High-Volume Recruiting: The Game Changer Your Company Needs

When it comes to recruiting articles, they often start by advising you to have a clear and well-defined plan. But what does that really look like? Mike Tyson once famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." So, what do you do when your plan falls apart, and you need to pivot immediately? The 1,000 people you need to start next month aren't going to hire themselves. (Though if you gave them the chance, you can bet they'd try.) This article dives into the strategies for rapidly and efficiently scaling your workforce while ensuring a positive experience for both your candidates and hiring team.

The Misconceptions of High-Volume Recruiting

Let's address the elephant in the room. High-volume recruiting is often seen as the rebel of the recruiting world. Many associate it with quantity over quality, high turnover or lower quality of hire. These perceptions can apply to any recruitment process that hasn't been optimized.

Real-World Scenarios: When High-Volume Recruiting is Essential

What happens when you need to extend 15,000 offers in a four-month timeframe to staff six call centers for the 2020 Census? Or when you need to hire an extra 500 people for a well-known sports company to support their call center during the holiday rush? Or maybe you need 3,000 people at the start of a pandemic to man a pop-up call center for the CDC answering questions about COVID? Perhaps you're a small-business construction company that needs to hire an entire workforce of skilled labor to fulfill a $200,000,000 government contract. In these scenarios, high-volume recruiting is genuinely your only option. Clinging to a traditional recruiting structure will result in an incredibly expensive, not-so-scalable, and overall bumpy ride.

The Value of an Optimized Recruitment Company

This is where contracting a recruitment company that has optimized systems and processes in place becomes invaluable. Companies like Recruiting Underground specialize in handling large-scale hiring needs efficiently and effectively. They have the experience, tools, and networks to streamline the process and ensure that the candidates they bring in are not just warm bodies but valuable assets to your organization.

Efficient processes mean efficient scaling. If your team is buried under a mountain of applications, manually reviewing qualifications, and stack ranking candidates, you're opening yourself up to liability and human error, and adding an exorbitant amount of administrative work to your team's already busy workload. Applicant tracking systems not only keep the team optimized and organized but also provide proof of an equal and fair hiring process. This starts with qualifying candidates. If that's happening outside of the applicant tracking system, you don't have the breadcrumb trail to prove you kept it between the lines.

Streamlined Screening and Ranking

Adding knockout questions to your application specific to the position allows the system to automatically reject candidates who don't meet the minimum requirements. Unqualified candidates can't get to your hiring manager if they never make it to the recruiter. This improves the candidate experience as well because unqualified candidates aren't dragged through a process they have no hope of making it through when they could be focusing on something that has more potential. Everyone's time is saved here (and so are their man hours). Third-party job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn have similar screening features, but are extremely limited and not recommended as standalone solutions for high volume.

Additionally, an effective screening system for high-volume recruiting processes must have the capability to assign a numerical weight to each answer and automate the stack-ranking process. Here's an example of why. Let's say your job requires a minimum of 3 years of experience but 5 or more is preferred. A minimum of a bachelor's degree is also required, though a master's degree is preferred. The system automatically rejects candidates who don't meet the minimum criteria. For everyone else, we'll add 5 points for candidates who have 3 to 4 years of experience and 10 points for candidates who have 5 years or more. The same thing with education. Add 5 points for anyone who has a bachelor's degree and 10 points for anyone who has a master's degree or above. From there, you can stack rank your candidates according to the score on their application. In this example, candidates who have 20 points have 5 years or more of experience and at least a master's degree and are your top slate of candidates. You'd focus on the top scores and work your way down the list in numerical order. This way, your recruitment team never gets buried under a pile of applications. They have a fair and codified system to stack rank candidates and ensure everyone is considered under the same set of qualifications, so their main focus is only ever the top slate of the talent pool, which is good news for your hiring managers because they can expect nothing but top-tier candidates. It also automates the front end of the qualification process entirely.

Now think of that at scale. Maybe you're hiring heavy machine operators that need to be able to handle a front-end loader, bulldozer, and paver but also have experience welding. Or you need 500 nurses with 3 years of experience that are licensed to practice in the state of Georgia and can work remotely. Your recruiting process is now wrapped around the job you want to hire instead of the other way around. This is the process you're going to use to scale, bar none.

Now that you have an abundance of highly qualified candidates stack-ranked and ready to go, how do you get through the screening process in a similar way - codified, optimized, and compliant? Having pre-screen forms ensures all candidates are being asked the same set of questions. Each section can be broken up into different competencies like behavioral-based questions, on-the-job skills, safety, etc. Candidates receive a score on each section that adds up to an overall score.

Efficient Interviewing and Onboarding

Interview guides can be created similarly. But how do you get through the pre-screens and interviews when each candidate needs to answer the questions? Teams can call candidates individually or schedule them to come onsite for interviews, but that's more of a traditional recruiting structure and isn't as scalable. Ask yourself how many hiring managers you have versus candidates, and how long would it reasonably take for them to sit down with everyone and interview them. Scheduling an online group screening or interview with 50 candidates allows you to put a link to the questions in chat for them to complete by themselves while on the call (or by the end of the day) and is an extremely efficient way of cutting through the masses. This works with onboarding as well.

Contracting a recruiting company that specializes in high-volume hiring is going to get you an influx of highly qualified people. You'll need to be able to process candidates all the way through to hire, which means you'll want to decide how you're going to interview, offer, and onboard a lot of people. The recruitment team can help with this as well, getting the people on a group call, sending out offer letters, and assisting with onboarding tasks like the first part of the I-9, gathering new employee information like emergency contacts, copy of licensing and certifications, answering questions on how to fill out background checks and where to go on their first day. Offers and onboarding don't have to be online; you can ask people to come onsite before their start date or schedule them to come up in groups so you can arrange for someone to help them through the hiring process and answer any questions they have.

Reducing Risk with Guarantees

With bringing on a large quantity of people, there's bound to be turnover. Having a 60-day guarantee in place allows those empty spots to be filled quickly and alleviates risks, so if someone quits or gets fired for any reason within their first 60 days, they provide up to one replacement at no extra cost. Ask yourself how much it costs you a day for even one position to be vacant. One of our warehouses told us it costs them $11,500 a day just to be without one forklift driver. With the guarantee in place and all the manhours you'll save in your recruiting process, going with a recruiting company that specializes in high volume is genuinely your most efficient and cost effective option.

Revolutionize Your Hiring Strategy

Partnering with a high-volume recruiting service gives you access to cutting-edge screening tools and expert techniques, ensuring every candidate is the right fit for your role. This strategy not only meets your urgent hiring needs but also helps build a resilient, top-tier workforce that fuels long-term growth. You'll also cut costs significantly by bypassing the need to expand your recruiting and HR teams, not to mention the systems needed to process that many hires. Instead, leverage a streamlined, optimized process that quickly scales to meet your demands. Revolutionize your hiring approach and secure the future of your company with high-volume recruiting.