6 Key Strategies for Mass Recruiting

For companies that need a large number of operational workers, recruitment involves a constant effort. They need to find qualified personnel to keep daily operations running smoothly. Carrying out a mass recruitment process without the right tools and strategies can become a difficult and time-consuming task.

Next, we'll develop this concept starting with the main challenges you'll face in mass recruitment, followed by key strategies and, finally, metrics that you can use to facilitate the recruitment process.

What is mass recruitment?

Hiring more than 500 people a year is considered high-volume. However, in some areas, exceeding 250 annual hires has the same meaning.

You'll usually see these numbers in industries with higher demand or turnover, such as retail, restaurants, and mass production with thousands of employees. Mass recruitment also occurs in companies that are hiring for new facilities.

What's the difference between mass recruitment and other types of recruitment?

Recruiting can be divided into several categories.

On the one hand, there is executive recruitment, which focuses on finding suitable candidates for executive levels.

Instead, mass recruitment is another category that refers to the recruitment of many candidates in a short period of time. This category is sometimes confused with that of corporate recruitment. The latter, instead of focusing on filling many vacancies in a short time, seeks to fill vacancies in specialized positions.

Common Challenges in Mass Recruiting

Since this recruitment category involves working with a large number of candidates, mass recruitment is understood as a changing business. Here's a summary of the three biggest challenges:

Lots of applications

If you hire 500 people or more, we're talking about 500 or more applications, right?

Incorrect.

Consider your Ratio of candidates to hire, which measures the number of applicants you receive, with the number of hires you make with that talent pool. Rarely, the ratio of candidates to hire is 1:1. Even a 2:1 ratio means filtering 1000 applications to make 500 hires.

Bad experience for candidates

Mass recruitment is challenging in and of itself, but it's made even more difficult if candidates say they've had a negative experience. When candidates have a bad experience during a company's recruitment process, they are likely to withdraw their application and keep looking the other way. Or worse, they may talk to their colleagues or friends, which could lead to a bad reputation and a decline in that company's overall applications.

Manual and repetitive processes

Speed is critical when your company needs to attract large numbers of new employees quickly. Outdated manual tasks slow down the recruitment process, and this directly affects your company's productivity.

6 Key Strategies for Mass Recruiting

When it comes to a large volume of candidates, it's essential that your recruitment process has efficient strategies. Use the following six strategies to attract quality candidates to boost and improve your mass recruitment process.

1. Offer easily accessible applications

Candidate time is valuable. They tend to apply to many jobs at once, so few will have the patience to complete applications that are lengthy and complex. If your application process is hard to find on your website or consists of multi-page forms, candidates may lose interest and move forward with more dynamic applications at other companies.

That's why you need to make your application process easy to access. Avoid the temptation to include long forms. It offers a simple process so that candidates are more likely to complete them and submit their applications.

In addition, more and more candidates are users of mobile devices. Therefore, they are more likely to complete their application process if they are able to apply with QR codes, SMS, social networks or other options that do not require an email address.

If your employment portal is mobile-friendly, you help users to apply wherever they are, instead of having to wait to sit at a computer. You should also ensure that your website is easy to find and that it doesn't force candidates to go through different steps to submit their applications.

2. Promote employment where candidates can see it

A survey conducted in 2019 by Jobvite, Job Seeker Nation Survey, provides the following statistics:

• 69% of candidates search for vacancies on job exchanges or job portals.
• Nearly half of the candidates know about vacancies by word of mouth.
• 41% are looking for jobs on social networks.
• 37% use professional networks to find out about job offers

If you want to attract a large volume of candidates, you must promote jobs where people will see it. Start with job boards, such as Indeed or Simply Hired, and social networks, such as Facebook, where hundreds of qualified candidates will see you at once. (Tip: Did you know that about 5 billion people do they use social networks? Use it to get to know your candidates). You can promote word of mouth by implementing a referral program among your employees. Not only does this publicize your vacancies, but it's also a good way for your employees to bring in new candidates from their network of contacts, which increases their quality.

3. Use an automated recruitment tool

When developing a project, you need the right tools to carry it out successfully. You wouldn't try to build a skyscraper with just a hammer and nails, would you?

The same logic applies to mass recruitment and, in this case, the equipment used by HR professionals includes platforms such as Emi, which optimize the process so that your managers and recruitment teams can handle a high volume of candidates.

With Emi, you can automate the posting of jobs so that, when you have a vacancy, the platform sends job descriptions and other details to your preferred job sites and social networks. It can also help you sort and filter applications, and search with keywords to narrow the pool of candidates. In addition, you'll be able to evaluate the efficiency of your campaigns, facilitate onboarding, and more.

4. Optimize your job descriptions

There are multiple reasons why it is essential to optimize the content that candidates receive. To begin with, as in marketing campaigns, improving your recruitment campaign can Increase the reach to attract better talent.

Optimized content also helps prevent headaches. For example, candidates may apply for a job with a not very specific description and find out, in the middle of the interview process, that it is not what they expected. Be clear about responsibilities, expectations, benefits and salary to avoid wasting time with issues like these.

Other questions, such as specific questions, can help you quickly filter candidates between those who give a desirable answer and those who don't.

Optimized content, in turn, helps improve the quality of hires, because it gives a general idea of the company culture. As candidates read job postings and advertisements, they evaluate themselves on whether they think they might fit the culture mentioned or not. Therefore, it is important to describe it precisely.

5. Improve the candidate experience

Consider looking for a job the same way you consider shopping. If you're looking for a job, in some way, you're going shopping, and a poor customer service experience is one of the reasons you'd look to shop elsewhere.

The same thing happens when candidates have a poor experience in their application process or recruitment experience. Managing a large volume of candidates is not a reason to neglect the quality of your process. Provide a personalized experience, be attentive when answering questions, and ensure that candidates have access to everything they need to apply and continue with the interviews. This is how you will achieve Recruit with empathy.

6. Measure and evaluate metrics

The modern business world is powered by information. Just as you need marketing data to effectively sell products, or accounting information to align budgets, you need to track your recruitment metrics. This keeps the talent attraction process running, and helps you to modify that process on an ongoing basis for better results.

In fact, there are some fundamental recruitment metrics, and we'll expand on that information below.

The most important metrics for monitoring the success of your mass recruitment process

Metrics are a fundamental part of your strategy: they can help your recruitment team improve decision-making and the effectiveness of their work. The most important metrics to consider are the following:

Ratio of applicants to hire

As we mentioned before, if you have a high ratio for your industry, be sure to review your sources, application process or interview process, to see what you can improve in order to balance this ratio.

Candidates by source

This metric measures the number of candidates each source brings, allowing you to focus more on your most productive sources.

Contracts by source

You can also use this metric for the same purpose, which is to identify which sources are the most effective for your company. Be sure to compare this metric to candidates by source.

You can do this by creating a ratio of applicants to hire per source. For example, if one source brings a ratio of 100 candidates per hire and another brings two, you can decide if a ratio of 100:1 is worth it.

Conversion rate

Like the ratio of applicants to hire, the conversion rate indicates how many candidates become employees in the company. High conversion rates are great, but a low conversion rate may indicate that you need to review issues such as lengthy or complicated recruitment processes, which may be discouraging candidates. Pay attention to the abandonment point in the recruitment process to identify where there may be problems, and thus modify them in order to achieve greater conversion.

Ratio of applicants to be interviewed

This number measures how many candidates advance to the first interview. You use it to learn important details of your application process that may be causing applicants to leave the process before arriving at the interview.

Interview-to-hiring ratio

Use this metric to evaluate the interview process itself. Let's say you're interviewing a lot of candidates, but making few hires. This could indicate that you are selecting a lot of candidates to interview, or there may be another issue such as a complex interview process that scares off applicants.

Candidate Satisfaction Score

Use surveys and similar tools to generate a satisfaction score. Once you know how satisfied (or not) people are with your application and recruitment process, you'll be able to identify and fix problems within the process.

Reasons for rejection

Be sure to talk to candidates who reject an employment offer to understand why they decided not to join your team and record the reasons. This can help you understand what parts of your recruitment process need to be modified or improved.

Also, talk to interviewers and recruitment managers about candidates who didn't make progress in the process and take notes. If your company rejects a large number of candidates, this can help you identify patterns and adjust your processes to better filter candidates. You'll save time for your company and for candidates.

Application process steps

The process should have three steps:

• Filter: filter applications and CVs to select the best talent and move forward with the interview process.
• Interviews: These are presented as an opportunity for your HR team to get to know the candidates and select the best ones.
• Offers: send offers after HR has selected the best talent from the interviewees.

Keep track of the number of people going through each stage of your process, as the numbers can be revealing. For example, if you have a lot of rejected offers, it may mean that there is something unattractive about the job itself. Another example may be that, if you have a large number of people who do not continue with the interview process, it may be an indicator that there are problems at this stage.

Recruitment time

Long hiring times can be bad indicators. First, they will cost your company's human resources hours more, and since many of the candidates want to become employees quickly, a longer hiring time can discourage qualified candidates.

Cost per hire

This measures the costs of labor hours, marketing materials, advertising value, training, and more. Measure this metric to keep your costs low.

Improve your mass recruitment strategy with Emi

Mass recruitment is complicated. Automating it with Emi will help make your team's work easier. You can use Emi to monitor your key metrics and important information. In turn, it's an ideal ATS designed to help you automate everything: from job advertisements to communications. You can even use it to schedule interviews and manage other time-consuming manual tasks.

If you want to know more, try Emi with a free demo that you can request here.

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