Ah, high-volume hiring; your inbox is overflowing with resumes, your calendar is jam-packed with interviews, and your stress levels are off the charts. Or, maybe you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum and can’t seem to find enough applicants to fill your endless vacancies.
Hitting hiring goals amid all of this chaos can quickly become a real challenge—especially with limited time and resources. But luckily, we’re here to help make sense of it all.
Here are five common reasons why high-volume hiring teams miss their goals, along with key solutions to help you improve your recruitment process.
Reason 1: Slow, Inefficient Communication With Candidates
Let’s face it—maintaining consistent communication is hard. And when you’re trying to coordinate interviews with countless candidates, things can quickly spiral out of control.
Gaps in communication and slow response times are bad, bad news for a high-volume hiring process. This can cause delays in scheduling interviews, lower response rates from candidates, and missed opportunities with stellar talent.
Pro-Tip: Leverage Email/SMS Templates and Automation
Templatizing your communication—whether that’s through email or text message—and utilizing a healthy dose of automation is the recipe for success. This way, candidates stay informed and engaged throughout the process.
Communication templates eliminate the manual work involved in drafting up a whole new message for every candidate in your pipeline. Even better, tech tools that enable automation reduce the time and effort required to send messages and coordinate with applicants, all while ensuring consistent communication.
Reason 2: Limited Time and Resources
Time is of the essence and helpful resources are essential when you’re a high-volume recruiter. Yet of course, these are the two elements that today’s teams lack the most.
The current hectic economic landscape has dealt a heavy blow to many recruiting teams, slashing budgets in half and reducing headcount in one fell swoop. High-volume hiring was hard before, and it’s even harder now. Teams must manage multiple candidates and coordinate a variety of interviews with less bandwidth and support to do so.
Pro-Tip: Streamline the Screening and Scheduling Process
To improve your efficiency and make the most of your resources, consider using technology to fast-track some of the most tedious, manual parts of the hiring process. For many recruiters, this means the resume screening and interview scheduling process.
That’s where your applicant tracking system (ATS) comes in. And if you don’t already have one, it’s time to change things. Here are our ATS recommendations. An ATS helps recruiters quickly filter through large volumes of resumes and identify the most qualified candidates.
But an ATS can’t do it all on its own. An advanced interview scheduling software automates the entire process of getting interviews on the books, from gathering a candidate’s availability to finding the best available interviewers. That way, recruiters have more bandwidth for the most high-value tasks.
Reason 3: Lack of Organizational Planning
High-volume hiring is oftentimes chaotic. And when you’re dealing with hundreds of candidates, it can feel hard to stay organized and on top of everything. But without a solid plan in place, you’re already setting yourself up for failure.
That’s why effective organizational planning is absolutely essential for successful high-volume hiring. Without a well-defined hiring process in place, recruiters may struggle to manage their time effectively, communicate with stakeholders, and make informed hiring decisions.
Pro-Tip: Align and Define the Stages of the Hiring Process
If you want to amp up your organizational planning, consider creating detailed hiring plans that outline each stage of the hiring process and the specific roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder.
For example, a hiring plan might include a timeline of each hiring stage, from candidate sourcing to final offer acceptance, as well as the specific actions and tasks required for each stage. By having a clear plan in place, recruiters can manage their time and resources more efficiently, communicate more effectively with stakeholders, and make better hiring decisions.
Reason 4: Candidates Dropping Out
When you’re managing such a large talent pool, many—or most—applicants that you come across just aren’t going to be the right fit. Yet even if you get a dazzling resume, there’s so many opportunities throughout the hiring process for qualified talent to become disengaged and drop out altogether.
Having candidates occasionally drop out is expected when you’re a high-volume recruiter. The quick, simple application process sometimes means candidates aren’t as invested in moving forward. However, failing to address the faults in your process makes it that much harder to win qualified talent.
Pro-Tip: Simplify the Hiring Process
We could go on and on about the variety of ways that recruiters can prevent candidates from dropping out. In fact, implementing all of our previously mentioned pro-tips amounts to a better candidate experience and a higher likelihood of securing the best candidates.
However, there’s one tip that we haven’t mentioned yet, and it’s an important one: simplify the hiring process. High-volume recruiting isn’t the place for an overly-complicated process. You want to get talent in the door fast, and candidates want to get to work ASAP.
Simplifying the hiring process can take many shapes. For instance, recruiting via SMS or WhatsApp allows candidates to quickly go through the hiring process via the device that they have on them at all times: their phone.
Reason 5: Not Enough Leads in the Funnel
When it comes to high-volume hiring, having a strong pipeline of potential candidates is essential to success. But for some high-volume recruiting teams, generating a consistent flow of leads is a major challenge.
Without a steady stream of qualified candidates, recruiting efforts can quickly become stalled, and positions may remain unfilled for longer periods of time.
Pro-Tip: Improve Employer Branding
Investing in your employer brand proves that sometimes it’s worth it to play the long game. When candidates have a positive perception of your employer brand, they’re more likely to apply for open positions and recommend your company to their networks.
So, how do you build up your employer brand? To start, conduct a brand audit to assess your company’s current reputation and identify areas for improvement. This could involve gathering feedback from current and past employees, analyzing online reviews and ratings, and researching how your company is perceived in the job market.
Once you have a better understanding of your company’s brand perception, you can start taking steps to improve it. This could involve investing in employee engagement initiatives, such as offering professional development opportunities or creating a more flexible work environment.
Transform Your High-Volume Hiring Today
Leveraging advanced hiring technology gives talent teams the best chance to hit their hiring goals and fill high-volume roles faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Our newest product, GoodTime Hire for High Volume, provides talent teams with advanced automated interview scheduling for high-volume roles through SMS, WhatsApp, and email messaging. Quickly reach out to candidates, schedule interviews effortlessly, and let automation take care of the rest.
See how Hire for High Volume can revolutionize your recruiting process.
