The Essential Guide To Hiring At Scale In 2023

Hiring at scale or high-volume hiring is a process that involves hiring large numbers of employees in a specific time period. 

As this process involves large numbers of candidates, a high-volume recruiter must be able to use all the tools and knowledge at their disposal to decide which applicants are suitable to progress to the interview stage. 

Finding and evaluating a high volume of candidates for different job roles, all of whom need to be identified, interviewed, assessed, and onboarded, also comes with placement targets to meet. If this sounds challenging, it’s because it is! 

That’s why it’s essential to establish well-defined processes and use the right tools for the job. In this guide, you’ll learn how to navigate high-volume hiring with success.

Challenges to hiring at scale in 2023

Whether you’re expanding into new markets, developing new products or services, improving efficiency and productivity or scaling for future growth, high-volume hiring is not for the faint of heart. Here are some of the challenges associated with hiring at scale:

Understanding the key roles to hire for: Talent acquisition leaders need to fully understand the roles they need to fill, but hiring managers and other stakeholders are not always clear on what they need.

Talent shortage: Many industries, globally, are experiencing a shortage of skilled workers, making it more difficult to find and attract qualified candidates.

Sourcing large pools of qualified candidates: With an increased demand for talent, companies are facing stiff competition to fill roles at high-volume. Recruiters and talent leaders need tools to help them source enough candidates for the seats they need to fill.

Shortlisting candidates: When faced with a huge amount of data, recruiters need tools to help them sort through applicants, without missing out on any qualified candidates. 

Technology and automation: With the increasing adoption of automation and artificial intelligence in the hiring process, companies may struggle to balance the need for efficiency and speed with the desire for a personalised and human touch.

Working with inefficient tools and/or a limited talent teams: In fast-growing companies, the initial period of growth can be challenging for your talent function, and the first step is understanding where you’re going wrong.

6 key metrics to measure when you’re hiring at scale

1. ‍Time to hire: This measures the number of days it takes to fill a job opening. A long time to hire can result in lost productivity and revenue.
2. Cost per hire: This metric measures the total cost of recruitment efforts divided by the number of hires made. It includes advertising, job board fees, and any other expenses related to recruitment.
3. Quality of hire: This metric measures the success of new hires in their role and the impact they have on the company's bottom line. You can track this by looking at retention rates, employee engagement scores, and performance evaluations.
4. ‍Candidate satisfaction: This metric measures the satisfaction of candidates with your recruitment process. You can gather feedback through surveys or interviews.
5. Diversity and inclusion: This metric measures the diversity of your candidate pool and the effectiveness of your diversity and inclusion efforts. You can track this by collecting data on the demographics of your candidates and new hires.
6. Offer acceptance rate: This metric measures the percentage of job offers that are accepted by candidates. A low acceptance rate may indicate issues with the job offer or recruitment process.

Optimising the hiring experience for candidates

Streamline the application process

‍Keep the application process simple, easy-to-use, and mobile-friendly. Consider allowing candidates to apply through various channels like LinkedIn or Indeed to broaden your candidate pool.

Communicate effectively and regularly

‍Keep candidates informed throughout the hiring process by setting clear expectations, responding to questions promptly, and providing updates on the hiring process.

Use pre-employment assessments

‍Use pre-employment assessments to help candidates understand the job requirements and provide them with feedback on their suitability for the role.

Showcase your company culture and values

‍Highlight your company culture and values on your website and during the interview process. This helps candidates determine whether they are a good fit for your organisation.

Provide a positive candidate experience

‍Ensure that candidates feel valued and respected throughout the hiring process. This can include providing feedback, communicating in a timely manner, and being transparent about the process.

Use technology

‍Use technology to automate parts of the hiring process, such as resume screening, to save time and increase efficiency. Consider using tools like video interviewing, chatbots, and AI-based assessments to create a more personalised candidate experience.

Preserving and improving your employer branding through high-volume hiring

As a company grows, it’s natural that its culture will evolve - it’s difficult to maintain the personal, everyone-knows-everyone feeling of a startup - and that’s no bad thing. 

But as a company scales, it’s important to think about how this will affect their company culture and employer brand. 

Organisations should set out the core values, mission, and vision that define them before embarking on a high-volume hiring spree. This way, they can incorporate these into their employer branding and throughout the candidate experience.

Leaders should work with employees to determine the aspects of company culture that are most important to them, so they know where to focus their efforts as the company grows.

Discover our top strategies to improve your employer brand here.

Keeping focused on diversity

One of the challenges of high-volume hiring is ensuring that diversity goals are met on a larger scale. Given the increased pressure to fill roles, it can be difficult to keep the focus on diversity. 

However, according to Glassdoor, 76% of candidates report that a diverse workforce is an important factor when evaluating companies and job offers, so not focusing on it can actually hurt your hiring chances. 

Here are a few ways to include diversity, equity, and inclusion in your strategy even when hiring at scale:

• Remove any biassed language from your job descriptions
• Use anonymous CVs to eliminate any candidate information that may influence unconscious bias like candidate’s name, age, gender, race, educational background, and location
• Leverage social media to promote a diverse company culture
• Unless it’s crucial to the role, don’t put too much emphasis on the educational background.
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Thriving through high-volume hiring 

High-volume hiring is an integral element of many businesses' recruitment tactics. With the right process, hiring huge volumes of candidates is a challenging but not impossible task.

Here are some companies who used BOOSTA to help them successfully hire at scale:

Trainline

Trainline engaged with us to help BOOST their talent teams as they scaled their business across the UK and Europe. We delivered high calibre individuals within Technology, Product and Data as well as Corporate, Commercial and Operations. Working with us saved Trainline £695,000.

Foolproof

Foolproof needed help expanding its Talent function, requiring two Senior Talent Partners with proven experience of Digital and Creative. BOOSTA delivered OPEX cost-savings of £203,198 on agency spend and a perfect example of service excellence and impact. Working with BOOSTA, Foolproof were able to treble their creative and tech teams, growing by over 100 people. 

Paddle

Paddle initially required our expertise in building out a Data Engineering team from scratch and having immediately proved our value within the first month, they requested another Senior Talent Partner to join the non-tech team to attract talent in the UK, US, Germany & Austria. Within 6 months, we had build an entire Data Engineering team. 

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