If you are a recruiter or manager for a company that consistently hires for a large number of positions, then you know that what worked a couple of years ago no longer cuts it. Under pressure to fill hundreds — if not thousands — of positions every year, high-volume hiring isn’t for the faint of heart, especially when there are millions more job openings than job seekers.
Whether you’re hiring seasonally, for a new location, or trying to keep up with openings at your current locations, your hiring process must be as streamlined and frictionless as possible — for both you and your applicants.
Here are seven tips for creating a high-volume recruitment strategy that fills your applicant funnel, decreases your time-to-hire, and makes life easier for HR pros, managers, and franchisees.
1. Automate as much as you can.
Automation is the biggest time-saver on this list. A critical component of moving the process along quickly is eliminating or reducing the time required for things like completing applications, scheduling interviews, answering applicants’ questions, and assessing their qualifications. By automating features like interview scheduling, managers are better able to handle the responsibility of recruiting by eliminating some of the repetitive, time-consuming tasks, and allows you to respond to qualified applicants quickly. Applicants are often considering many job options and the best candidates get hired fast, so those who don’t receive an immediate response are more likely to move on to the next option.
2. Speed up your application process.
Automation is one way to speed up your process, but it is essential to create a quick and easy application. It’s been shown that 73% of people will abandon a job application if it takes them longer than 15 minutes, so if you can get that down to 3 minutes or less, you should see a significant increase in applicant flow and decrease in applicant drop-off.
3. Revisit previous applicants.
Always keep applications on file so that you can go back and reach out to anyone who might be a good fit this time around. Even better if you have access to a Talent Community that allows hiring managers to search and filter applicants, and then reach out to communicate with active and passive candidates to fill broad or specific needs.
4. Communicate with candidates in the way that works best for them.
Reaching today’s hourly workforce means accommodating multiple communication styles, specifically text communications. Recent research found that 88% of today’s hourly workforce prefers texting, and that the read rate for text messages was 98% vs. just 20% of emails. Texting is no longer an added bonus, but a requirement if you want a frictionless recruitment strategy that will engage more candidates.
5. Offer a branded experience.
Branded career pages help your business stand out in a competitive hourly market by showing off your company culture. Applicants get to experience your brand and get a sense of what working for your company would be like. This is especially useful for companies with multiple locations or franchises, as it allows each location to highlight their unique perks.
6. Ask for referrals from current employees.
A happy employee is just about the best recommendation you can get, so ask your current staff if they know of anyone looking for a new job. Better yet, create an incentive program offering a cash bonus, prize, or something else of value if they refer someone who you ultimately hire. Another tip? Ask your employees to fill out a review on websites like Indeed or Glassdoor so that potential candidates can learn more about your perks, culture, and all of the other reasons why your company is a great place to work.
7. Track your efforts to optimize your strategy.
High-volume hiring decisions can only succeed with adequate data to guide them. Analyzing the data generated from engaging with job applicants and new hires helps you learn vital information to improve your talent acquisition strategy. For example, track sources of applicants and hires to optimize your advertising spend.
The best solution to the challenges of hiring hourly employees — now and in the future — is an end-to-end talent management platform that allows you to do all of this and more in a single platform. Creating a smooth, streamlined process attracts more candidates, moves them through interviewing and hiring in a flash, and gets them into a uniform within days.
As an industry-leading talent management solution provider, TalentReef leverages over a decade of serving national brands at more than 100,000 locations to establish optimized recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, and assessment workflows. The only talent management platform purpose-built for location-based, high-volume hiring, TalentReef integrates seamlessly with business systems to create a single, streamlined experience for applicants and managers. Learn more about the TalentReef platform.