5 Common Roadblocks to Your High-Volume Hiring Strategies — And How to Overcome Them

When it comes to high-volume hiring for transactional skills, professional skills, seasonal roles, or new locations, your standard recruiting and hiring practices could be slowing you down.

Most organizations don’t have the processes or people in place to move hundreds or thousands of candidates rapidly through the talent pipeline while balancing their need for quantity and quality of hires.

Once you realize that your high-volume recruiting and hiring process can be different from traditional hiring, you can identify and remove roadblocks that prevent your talent pipeline from flowing at full speed.

We’ve identified five common roadblocks that could be preventing your high-volume hiring strategies from succeeding — and how to get around them.

1. Relying On a Less Than Stellar Candidate Experience

Unfortunately, not every candidate's experience is a slam dunk. Some are so outdated and rigid that they turn high-volume candidates away immediately. To attract and engage potential job seekers, available roles and their qualifications need to be easily found and articulated correctly.

Simplify your high-volume hiring and recruitment process by adding artificial intelligence (AI) to job search functions on career sites and within chatbots. Leveraging AI in these ways can connect candidates to roles that match their skills and interests, removing the need for job seekers to second-guess your organization's specific job titles.

Speaking of chatbots, are you using them to fill in the recruiting blanks when your HR staff is unavailable?

Candidates may be job hunting outside of your regular business hours. Instead of leaving them to their own devices, an AI-powered conversational chatbot can act as a first line recruiting “concierge” that’s available 24/7 to accelerate your high-volume hiring process, while improving the candidate experience.

When looking to improve the candidate experience, it's also important to make it accessible to a diverse population of job seekers. Taking an omnichannel approach — including text-to-apply, email campaigns, chatbots, and other recruitment marketing tools — you can meet candidates where they are while increasing your hiring pool.

Being able to engage with your organization on their terms, and on their preferred device or channel, increases your pool of candidate interest and keeps them moving forward in the hiring process.

Phenom’s annual State of Candidate Experience report found that even among the US Fortune 500 companies only 10% of career sites had an intuitive job search and apply process requiring less than 3 clicks to apply. And only 16% presented job recommendations based on a candidate’s profile.

2. Using the “One-size-fits-all” Mindset

Your hiring needs may vary by location, season, or role. So does it make sense to use just one set of consistent HR tools and practices across the entirety of your organization?

Of course not. For optimal results, you should apply just as many early-stage recruiter (or hiring manager) resources as needed to support your high-volume hiring strategies.

For hourly and frontline roles that are hired most frequently, define just how much candidate information and skill validation must be gathered in person. When possible, utilize chatbots for presenting early knock-out questions before a candidate gets to the application itself. This creates a more efficient hiring process that provides your team with the information they need quickly.

Use intelligent automation to confirm interest in shifts and locations, and recommend the best-fit role for each candidate. When troubleshooting your high-volume hiring strategy, it’s also beneficial to adjust your online application process as well — removing unnecessary fields like year of graduation or degree requirements, if neither is applicable to related jobs.

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Related: High-Volume Hiring Lessons From a Retail Giant

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The same goes for interviews — ask if they are really needed. And if yes, with who? Shift as many elements of the hiring process as close to the job location as possible, pulling in on-site hiring managers as part of the talent acquisition team.

But keep in mind, not every role requires hands-on attention. Take some time to assess and adopt streamlined practices when you need to move high volumes of qualified candidates into new-hire roles as efficiently as possible.

3. Getting Caught Up in Manual Work

Resume screening, talent pool "Tetris", interview scheduling — all are redundant, administrative tasks that pile up massively when faced with a high-volume hiring target.

For every candidate you progress, here are some questions you should be asking to evaluate how time-consuming your high-volume hiring strategy is and where you could be making improvements:

• How many applications did you review for an open role?
• What did you do with the surplus of applicants?
• Could you have moved them into consideration for another equally important open role?
• Have you captured passive candidate information?

When you can automate — and better yet, customize — hiring workflows, you can take all of those early-stage hiring actions off individual recruiters’ to-do lists and move them into AI-managed processes that are specific to hiring patterns defined by job type.

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Related: Ahead of Schedule: How Thermo Fisher Scientific Is Booking Interviews Faster with Automation

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Imagine being able to engage a candidate on a career site or via a chatbot and letting them drive their own hiring journey — exploring job roles that match their interest and skills.

To do so, consider providing a two-way screening process that lets candidates confirm a match of their skills and work availability to your open positions. When supported by the right technology, candidates can also submit a recorded video assessment and self-schedule any online or on-site interviews directly.

Once that heavy lifting is done, recruiters and hiring managers can focus their efforts on a smaller pool of highly qualified candidates that are ready to progress to the final stages of hiring. These capabilities alone can supercharge your high-volume hiring and free up valuable time for your hiring teams to move candidates through their journey faster.

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Related: A Must-Have Action Plan to Boost Your High-Volume Hiring Efforts

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4. Downplaying the Role of the Hiring Manager

Sure, HR may take the lead in making the majority of corporate hiring decisions, but what happens when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of locations? The burden of candidate vetting and face-to-face or online interviews falls to the on-site hiring manager.

They also have day-to-day responsibility for sales, inventory, production levels, worker safety, payroll, and other pressing priorities. And, they may not have corporate-issued technology or direct access to HR systems of record, yet are expected to meet high volume hiring targets.

To give hiring managers a helping hand, make it easy to include them in volume hiring activities with access to tools like collaborative assessment reviews, interview scheduling, and candidate comparisons extended to their corporate mobile device. When it's easier to hire on-site, managers can quickly build skilled teams that keep their operations running smoothly.

Phenom is customizing recruiting workflows for hiring managers as well as talent teams, removing inefficiencies often found when traditional processes are applied to hiring at scale.” – Matthew Merker, Research Mgr, Talent Acquisition & Strategy, IDC

5. Delaying Time to Offer

When employers are hiring thousands of employees for roles that have transferable, transactional skill expectations, they often find themselves competing based on the immediacy of salary and possible signing bonuses. But one other influential consideration is time to offer.

Large organizations are taking notice of the correlation between first to offer and first to hire. Some are streamlining the high-volume hiring process with technology to speed up the sequence of events before extending a job offer. Others are making on-the-spot offers to candidates who attend face-to-face “hiring day” events.

Being able to commit to conditional offers not only shortens the time it takes to actually get new hires on the job, but it also helps get them out of the job-seeking market for your competitors.

Time to hire is especially important when you’re competing with large organizations in the same industry. For example, during last year's retail season, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Kohls were all looking to hire half a million sales associates and supply chain specialists.

With similar available roles and job requirements, the employer with the quickest time to offer is more likely to capture candidate commitment.

Improve Your High Volume Hiring Strategies with Phenom

Leveraging technology is one of the best ways to remove common roadblocks in your high-volume hiring strategy. With AI-powered tools, you can give your hiring teams the assistance they need to meet hiring goals while bringing quality individuals into your business.

Phenom’s High-Volume Hiring solution uses intelligent automation to improve recruiting efficiency by up to 90%, pushing candidates from their initial “hello” to their next hiring action in as little as 3 minutes.

For more on assessing your high-volume hiring strategy, setting priorities for hiring at scale, and using intelligent automation to build world-class action plans, download Phenom’s High Volume Hiring Playbook.