For business owners, growth is the goal. It is a hallmark of a successful business. Your business is thriving, and your revenue streams are healthy. The flip side of the coin is that as your business grows, so must your workforce. Rapid growth, such as launching a new product line or opening a new location, can trigger the need for volume recruiting.
With unemployment rates in the United States currently at historically low levels, many businesses struggle to meet staffing needs. Meeting your high-volume hiring needs can feel insurmountable in this market, especially for HR specialists unfamiliar with the territory. Volume recruiters specializing in helping businesses fill high-volume recruiting needs with quality applicants can be invaluable as you navigate the common challenges associated with high-volume hiring.
Volume Hiring Challenges
1. Being Efficient and Effective
High-volume hiring, by definition, involves filling many open positions in an organization within a short timeframe. This may mean fully staffing a new warehouse location, a new department within an existing organization, or increasing seasonal staffing. While the average time to hire in your organization may allow you several weeks to list an opening, review applications, and interview candidates, high-volume hiring requires you to streamline processes to have personnel onboarded and working much faster.
Incorporating technology and automation can increase the efficiency of your hiring process, allowing you to screen and hire qualified candidates with less time and effort. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are particularly useful for streamlining mundane tasks, including scheduling interviews and screening resumes. The ATS can help identify candidates most likely to fit your job description and allow your team to focus their efforts on interviewing and onboarding tasks.
If the work required is overwhelming your HR department, consider partnering with a Salt Lake City volume recruiter. Leveraging their contacts and experience can relieve the load off the shoulders of your team and help you keep on schedule. Even with an expert in your corner, high-volume hiring takes time. Be sure to set realistic goals and expectations from the start.
2. Engaging the Right Candidates
With a shortage of unemployed workers, attracting enough top talent to fulfill your staffing needs may seem impossible. You may receive a stack of applications with a surprising lack of qualifications. Worse yet, you may not get enough applications at all. There may be great candidates available, but reaching them and attracting them to your company is the challenge.
The best strategy to overcome this problem is to focus on your company culture and branding. Make your company a great place to work – a company that skilled individuals aspire to work for. Becoming what your employees want you, to begin with, determines where you currently stand.
- What is your company culture?
- What would current employees say about working at your company?
- What are you like as an employer?
- What could you do to improve benefits, opportunities, or compensation?
Making small changes in your business practices can help you stand out as a great employer and help you attract top employees.
3. Advertising the Right Way
Job boards. It’s where many jobs get posted, and many job seekers look for listings. However, it is not your only resource, and you may exhaust the pool of qualified candidates long before you fill all your positions. Volume hiring requires you to reach beyond your regular resources.
- Referrals – Consider offering current employees incentives for referring family or friends to the company. We trust the opinions of the people we know well. If a friend says their company is best and they love working there, that will weigh heavily on our decision to apply there.
- Hiring Events – Once limited to in-person events, job fairs, and other hiring events now happen virtually. Participating in a hiring event allows you to talk to candidates from a broader geographic area than ever.
- Social Media – Your social media accounts are great for engaging with potential customers, but it also allows you to advertise job openings to passive candidates. They may not be looking to make a change, but your followers may be interested in working for a company they already know.
4. Casting a Wider Net
The pressure and time constraints of volume hiring make adherence to diversity hiring goals more challenging to achieve, especially if you are hiring multiple candidates from the same sources. Hiring for diversity not only contributes to a more diverse company culture. It also brings a wider range of ideas, experiences, and methods to your business.
Consider the following ways to incorporate diversity into your volume hiring processes:
- Keep job postings inclusive. Steer clear of language that may discourage certain individuals and groups from applying for positions.
- Standardize interviews. Interviewing each candidate in the same manner, levels the playing field for all. Likewise, including a diverse group of interviewers in the process helps eliminate personal biases.
- Include personal interactions early. Interacting with candidates earlier in the recruiting process allows you to influence diversity hiring practices.
5. Providing a Positive Experience
Streamlining the hiring process for volume recruiting should not significantly impact the overall candidate experience. Whether or not a candidate is a good fit for the position, they should walk away having had a positive experience with the company. Disgruntled or frustrated candidates may share their experiences with others, tarnishing the good reputation you are working so hard to establish.
Companies hire thousands of employees every year. But, most times, it is done over a period of weeks or months. Hiring hundreds of employees in just weeks for a single company requires an entirely different skill set and process. If you have high-volume hiring needs and need assistance overcoming these common challenges, find a recruiting firm specializing in high-volume recruitment. Their experts can help you streamline the process and keep your business on track for another banner year.