Getting the right people in the right roles is a challenge, even when it is a regular recruitment. Imagine the complexities that come with volume hiring! Recruitment at scale requires an efficient automated process, unlike the manual processes used in regular recruitment, that can't handle the level of demand for volume hiring. In this blog, we’ll help you know how volume hiring is different from regular recruitment, and why the former requires a different approach than the latter.
What is regular recruitment?
Regular recruitment is where one individual needs to be hired for one open role. It begins by identifying the need of the role, and ends with onboarding a new employee. Traditionally, it is a manual and labour-intensive process that involves a lot of time and resources. Recruiters carry out multiple stages of recruitment manually such as posting an open role, writing and posting job ads, sourcing and screening candidates, updating application statuses, scheduling interviews, interviewing candidates, and sending hiring decisions.
What is volume hiring?
Volume hiring is where multiple people are to be hired for similar roles. Typically, yearly applicant numbers for volume hiring range from 5000 to 3 lakhs, and beyond! Manually carrying out the tasks for such huge numbers is typically impossible, which is why the processes are broadly automated, to be able to handle much more work than in regular recruitment.
These may include automated data driven sources, full digital experience, role-specific assessments designed for automation, data-driven automated decisions, and other automated processes that focus on admin and background checking. Successful volume hiring thus utilizes recruitment software to increase efficiency through automation, and identifying top talent in a short time period, while providing a personal touch, and delivering an outstanding candidate experience.
Regular recruitment versus volume hiring
Let’s now dive deeper into the differences between regular and high volume recruitment, at every stage of the recruitment process, and how these differences are approached by talent acquisition firms and the best recruitment companies in India, for an efficient hiring process.
Stage 1 – Sourcing
Ø When carrying out regular recruitment, recruiters advertise the vacancy themselves by writing the hob advertisements and submitting them to major job boards to catch the attention of suitable candidates. They then manually search for potential candidates before reaching out to them via the job boards, or through social media.
Ø When carrying out volume hiring, finding enough applicants to sift through can be problematic when using conventional job boards, as they won’t yield the high quantity of high-quality applicants required for the job. Recruiters thus need to think strategically.
They can thus ask existing employees for referrals, or look at the pool of vetted candidates who have previously applied to work at the organization, but were somehow not suitable then. This can be better done with the help of technology to bolster the sourcing efforts. Data-driven candidate sourcing can lead to a fully digital experience that’s scalable and can drive conversion.
Stage 2 – Application
Ø When carrying out regular recruitment, the candidate experience is often neglected. A boring regular process is put into place that doesn’t excite the candidates much. It lacks the depth of detail required for the candidate to make an informed decision. Only when a candidate is seen to have a potential match to the company and job role, is he given a chance to interact with the HR to know more about the company and the job role, after the initial screening call.
Ø When carrying out volume hiring, recruiters need to attract as many high-quality applications as possible, which can't be done with a regular boring hiring process. Instead, the job needs to be sold! The employer brand and employee value proposition need to be built, showcasing the company culture during the application process itself, giving candidates a peek behind the scenes. You want the candidates to be impressed and talk about you to others, who might also then apply for the job. This can be possible only when you create an exciting application that makes candidates want to come and work for the company.
Stage 3 – Assessment
Ø In regular recruitment, recruiters carry out initial screenings manually, after sourcing candidates. They filter applications, review resumes, and check for past work experiences and other qualifications. The data driven out of these resumes help them identify good fits for the organization.
Ø In volume hiring, it’s impossible to review and assess hundreds and thousands of resumes coming your way. Thus, applicants need to be screened and assessed automatically. This can be done based on some specific skills, character traits, and abilities, which can be carried out via certain tests that accurately predict future job success.
The most popular types of assessments used in volume hiring include cognitive ability testing, personality questionnaires, learning agility, virtual interviews, situational judgement tests, and cultural fit assessments. By employing such technologies to sift resumes and applications, a predefined selection criteria can be set, and results achieved faster, making it an improved experience for both the candidates and recruiters.
Stage 4 – Interviewing
Ø After assessment and shortlisting, recruiters in the case of regular recruitment invite the most suitable candidates for interviews. These interviews help candidates and recruiters meet in person, helping the recruiters to guide their hiring decisions, using the candidate’s attitudes and performances during the live conversation. On the other hand, it also gives the candidates to get answers to their questions about the company and job role. Hence, interviews can give both the parties enough information that can help them decide whether they want to continue further or not.
Ø Carrying out interviews for volume hiring can prove to be very time consuming. Instead, what can be done is that the applicants can be asked to record a short video where they need to answer predetermined questions, which can then be reviewed manually or have technology to evaluate the answers. Hence, the interview process may require some manual effort, but it can still be partly automated.
Stage 5 – Selection
Ø In regular recruitment, after the interview, recruiters carry out background checks, based on which they make their hiring decisions.
Ø In volume hiring, the process isn’t that simple or easy, as the number of candidates is much higher. Numerous hiring decisions that involve a lot of time are made. A clear selection criterion needs to be put into place so that a standardized and unbiased way of selecting candidates is followed. Recruitment tools can be used to make sure that the selection is data-driven and free of bias.
To sum up,
You can see how automation plays a great role in the case of volume hiring, whereas manual processes can still be used to select single candidate roles like executives, leaders, and managers. However, automating the latter also has its own advantages. As per a research, the executive search industry is also about to enter a new phase of growth driven by AI and automation.
In fact, some of the best recruitment companies in Mumbai, like WalkWater Talent Advisors, are already using automation to reduce manual error and collect more reliable data across platforms. This is why they’re a step ahead as they develop a high-quality database of executive talent, that would otherwise be difficult to find. Such tech-savvy recruitment companies can produce a 100% complete long-list of apt candidates within seconds, by adding candidates to the database, updating candidate information, checking for duplicate candidates, tracking search activity and outreach, managing day-to-day recruiting team activities, creating and sharing candidate lists from the database, completing and tracking candidate assessments, and doing so much more!
