What Is High Volume Recruiting and How Does It Work?

Let’s say you’re preparing for a seasonal spike in business or need to meet a quota before the end of the quarter. One solution you might consider is high-volume recruiting or quickly expanding your workforce to better meet demand. It’s not uncommon for recruiters to field dozens of applicants for a single position. Bigger corporations might sort through hundreds when they utilize high-volume recruiting. 

A successful high-volume recruiting program — while it can be effective for getting the job done — depends on a lot of effort, personnel, and time. We spoke with Director of Recruiting Operations Danielle Pond who has over 12 years of staffing experience. She explains some of the benefits, challenges, as well as some strategies to improve your high-volume recruiting efforts.

What is High-Volume Recruiting? 

High-volume recruiting is used when companies need to rapidly bring on more staff. It’s often to grow the company’s workforce, handle increased influxes of demand or meet deadlines. Companies will go through a multitude of interviews and field many applications. 

“Companies often utilize high-volume recruitment during ramp season or for a special project. This can be related to an uptick in business, seasonal business, or events such as COVID-19 that require rapid response from businesses in unpredictable times,” says Pond. 

High-Volume Recruiting Example 

Let’s say your distribution and logistics company is preparing for the busy holiday season. You’ll need to quickly add new warehouse workers, forklift operators and other skill sets to receive product and ship orders. To accomplish this, either the company’s HR department or a staffing partner will put out numerous advertisements for the open positions. They’ll then screen and interview candidates, complete the required background checks and get new hires trained.  

What is the High-Volume Recruiting Process Like? 

It takes a lot of effort and resources at all stages of high-volume hiring. Fortunately, software and automation have helped streamline the process, but recruiting dozens of people is no easy task. 

First, you’ll need to market the available positions. Whether in print, digital media, or recruitment emails, you’ll have to market every available position in a way to maximize its exposure. This is especially important when competing for workers during a labor shortage. If your company doesn’t have a designated department, a staffing agency can handle the marketing for you. They may have a roster of talent they can draw on, which could make the process quicker.

Next, companies and staffing agencies alike will need to filter through all the applications they’ll get. Often, they’ll use software to screen applicants, using keywords or qualifications. Many applications will be read and filtered by the recruiters themselves, and then the finalists will be interviewed and then a hiring decision will be made. If you use a staffing agency, you might be called on to interview the finalists before deciding whether to bring them aboard. 

Before starting your high-volume hiring process Danielle suggests that employers do some research:

“For the hiring company, Have a plan. I know this seems simple, but companies should think about how many candidates are needed to fulfill on the project, and then work backwards from there. How many people can be trained at one time? Can more than one language be accommodated? How will such a large volume of candidates be performance managed? Time keeping, logistics for interviewing/first day and on-the-job training are all major parts of this as well,” says Pond.

What Are Some High-Volume Recruiting Challenges? 

The biggest challenge is often the large number of candidates and new hires involved. Even for a big company, high-volume recruitment will take up a large part of the HR department’s time. The onboarding process will also take a considerable amount of time after the selected applicants have been hired. 

A staffing agency can help get around this by handling the bulk of the work. Your employees can focus on their tasks, and not be diverted away from their primary duties. And, some staffing agencies may also offer services to help with the onboarding process and paperwork.

Danielle also highlights location, pay rate and competition as common challenges employers will need to overcome.

“Some of the most common challenges when performing high-volume recruiting typically are in candidate pool, pay rate and geographic location for the roles. When companies need to scale quickly, they build off current strategies in their locations, and often the labor pool for that market is already saturated. Inflated pay rates that disrupt the market help to combat this issue. If a company is identifying space in a less populated geographic area, the challenge then becomes identifying enough people in the area and quickly building brand loyalty with a market that has never heard of the company before,” says Pond.

The Best Way to Manage High-Volume Recruiting

Chances are your company is busy — or preparing to get busy — if you’re about to launch a high-volume recruiting campaign. While it requires a lot of effort, there are ways to make it more manageable. One way is to reach out to a staffing partner with experience finding workers in your industry. 

“Our ability to quickly build rapport and generate candidates from referral-based recruitment may be one of the best ways to kick start high-volume recruitment opportunities. Just like the strategy for starting high-volume recruiting, having a plan, and dividing resources between a myriad of community organizations, advertising outlets and recruitment strategies is the best way to begin this process. Our ability to capture the candidate pool in a geographic area quickly helps the companies we’re supporting understand market conditions, favorable pay rates, most common skill sets and best practices to identify qualified candidates for roles,” says Pond.

If you’re considering having a staffing agency at your side for your company’s next high volume-recruiting, contact us and let us know about your workforce challenges.