In today’s rapidly evolving business world, mastering the art of high volume recruitment is becoming increasingly crucial. This approach is more than just a strategy; it’s a necessity for companies looking to thrive amidst the challenges of scaling and adapting to technological advances. High volume recruitment (HVR) stands as a beacon for organizations aiming to harness talent at scale, blending traditional methods with innovative technologies.
What is High Volume Recruitment?
High volume recruitment (HVR) refers to the process of rapidly hiring a large number of employees, typically in response to significant organizational growth, operational expansion, or to meet seasonal demands. It is a strategic approach employed by sectors with high turnover rates or those that experience large fluctuations in workforce requirements. HVR is characterized by its focus on efficiency, scalability, and the ability to attract and process a high quantity of candidates within tight timelines, ensuring that organizations can quickly fill multiple positions without compromising on the quality of hires.
This method contrasts with traditional recruitment strategies that may focus on filling fewer, often more specialized roles over a longer period. HVR is essential for businesses aiming to adapt to market changes, capitalize on growth opportunities, or maintain operational continuity during peak periods.
Amongst many, here are a few industries that often rely on High volume roles to be filled -
- Retail: Sales Associates, Stock Clerks, Store Staff & Customer Service Representatives.
- Restaurants: Baristas, Cooks, Dishwashers & Servers.
- Healthcare: Nurses, Medical Assistants & Support Staff.
- Logistics: Warehouse Staff, Delivery Drivers & Operations Coordinators.
Why is High Volume Recruitment essential?
Understanding the essentials of HVR and its pivotal role in contemporary business landscapes is key to grasping why it's becoming increasingly significant. Below are three core reasons, distilled from research and insights, demonstrating why HVR is critical for employers in 2024 and beyond.
Adapting to Market changes to support rapid growth
Businesses across various industries must remain agile and responsive to market changes. This could mean diversifying product offerings, entering new markets, or leveraging new technologies to stay competitive. This growth and the necessity for adaptation underscores the importance of HVR strategies to quickly onboard talent that can drive innovation and maintain a competitive edge.
Application Inbounds are growing Exponentially
The modern recruitment landscape is characterized by a deluge of applications from diverse sources, far beyond traditional job portals. This influx, growing exponentially, presents both an opportunity and a challenge for employers. To efficiently process and evaluate the vast number of candidates, HVR emerges as the most viable strategy. LinkedIn data shows that around 140 job applications are submitted every second, amounting to about 12M+ applications per day from LinkedIn alone.
High Seasonal Demand for Operational Efficiency
Industries like retail, logistics, etc. exhibit significant seasonal fluctuations, necessitating scalable workforce solutions to meet consumer demand, particularly during peak seasons. This emphasizes the need for HVR strategies that can enable businesses to efficiently scale up their operations, ensuring they can meet the surge in customer activity without compromising service quality or operational efficiency. Amazon alone hired ~250,000 workers to support the holiday season in 2023.
Challenges with High Volume Recruitment
Now that we've established what and why HVR, let's understand why traditional recruitment strategies fail when implemented to achieve HVR.
Scaling practices
Efficiently scaling recruitment operations is crucial yet challenging without clear visibility into the candidate pipeline. Traditional methods, which often involve manual screening of resumes and one-on-one interviews, are not scalable to the requirements of HVR. If not done effectively, the sheer number of applications can be overwhelming, leading to delays and the risk of missing out on top talent.
Speed of Hiring
In traditional recruitment, delays can already be problematic due to issues like scheduling conflicts, limited interviewer capacity, and slow decision-making processes. However, when these same strategies are applied to HVR, the impact of such delays is magnified significantly and can lead to poor candidate experience followed by brand degradation.
Overworked Staff
The high volume of candidates can lead to recruiter burnout. In addition to that working constant overtime can cause increased mistakes and oversight, decrease in quality of talent in addition to the degradation of candidate experience. Lastly, over time this often also leads to attrition.
Hiring Time & Costs
Incorporating traditional recruiting practices into HVR scenarios not only extends hiring times but also escalates costs substantially. Specifically, the strategy of adding more staffing to manage the increased workload translates into higher hourly investments, further inflating the overall cost of hiring. This approach, while seemingly straightforward, exacerbates financial strains as it directly increases payroll expenses without necessarily improving efficiency or effectiveness.
Role of AI in Revolutionizing HVR
With the latest advances in technology especially with conversational AI, it has become the goto technology in overcoming challenges with HVR in a cost-effective and efficient manner. 24% of the companies are already using AI tools for talent acquisition and 79% of recruiters believe that AI tools will be used to make hiring decisions in 2024. It can enable automation that can take over repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable recruiting resources that can be better spent on downstream interviews with high quality talent. It also makes it easier than ever to scale the resources up or down in the event of seasonal peaks without having the burn people or money.
Screenify has been at the helm of building one such technology called Interactive AVIs (AIVI). It offers an interactive human-like interviewing experience where it dynamically learns about the candidate, crafts real-time questions to uncover deeper insights. This interactivity allows for a more engaging candidate experience. And this entire process can be run on auto-pilot to sift through countless applications and surface the top candidates without even lifting a finger.
To wrap up here, HVR represents a vital component of the talent acquisition landscape, demanding a blend of speed, efficiency, and quality. As businesses continue to navigate the challenges associated with HVR, the integration of AI and automation tools such as Screenify stands as a beacon of innovation, driving the evolution of recruitment practices towards a more efficient and effective future.