High-Volume Hiring: What It Is and How It Works

In today’s competitive labor market, companies are always identifying new, creative ways to stand out from other organizations to attract and hire top talent. An effective recruitment and hiring strategy is particularly important when rapidly scaling a team through high-volume hiring.

Organizations often engage in high-volume hiring during periods of rapid growth, seasonal peaks, or when opening a new office or launching a new business unit.

No matter the reason for expanding your team, understanding the ins and outs of high-volume hiring—including top challenges, relevant metrics, and best practices—can help you achieve hiring goals.

Table of contents:

• What is high-volume hiring?
• High-volume hiring challenges
• High-volume hiring metrics
• 3 creative strategies for high-volume hiring

What is high-volume hiring?

High-volume hiring refers to recruiting a large number of candidates in a short period of time. This can include adding anywhere from several dozen to thousands of workers within a few weeks or months. This recruitment method also comes into play when an organization receives a considerable number of applicants for a specific role.

High-volume hiring is more common than some might think—73% of large organizations engage this form of hiring, according to research from HR.com. And high-volume hiring requires a different approach and strategy than traditional recruitment.

When your organization is only hiring for one or a few roles, the team might spend more time manually reviewing each applicant and completing several rounds of screening and interviews. But when hiring at scale, a manual, lengthy process can be costly and time-consuming. Identifying areas to streamline the high-volume process and automate specific steps can save time and resources, while getting new team members on board sooner.

While you might not have the opportunity to manually review all applicants in a high-volume hiring scenario, focusing on quality—rather than simply trying to fill the roles as quickly as possible—can help your team avoid risks such as disengagement and attrition down the road. Whether you’re filling one position or many, identifying qualified candidates who align with your organization’s mission and values is key to success.

Related: 7 Business Scaling Strategies for Growing Your Business

High-volume hiring challenges

High-volume hiring can present a number of challenges and the HR.com research found that only 45% of organizations strongly agree that their high-volume hiring strategy is effective. The challenges associated with high-volume hiring are similar to those with traditional recruitment—only multiplied because of the number of roles that need to be filled.

Sourcing

A top challenge with high-volume hiring is reaching enough qualified candidates where they’re searching for open roles. If you only post jobs on your website, for example, you’ll miss out on job seekers who are searching for jobs elsewhere.

To quickly fill open roles with quality candidates, consider experimenting with different candidate sourcing channels to determine which ones drive the best results.

Sourcing channels can include:

• Company careers pages
• Traditional job boards
• Industry-specific job boards
• Job boards geared toward diverse populations
• Social media advertising
• Contracts with staffing agencies
• Referral programs
• Local classified ads
• Talent marketplaces
  
  

Related: How to Expand Your Workforce: The 12 Best Methods

Time and scheduling

Ushering candidates through the hiring process requires a lot of moving parts and coordinating schedules across teams. Talent acquisition and HR teams handle the initial screening and early interviews, and often also extend final offers.

Along the way, candidates will also likely interview with the manager directly hiring for the role, other team members in a peer interview format, and potentially leaders on the team, depending on the role. Finding times that work for both candidates and team members can be challenging, especially if the team is completing dozens or hundreds of interviews in a short period of time.

One way to address this is by automating interview scheduling by integrating team-member calendars into a scheduling tool. Another option that some companies tap into for high-volume hiring is scheduling group interviews when an organization has several openings for the same role. Group interviews help decrease the total number of interviews and give your organization a sense of how candidates interact with others who might soon become their team members.

Organization

When your team is juggling hundreds or thousands of candidates, organization is key. Rather than collecting applications via email and saving them on a personal drive, centralizing all applications and candidate communication can help your team stay organized. It also ensures each individual involved in hiring has insight into the stage of the process and where each candidate stands.

Technology such as an applicant tracking system can help your organization keep all hiring data streamlined and easily accessible for all team members. Another way to simplify the process is by leveraging a work marketplace like Upwork. Through Upwork, your team can post jobs, accept proposals from skilled independent professionals, schedule interviews, and extend offers—all in one place.

Related: Why Every HR Department Needs To Digitally Transform—Now

Diversity

A report from the Josh Bersin Company found that when organizations prioritize DEI initiatives, they are 2.6 times more likely to engage and retain their workforce. Whether you’re adding a few team members or engaging in high-volume hiring, an effective strategy should focus on diversity in your hiring team, sourcing channels, and candidate pool.

Depending on the demographics of where you're hiring and which roles you’re looking to fill, diversity can be difficult to achieve in a short period of time. While it can take time to effectively integrate diversity into your full-time, in-house worker population, one way to get closer to achieving your diversity goals is by engaging independent professionals. Tapping into a platform like Upwork can help your organization access global talent and build teams with diverse backgrounds, skills, and perspectives.

Related: Top HR Trends: The Latest Priorities and Concerns

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High-volume hiring metrics

Measuring key performance indicators in your high-volume hiring is critical to success. In the absence of metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not, your organization risks falling short on your high-volume hiring goals.

Time to hire

This refers to the total time between when a role is initially opened until an offer is accepted. Research from the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) found that the average time to hire is 36 days. When your team needs to fill a high volume of roles, it can be a significant strain on your business if the process takes over a month.

If your time to hire is lengthy, your team can pinpoint bottlenecks along the way and identify ways to make the hiring process more efficient. For example, it might take too long to review applicants when they first apply or require a lot of back and forth to schedule interviews. The more you reduce time to hire, the sooner you’ll have new team members adding value to your business.

Related: 13 Ways To Reduce Time To Hire Without Sacrificing Quality

Hiring cost

Several factors go into calculating cost per hire. This metric includes any budget spent on job boards, social media, and other advertising to fill an open role. Other costs include total budget spent on hiring technology, candidate screening, referrals, and administrative costs, to name a few. Another factor to take into consideration is the cost of lost productivity when a role is unfilled—whether due to adding a new role to your team or a worker leaving the company or transitioning to a new role.

According to another report from SHRM, the average cost to hire is nearly $4,700. When your organization is filling an abundance of roles, this cost multiplies significantly, so it’s always useful to have an understanding of total cost per hire, as well as ways to decrease it.

Sourcing channel cost

A significant portion of the overall cost to hire is the cost for each candidate sourcing channel you pay for. These channels include job boards, social media ads, contracts with recruiters or staffing firms, referrals and more. Job boards often charge hundreds of dollars per month for each role, while staffing firms can require costly retainers. Costs also increase depending on the complexity or competition for the role.

Once you have an understanding of the total cost for each sourcing channel, consider ranking each source based on the total number of qualified candidates and eventual hires they drive. You might find that you can eliminate specific sources that don’t drive strong results, which will help your team reduce overall hiring costs.

Offer acceptance rate

No matter how qualified the candidate or engaging the interview process, not all job offers are accepted. Candidates might receive a competing job offer, a counteroffer from their current employer, or decline your team’s offer for any number of other reasons.

The offer acceptance rate is important because if you reach the final offer stage only for the candidate to decline the offer, you may have to go back to the drawing board, spending additional time and resources that you weren’t anticipating to fill the open role. When assessing your offer acceptance rate, identify top reasons why candidates declined offers and think of ways to improve the overall rate.

Identifying and measuring the right metrics is only a part of the process. Gleaning insights from the data can help you identify areas to improve your high-volume hiring strategy over time.

Empower your HR team to spend more time interacting with candidates and less time in the weeds with data. Skilled data analysts are available on Upwork to gather data and identify insights to improve your high-volume hiring.

3 creative strategies for high-volume hiring

Despite the challenges associated with high-volume hiring, a creative approach, the right strategy, and the latest technology can better position your organization to reach your hiring goals.

1. Automate hiring process steps

Rather than completing manual hiring steps for hundreds or thousands of applicants, automating some steps can help save time and resources, while decreasing the total time to hire and supporting a more engaging candidate experience.

According to a recent survey of 420 recruitment professionals from Aptitude Research and Fountain, many organizations fail to integrate automation in important ways. Only 27% of enterprise companies have plans to automate more than 50% of their talent acquisition processes, and most of their focus is the application process.

With effective technology in place, such as an applicant tracking system or talent management platform, steps that can be automated include:

• Centralizing applications
• Sending candidate pre-screening surveys
• Initiating candidate communication
• Scheduling interviews
• Collecting interview feedback
• Initiating background checks
• Sending new hire paperwork
• Completing onboarding tasks

2. Support an engaging candidate experience

While automating hiring steps offers many benefits, supporting an engaging, personalized candidate experience—especially for individuals in the final rounds of the process—is key to securing top talent. The survey from Aptitude Research and Fountain found that nearly half (46%) of high-volume hiring candidates who dropped off early in the process did so because of a poor experience.

Automation can help your organization avoid candidate frustrations related to a slow or disorganized hiring process. To further engage candidates, your team can personalize certain aspects of the process, which will show individuals that your team is invested in them personally.

Some ways to personalize the candidate experience include:

• Providing a team member’s contact information so candidates can reach out with questions
• Specifying which of their skills align with the role’s needs
• Offering flexibility with interview scheduling
• Leaving time for candidates to ask questions during interviews
• Asking candidates about their preferred communication method
• Providing personalized interview feedback
• Collecting feedback from candidates on their experience

3. Embrace independent talent

The report from Aptitude Research and Fountain shows that 48% of respondents say they face difficulties finding quality hires. Additionally, 47% have lost candidates during the hiring process because the candidates found other jobs. To avoid these risks and scale teams efficiently, leading organizations embrace independent talent.

Our 2022 Future Workforce Report found that nearly 78% of hiring managers who engage skilled independent professionals say they are confident in their ability to find the talent they need, compared to just 63% of those who don’t tap into independent talent.

On average, independent professionals on Upwork can start working within four to five days, compared to several weeks or months for full-time, in-house workers. This quick timeline is particularly helpful when you’re hiring a high volume of workers, because the longer you have open roles, the more productivity is lost.

Related: Why Companies Are Using Freelancing Platforms to Find Remote Workers

Upwork can be your greatest ally for high-volume hiring

While high-volume hiring might seem daunting, bringing on new team members is an exciting opportunity because in most cases, it means your business is growing. And the good news is that your team doesn’t need to manage high-volume hiring on your own. Upwork is here to help you confidently source, engage, and manage independent professionals with the skills you need both now and in the future.

With Enterprise Suite, access diverse, vetted talent with more than 10,000 skills, while driving cost savings compared to what your team might otherwise spend on staffing agencies, job boards, and other sources. We’ll partner with you to develop a custom, scalable, high-volume hiring strategy to add more skilled talent to your team. Learn more about Upwork Enterprise and get started today.