How to Manage High-Volume Hiring (Without Losing Your Mind)

High-volume hiring is a necessary part of any company with seasonal demands or in a fast-growth cycle. However, the strain it places on your human resources department can easily outweigh the benefits of hiring many people at once.

Sifting through numerous resumes, finding time to interview candidates, and sorting paperwork all take time away from valuable core business tasks. Let’s take a look at why high-volume hiring could cause you a headache – and how to manage a large recruitment drive without it affecting daily operations or costing significant time and money.

Before you take on a high-volume recruitment drive, it’s important to realize the biggest challenges you’re likely to face.

If your job descriptions aren’t clear enough or you’re seen to be advertising anywhere and everywhere, you’ll receive too many unsuitable applications. This slows down your process time and lengthens the overall recruitment process.

Running a short window for the entire recruitment process runs the risk of bad hires. The pressure to fill roles runs the risk of poor vetting procedures and taking on candidates who are a bad fit.

Lack of planning means companies face a sudden rush to hire seasonal workers all in the same period. You’re up against your competitors to fill tens or hundreds of positions from a limited talent pool. With every company fighting for the same talent, the likelihood of filling every role reduces as the season closes in. Preparation is a vital key to avoiding these common mistakes and challenges of high-volume hire periods. However, going it alone with your usual in-house staff will still cause problems – no matter how much planning you do.

Your team could face hundreds of resumes before finding the long list of suitable candidates. Next, you’ll have to screen and arrange interviews with each of them. This means additional time off for key management team members who need to meet candidates as part of the process, too.

Taking managers and senior staff away from core business duties to interview a lot of potential candidates only harms your company’s output – especially as high-volume hiring periods occur just as seasonal work starts to have an impact on production demands. When you’re facing a high-volume recruitment period, taking it on in-house causes delays to business efforts, additional stress for your staff and plenty of room for human error as workload demands increase.

The best way to get through a seasonal or business growth high-volume recruitment drive is to outsource to an expert partner. Taking the responsibility away from your core human resources team, and senior managers mean the business can carry on as usual. The stress, additional workload, and significant amount of time required will be removed from your workplace and handled by an expert.

Professional recruitment agencies with experience in high-volume hiring practices can take the strain away from you. They’re well-equipped with technology and experience to handle the complexities of hiring hundreds of candidates at once, so all you need to worry about are the final interviews – instead of all the bits in-between.

Working with your recruitment agency, build a realistic timescale for your mass hire. If you need seasonal packers in time for November, for example, start your advertising in the summer months. Doing this helps you to find the right talent before your competitors and leaves enough time to find the best candidates, too. Your recruitment agency will handle the advertising, screening, and initial interviews: so even though you’re starting the hiring process in August, you won’t need to get too involved until just before your new hires come on board.

Knowing that you can remain hands-off for the first few months of the recruitment process gives you plenty of time to schedule in the essential meeting time for final interviews with senior team members. They’ll have plenty of warning to arrange shift cover, so the production efficiency of your warehouse or business won’t be affected by their time off the floor, either.

A specialist high-volume recruitment agency will also have access to niche software to help streamline your hiring process. Once you’ve got a great job description based on previous hire data, your recruiter can use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to find the best candidates. This works in both an inbound and outbound capacity: AI can search online resumes to headhunt potential candidates, and also searches applications to the job for key markers.

AI can also be used in the early stages of the recruitment process to further screen candidates. Chatbots, for example, provide a natural conversation style to ask candidates relevant questions without it feeling impersonal. The AI takes the role of an initial interview, saving you potentially hundreds of hours of real-life interviews.

At Aplin, our high-volume recruitment experts are ready to show you why outsourcing your mass hire will save you time, money, and stress. Contact us today to find out more about optimizing your hiring process with our unique recruitment tools and expert knowledge to make your next seasonal high-volume hire process as easy as possible.