The high-volume hiring strategies top companies utilize

Creating a high-volume hiring strategy — able to deliver real and consistent results — remains an ongoing challenge for many companies looking to scale rapidly.

Businesses in retail, hospitality, healthcare and other high-turnover sectors often need to recruit dozens — or even hundreds — of employees under tight deadlines. Without careful planning, this fast-paced hiring can end in poor applicant evaluation, staggering costs and negative candidate experiences that harm the employer’s brand.

Let’s explore the industries most reliant on high-volume hiring, key challenges they face and proven strategies market leaders use to optimize recruitment without compromising hiring quality.

What is high-volume hiring?

By definition, high-volume hiring is when a large number of employees are recruited within compressed timeframes. Sometimes called “bulk hiring” or “mass hiring” in the talent acquisition world, it often occurs in response to seasonal demands, company expansion or industry-specific fluctuations.

Finding many, qualified candidates in a short time can be challenging for recruiters. Effective strategies are needed to hire quickly and sustain business operations at scale — without compromising on applicant quality.

Industries requiring high-volume hiring

Certain sectors depend heavily on high-volume recruitment to keep up with seasonal surges, rapid growth and related factors. Industries where you’ll often observe mass hiring include:

Retail

During holiday seasons or special in-store promotions, retailers often need to hire seasonal staff in response to increased customer demand. These brands are tasked with processing hundreds of applications in the span of weeks, rather than months, plus quickly onboarding positions like cashiers, sales associates and fulfillment workers.

Hospitality

Restaurants, hotels and event venues all tend to see seasonal peaks in guest numbers. From hiring housekeeping teams to front desk personnel, hospitality businesses need streamlined processes that can scale up and down with the fluctuations in demand.

Healthcare

Hospitals and medical facilities often face staffing shortages and pressure to fill multiple vacancies, especially during cold and flu season or public health emergencies. Quickly recruiting qualified nurses, medical assistants and administrative staff is top priority for maintaining patient care standards.

Manufacturing

Production facilities may need to scale their workforce to meet supply chain demands or launch new product lines. These roles include assembly workers, quality control specialists and logistics staff who must be trained quickly to keep pace with manufacturing schedules.

Customer support

Call centers and customer service departments tend to experience high turnover rates and seasonal volume spikes. With a recruitment pipeline that’s always active, these companies must balance speed with thoroughness to ensure newly hired reps can navigate and respond to customer inquiries.

Technology

Fast-growing tech startups and established companies often need to rapidly expand their technical teams. This reality means finding developers, IT support specialists and product teams in a crunch to meet project deadlines and innovation goals.

Challenges of high-volume hiring

Time constraints

Facing a race against the clock can compromise a company’s recruitment processes and undermine their hiring best practices.

Without strong systems in place, recruiters under pressure to fill multiple roles at once may resort to shortcuts. Neglecting to properly vet candidates can cause important qualifications and cultural fit indicators to be overlooked.

Consistency in candidate evaluation

When evaluating hundreds of candidates, upholding any standardized assessment criteria becomes increasingly difficult.

But without these safeguards, unconscious biases can creep into decision-making, with the potential to lead to inequitable hiring outcomes and expose companies to compliance risks.

Maintaining candidate experience

Instead of building a positive candidate experience, high-volume recruitment processes risk becoming impersonal and transactional.

However, it’s important to avoid sacrificing quantity for quality when it comes to recruiting. Jaded candidates, who believe recruiters see them as just another résumé, are less likely to accept job offers or recommend the company to others — regardless of whether or not they’re hired.

Cost implications

Traditional high-volume hiring approaches often come with hefty costs. Without modern strategies and tools, companies can incur large sums for job advertising, external agency fees, overtime for in-house recruiters and extended vacancies.

Racking up these costs can quickly derail your recruitment budget and stifle recruitment teams’ productivity.

To manage costs effectively, consider investing in technology that automates sourcing, screening and scheduling. This reduces your team’s reliance on external agencies and minimizes time-to-hire. Centralized platforms can also help track spend and optimize recruitment efforts over time.

Key strategies for effective high-volume hiring

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to high-volume hiring. But there are evergreen strategies that have proven successful for recruitment teams — no matter the company’s sector, size or geographic location.

Leveraging technology

Trying to hire at scale is a fruitless endeavor without the right tools. When ill-equipped for the task at hand, high-volume recruiters become more prone to cutting corners, overlooking problems, and experiencing burnout from their workloads.

But implementing an AI recruiting software could be the first step in putting the talent acquisition team on a better path. For overwhelmed recruiting teams, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can deliver tremendous benefits.

For example, an AI-powered applicant tracking system like iCIMS makes it possible to:

• Find top talent in your résumé pile: Based on your preferred criteria, the ATS uses AI to surface the most promising applicants and assign rankings to their résumés, saving recruiters considerable time during the first round of candidate screenings.
• Simplify meeting scheduling: The platform’s self-scheduling tool syncs with your work calendar and allows candidates to book their interviews themselves.
• Streamline candidate interactions and engagement: A variety of email templates and communication channels make replying to candidates quick and easy. (You can even look into AI chatbots to answer applicant FAQs.)

Streamlining the recruitment process

Building a talent pipeline supported with automations will take the starts and stops out of recruitment workflows.

A talent pool of prequalified candidates transforms recruiting from reactive to strategic and empowers companies to re-engage promising applicants quickly when needs arise.

And automating repetitive tasks with an AI-driven ATS can accelerate the talent pipeline and free up the team to focus on high-value tasks instead.

Enhancing employer branding

Recruiters who invest in employer branding and tailoring it to ideal candidates attract more high-quality applicants.

One method is to create an employer value proposition (EVP). The aim is to promote benefits, growth opportunities and cultural attributes that resonate with target candidates across the company’s career site, job ads and social media content.

Using employee video testimonials is another creative way to enhance employer branding. Featuring real staff discussing their roles, this type of video marketing content offers job seekers an inside look into working for the company, along with its perks, tasks and day-to-day realities.

Employee referrals and internal mobility

Existing employees are a great source of insight for streamlining high-volume recruitment practices. After all, no one else knows more about working at the company.

And an employee referral program could inspire staff to encourage qualified people in their personal network to apply for openings.

On the flipside, internal candidates already understand the company’s culture and processes, which makes them valuable resources during high-volume hiring periods. Creating clear pathways for their advancement can reduce the need for external hiring and improve staff retention.

Onboarding and training at scale

Structured onboarding programs

Training effectively at scale is no small feat. For everyone to benefit, onboarding must have a clear foundation and structure, while being flexible enough to support independent learning, personal learning styles, and logistical challenges like working in different time zones or locations.

To get started, recruiters should consider incorporating these ideas into their training programs:

• Try modular training: Training should be broken into more manageable modules to support in-person and remote onboarding formats as well as different styles of learning.
• Adopt learning management systems: Employee onboarding software can deliver consistent training, regardless of hiring volume or new hires’ geographical location. The best systems combine self-paced elements with interactive assessments to help verify comprehension.
• Set clear objectives and goals: For company newcomers, having stated objectives, company priorities and success metrics can help reduce anxiety during onboarding and increase productivity afterwards.

Training techniques for large cohorts

Effective techniques for one-on-one training aren’t always transferable when trying to teach large cohorts of new employees. Here are some fresh strategies to try:

• Incorporate interactive elements: Using engagement-focused training methods — like simulations, role-playing scenarios and gamified learning — can boost knowledge retention, plus make large-group training more effective and enjoyable.
• Establish mentorship and peer coaching: Beyond helping to distribute the onboarding workload, support networks like buddy systems and mentorship programs can increase engagement and reduce early turnover.

Conclusion: The importance of high-volume hiring in talent acquisition

Fine-tuning high-volume hiring strategy gives recruiters the edge when it comes to talent acquisition. 

Simply put, recruiting teams’ efforts will be faster, easier and more successful than ever — especially when supported by the right technology and processes.

Businesses that source, hire and onboard a large cohort of new employees, without cutting corners on quality, can deliver its objectives, save money on unfilled positions and build a strong reputation with job seekers.

Looking to maximize your high-volume hiring practices? Book a personalized demo with iCIMS to see how our AI-powered solutions can help you recruit at scale.