Mass Hiring Strategies: How To Hire Job Candidates in Bulk

For new or growing businesses, one of the challenges of opening a new job site is not only locating qualified candidates but also enough candidates to fill out the workforce. Without a sufficient number of employees, you won’t have a workforce at all.

Mass hiring is one tactic often employed by skilled leaders of industry and management-level professionals to staff new job sites quickly. It’s also becoming increasingly prevalent for staffing hybrid offices.

This article will discuss mass hiring, including the challenges recruiters face and strategies to overcome them. Understanding the bulk-hiring process can empower any manager or other leader to fill vacancies quickly and efficiently without sacrificing quality.

What Is Mass Hiring?

Mass hiring, sometimes known as volume recruitment, is the practice of recruiting a large number of new employees at a single time.

There are many reasons why a business might opt for this hiring approach, but the most common is that it gives new or expanding businesses an easy means to staff new offices.

It is also a good approach for re-staffing an existing workplace or addressing a labor shortage. Employers have an easier time training employees and promoting from within than hiring externally from a pool of workers who arrive with the necessary skills and experience.

Volume recruitment has additional benefits beyond supplying a ready workforce. For one, this hiring practice primarily focuses on filling entry-level or lower-tier positions. Mass hiring can speed up the time to hire, which can have a ripple effect that eases the workload from higher-level jobs and improves productivity across the board.

This technique also enables staffers to prep a workspace or enter a new market. It can open up whole new areas to the business in question if done well.

What Are the Challenges of Volume Recruiting?

As exciting as this sounds, bulk-hiring requires recruiters to meet tight deadlines, onboard new recruits quickly, and prepare a range of paperwork. Each step of the recruitment process presents unique challenges.

Navigating a Sea of Candidates

The first challenge with any mass hiring campaign is acquiring enough traffic in the first place. There are many places to put out feelers for job seekers, including traditional ones, such as newspapers or online job forums, and less traditional ones, such as university career fairs.

Another critical facet of mass recruitment is handling the massive traffic of potential recruits. Not every job seeker is suitable for the position, and navigating the vast sea of candidates is where inexperienced recruiters may find themselves bogged down.

Recruiters rarely have time to sort applicants when hiring dozens or even hundreds of workers. On top of that, the vetting process for employment, education, criminal history, etc., adds hurdles to what should be a swift recruitment process.

As such, this stage in the hiring process requires strategic methods and tools for sorting applications and targeting only qualified applicants.

Scheduling Follow-Ups

One of the most time-consuming aspects of any volume recruiting event is the sheer amount of follow-up that any such campaign would entail.

In a standard recruitment campaign, follow-up entails phone calls or emails notifying qualified candidates, researching references, scheduling interviews, and sending out offers.

Follow-up is vital for even singular job openings, and the work involved in each of these activities can take many hours. Multiply the labor hours involved in the recruitment process times hundreds of recruits, and you’re looking at an insurmountable feat.

Employment trends show that businesses nowadays are speeding up the time to hire in response to labor shortages. Volume recruitment can slow down attempts at improving productivity and efficiency if undertaken without the appropriate methods in place.

Training New Hires

Once the initial steps of job calls, vetting, and follow-up are complete, you still need to train your new hires.

Training even a singular employee can take months, but you don’t have that time with volume recruitment. The central premise of mass hiring is to staff a job site quickly. As such, HR teams need to translate training protocols for individual employees into programs that work for onboarding potentially hundreds of recruits at one time.

Strategies For High-Volume Hiring

A high-volume hiring operation can be successful with the right strategies. Follow the tips below for a swift and efficient mass hiring campaign.

Flag the Vacancies You’re Filling

The best positions to perform a high-volume hiring campaign are not high or mid-level positions. High-volume hiring works best for entry-level positions. You can recruit employees and later train them to meet your exact standards.

The job description is thus a critical part of effectively recruiting the right people for the job. Your search should be transparent about the position you’re filling, the requirements, and even the recruitment campaign itself to prevent an overwhelm of overqualified or ill-suited applicants.

Invest in Applicant Tracking Software

It would be impossible and inefficient to sift through the hundreds or thousands of applications you may get during your volume recruiting campaign. The easiest method to sort all the applicants is to use applicant tracking systems that use AI technologies.

These systems feature functions like data processing, keyword search, and other tasks that filter out qualified from unqualified candidates. Some will also have built-in email features to send out a pre-scripted message offering the applicant a position.

Investing in AI recruiting software will free up the recruitment team to work on other tasks and devote themselves more fully to the next steps in the recruitment process, like training.

Create Scalable, Standardized Training Models

You may well wonder how to train many employees coming in simultaneously. The most straightforward method to do this fast is to leverage all of your resources, from skilled existing employees to the resources you already have that you use to facilitate training.

Create a scalable training plan using your existing employees as resources. Doing this early in the recruitment will allow you to adapt the training model for successive recruitment campaigns.

Digitizing the training materials and sharing them with recruits before day one also ensures that your new hires can read over materials. Provide standardized protocols, expectations, and job requirements in a training package to integrate new hires into your team quickly and efficiently!

Background Checks in Bulk Hiring

As noted, verifying employment history, education, criminal history, and other types of screening can be time-consuming. Each screening process requires contacting different organizations, fact-checking databases, and filling out verification paperwork. Performing even a single background check can take three to five days.

Background checks are a crucial part of hiring employees that you don’t want to skip. Still, given the time constraint they impose on the hiring window, they require strategic planning.

The good news is that third-party verification services manage these steps for you. Ideally, the background check service also will integrate with the applicant tracking software so that you can go straight from calls for jobs to hiring job seekers.

Conclusion

The challenges of mass hiring are multifaceted and stress-inducing, but an expert team of experienced, helpful professionals can help you manage this process.

At ScoutLogic, we offer swift background check services for high-volume recruitment campaigns. Our software integrates with most applicant tracking systems, so you can rest assured that you are optimizing efficiency at every stage of the mass hiring campaign. Contact us today, and we can begin to collaborate immediately!

David Garcia

David Garcia, co-founder and CEO of Scout Logic, is an industry leader in the bulk background check world. With his strategic acumen and expertise in the HR sphere, specifically in hiring, recruiting, legal compliance, background checks, and resume screening, he’s an invaluable asset and consultant.

David's counsel extends across the boards of ScoutLogic, YipitData, and Supplier.io, drawing from his impactful stints on the boards of Infutor and Avetta. With an extensive 25-year journey, he champions unparalleled B2B commercial leadership within data & analytics, significantly shaping the HR landscape.