Let’s face it: recruiting today is hard in any setting. But high-volume hiring brings its own set of challenges. Still, with the right strategies in place, hiring managers can more effectively streamline their hiring process and get additional candidates through the recruitment funnel quickly. 

Let’s take a look at the top challenges of hourly recruitment and what recruiters can implement to be successful in their high-volume hiring efforts.

3 challenges of high-volume hiring strategies

High-volume hiring is defined as the process of recruiting more than 250-500 people annually. Industries that are generally hiring large numbers of people at once include:

• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Restaurant 
• Hospitality
• Airline
• Agriculture
• Consumer packaged goods
• Distribution

Here are some of the most common issues with hiring at scale:

1. Resume development

Many job postings ask for formal resumes, and very few hourly candidates have one. This is the case for a few reasons. Primarily, people haven’t been trained in building a resume, which keeps them from making one and will likely take them out of the running before they’ve even begun, limiting the candidate pool. 

2. Candidate drop off

A Glassdoor study found that companies have an 80% candidate drop-off rate throughout the job application process. On top of that, 92% of people interested in a job will click apply but abandon the application without finishing it, according to SHRM. This is in large part due to an overly long or overly complicated application process. 

3. Time to hire

Companies with a large portion of frontline employees, like restaurants and retail, often have high turnover rates, resulting in a constant demand for new employees. 7Shifts found that the average restaurant turnover rate is 55%, with employees only staying about 110 days at one company. 

However, hiring enough candidates takes time, and a high candidate drop-off rate elongates the time to hire. 

On top of this, many industries that are dependent on hourly jobs require a large amount of employees to accomplish tasks.

5 strategies to implement for improved hiring

While every business is unique and undergoes different challenges, there are some tactics that can benefit talent acquisition teams at large.

Here are five strategies that can boost your frontline hiring process. 

1. Make applications accessible 

For hourly workers, applicant abandonment usually happens in the first 3-5 minutes. So, if a job takes longer than 5 minutes to complete, the candidate drop-off rate increases to 50%-75%. 

The less time it takes to answer questions and finalize the application, the more people will complete it. 

2. Share your job postings on job boards

Even though it’s about 30 years after job boards were introduced, and there are many more methods for applying to high-volume positions, job boards are still commonly used channel to get open positions in front of more people who may be the right candidate for the role. 

3. Measure analytics

Unless you track key hiring KPIs, you won’t know if you’re achieving positive results. Measuring KPIs can help leverage your entire hiring process to improve areas that need help. These metrics can help your company create SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound— that, ultimately, ensure your hiring team is on the right track. 

The top recruiting metrics to monitor include:

• Time to fill
• Time to hire
• Source of hire
• Cost per hire
• Quality of hire
• First-year attrition
• Hiring manager satisfaction
• Applicants per opening
• Selection ratio
• Offer acceptance rate
• Percentage of open positions
• Recruitment funnel effectiveness
• Sourcing channel effectiveness
• Sourcing channel cost
• Recruitment performance metrics

4. Improve the candidate experience

78% of candidates say overall candidate experience is an indicator of how a company values its people. And, 83% of talent says a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they once liked.

It’s important to remember that the reach of negative candidate experiences can reach far beyond a candidate simply not moving forward with the role they applied for. They may remove themselves from a company’s candidate pool and even remove themselves as a customer if they were one before. Additionally, a spurned candidate may have a ripple effect, discouraging those they know to apply at an organization through word of mouth or poor company reviews.

So, it’s essential that organizations put the necessary weight on the quality of frontline candidate experiences for the sake of the business at large.

5. Automate recruitment

Traditional high-volume hiring processes often include many manual, time-consuming steps. Organizations that deliver efficient, user-friendly, and consistent experiences will win out in the race for the limited frontline talent available.

By adopting an automation-first process, organizations can save a tremendous amount of the recruiting team’s time and resources. With a recruitment automation platform, like Emi, organizations have seen a 75% reduction in outsourcing expenses, 83% decrease in time to fill, and thousands of recruiting hours saved.

Ready to automate your high-volume recruiting?

In addition to utilizing these strategies to increase candidate engagement and onboard more employees, it’s also vital to evaluate where hiring managers can save time by reducing manual work. 

The high-volume hiring process is difficult for any industry for organizations of 5,000 employees or 50,000. That’s why we created Emi.

Emi is the frontline recruitment automation platform that helps companies fill roles fast, automate the hiring process, and deliver a quality candidate experience. Emi utilizes a combination of automation and AI remove low-value, manual, repetitive tasks associated with high-volume recruiting. Saving time, resources, and energy for the entire talent acquisition team.

Want to learn more about our mission or see how we’ve helped companies like Walmart, Burger King, and Heineken accomplish their hiring goals? Request a demo to get started.