent recruitment and accurate recruiting metrics.

The best assessments will be grounded in scientifically validated psychometric rigor. They will offer an immersive, engaging and entertaining candidate experience and provide meaningful, job-relevant insights about each applicant.
For very high-volume recruitment, a bespoke assessment process may become a cost-effective option.

6. Make Sure to Offer a Fair Selection Process

You must be careful to ensure that your selection process does not disadvantage potential applicants or discriminate against any group. This is true at every stage of the process, from conducting an objective job analysis right through to running consistent interviews and assessment centers. Your process must be fair and free of any bias or adverse impact. Standardized interview questions and scorecards allow managers to stay focused, gather the right information and prevent human bias to creep in.

Fair testing raises the issue of potential training for recruiters and hiring managers. You will want to ensure that a broad range of talented people is hired and that this is based on their potential.
Every applicant should have an equal chance of success, regardless of ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, class, physical abilities or religion.

7. Prepare Your Applicants for Their Assessments

Always explain to candidates why you are using psychometric tests and what you plan to do with the data. You need to tell them what’s involved, why the information is relevant and how they can prepare for the experience. Some assessment providers offer free practice opportunities where candidates can find practice tests and advice on completing online assessments.

8. Engage, Excite and Inform Your Candidates

Aim to deliver a well-designed, attractive and efficient selection process that will enhance your employer brand. At each stage, communicate with candidates, engage them in the process and let them know the status of their application. Offer them feedback on the assessments they’ve completed.

Treat candidates with the same level of care and attention that you would treat customers. Regular contact with candidates, by phone and email, is important for maintaining their interest, building goodwill and instilling trust. If you won’t be taking a candidate further in your selection process, share why.

9. Empower Your Hiring Managers

Ensure greater consistency in your talent acquisition: Use assessments that provide your local hiring managers with targeted recommendations and follow-up questions for each candidate based on their assessment results.

10. Welcome Walk-In Applicants

When job seekers are looking for front-line roles, they may walk in to one of your sites and ask for a job. This presents a great opportunity for the manager to build a positive relationship with them at the outset. However, they have also probably contacted your competitors and are likely to take the first position offered, so you must act quickly.

If you ask them to apply via your website, that can take time. However, you can ask them to complete your realistic job preview to self-assess their own suitability. via a dedicated tablet while they are on site. Next, they can complete a situational-judgement test, some quick psychometric assessments and a short video interview.

This is a quick and efficient process that enables you to respond rapidly and screen all applicants effectively. It also delivers a positive candidate experience, as people feel they are being recognized, treated fairly and quickly progressed.

11. Organize Branded Recruitment Events

For some key roles, volume recruiters may invite short-listed candidates to assessment centers that creatively reflect their brand. Such sites let candidates take part in practical, interactive exercises as well as situational-judgement and customer-interaction role-playing with live actors. By using tablet devices, you can deploy video clips and quizzes that can be instantly scored. This helps you enhance your employer brand and provide a personalized and compelling candidate experience while identifying who is right for the role.

12. Conduct Verification Tests and Pre-Employment Checks

At the interview stage, you might consider asking candidates to undergo a verification test to check their results in the assessments used earlier in the process. Local laws will govern the types of reference, credit or criminal-record checks you may perform on your employees.

13. Onboard Vour New Recruits

When new employees start, many organizations assume the recruitment process is over. However, it’s important to continue to engage with new employees beyond their start date. Provide an effective introduction to the role, the team and the organization. Consider assigning a mentor to each new starter to help them settle in, adapt to the workplace and quickly contribute to the business.

14. Conduct a Business-Impact Study

It’s important to confirm that you’re using the right assessments and that your data is helping you to make the right selection decisions. Only then can you fully measure the impact and prove the return from your investment.

A business-impact study enables you to investigate the correlations between your assessment results and actual performance data. You can link your assessment data to any talent challenge or business issue (e.g. performance, leadership success, employee engagement, job satisfaction, attrition, absenteeism) and analyze the correlations between them. This will provide evidence that your assessments, your data and your conclusions are valid and reliable.

Conclusion

The goal of volume and high-volume recruitment is to identify and select candidates who represent the optimum match for your organization. Talented individuals want a job with a purpose, work-life balance and a chance to develop and control their career. They also want to be treated with respect when they apply. This means you need to create an efficient and effective screening process that provides a positive candidate experience.

Employers can no longer get away with giving long, boring assessment tests and limited feedback to applicants. Candidates have become accustomed to engaging online experiences. To engage candidates, your assessments need to be short, visually appealing, interactive, fair, objective and close to the real-world work situations that the candidate would experience.

With a wide range of assessment options available and the new possibilities of data-driven decision making, recruiters must be able to judge good tests from bad ones. You want to look closely at the science behind each assessment and the evidence that it will measure what it’s supposed to measure.
With the support of the right assessment partner, you’ll be able to differentiate your employer brand, master your volume recruiting and recruit the talent you need.
Aon

Aon | Assessment Solutions

Aon's assessment solutions provides clients with powerful tools and insights to help them make better talent decisions at every stage of the employee lifecycle. This includes pre-hire assessments, identifying future leaders, screening for digital skills and agility, and AI-enabled solutions.

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