What You Need to Know About Mass Hiring: How to Balance Quality and Quantity Hires

Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Manufacturing, Food, and Transportation are just a handful of industries mass hiring annually. In Food Services, for example, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that there are more than 950,000 jobs available every year with a turnover rate of 75%.

With that much talent needed and leaving frontline and hourly roles, employers must improve their mass hiring strategies in order to attract and ultimately retain employees.

Here’s everything you need to know about mass hiring to set, or re-set, your strategy.

What is Mass Hiring?

Mass hiring, also referred to as bulk hiring or high-volume hiring, is when companies add a large volume of employees to their workforce (usually that number is in the hundreds or thousands) in a very short amount of time, less than a few weeks. Most of the time when mass hiring, the positions that need to be filled are very similar in terms of employee credentials and skills.

The need for mass hiring occurs for a few reasons:

• High churn rate: When a business is rapidly losing a high volume of employees or regularly experiences high levels of staff turnover and needs to fill open positions.
  

• Seasonality: During the winter holiday season, for example, retail companies must hire extra in-store and warehouse employees in order to prepare for increased consumer demands.
  

• Business expansion: This can be due to an increase in demand for a specific service or because the business itself is expanding to multiple locations and will need to staff those new locations.

No matter the season or economic climate, mass hiring will always be relevant. As employers cycle through periods of increased demand for products or services, the need for a well-thought-out volume hiring plan is a necessity.

Related reading: Tackling Mass Hiring No Matter the Season

How to Tackle Mass Hiring Effectively

One of the biggest issues that organizations face when hiring is shortening the critical time to offer to secure candidates who might be pursuing opportunities with other employers. For job hunters with transactional, transferable skills, a rapid job offer can be the difference between them being your next new hire or moving on.

So, how can you move faster? By automating recruitment processes. With AI technology and automation, most administrative recruiting tasks like screening and scheduling can be put on autopilot. This means your recruiters have more time for building candidate pipelines, building relationships with top candidates, and accelerating offers.

Companies using recruitment automation to help with their bulk hiring needs, for example, are able to hire candidates through AI-led processes and personalization. They do this through technology like:

• Conversational Chatbot: Helps guide candidates through relevant job postings based on skills and location, prescreens for required qualifications, and moves talent on to the next hiring stage based on prioritized job openings.
  

• AI Scheduling: An AI-powered interview scheduling tool that automates time-consuming recruiter and hiring manager meeting coordination and syncs calendars of all involved parties, including candidates.
  

• Video Assessments: Engages with and evaluates candidates through one-way video interviews that candidates can complete and hiring teams can review on their own time.
  

• Hiring Manager: An assessment tool that makes it easy for hiring managers to evaluate interviews and video assessments, and collaborate on team feedback — whether remotely or on-site.
  

• Automated Workflows: Minimizes recruiter intervention as candidates automatically progress through a personalized application and hiring process.
  

• SMS and 1:1 Messaging: Sends candidates 1-to-1 or 1-to-many SMS messages to quickly promote open roles, upcoming events, follow up on interviews, arrange next steps, and communicate offers.

Related resource: How to Mass Hire Without Sacrificing Quality for Quantity

When companies have technology like this to automate the majority of typical time-consuming tasks, hiring teams can capture quality candidates quicker and with confidence — ultimately decreasing time to hire.

See how Phenom can help by downloading our High-Volume Hiring Playbook!