The strategy has to be efficient, and the results need to be immediate. That’s the expectation in high volume recruiting. The impression of clients and technical recruiters tends to be that because you are not typically looking for highly technical candidates, your job is easier. Wrong. Because you are not looking for one or two qualified candidates, but instead you are trying to move an entire group of people across the finish line, more things can and do go awry.
What is this high volume recruiting job exactly? Am I looking for a recruiter or am I looking for a researcher? The answer is a little bit of both. High volume sourcing and recruiting is an entirely different animal than for example, technical recruiting. The challenge is not looking for a few highly qualified individuals, but rather an entire group of people who may or may not have experience, but have the aptitude to be trained. High volume recruiters have to be researchers first. According to a 2017 MRI Network study, 63% of recruiters say that the talent shortage is their biggest problem. For high volume recruiters to find qualified applicants, they need to go beyond the typical job boards and LinkedIn to mine the unemployment databases in the targeted area, military employment and industry-specific websites, colleges and universities, social media and workforce development centers.
As you build your candidate pool, we all know that the most important piece of information to next to knowing where to find your candidates is knowing your top competitors. Who are they and what are they offering in comparison? The best information about competitors will be from the candidates themselves, Glassdoor is also an excellent way to conduct a little bit of competitive analysis, but there are other contenders out there are well, such as CareerBliss. They recently boasted over three million job postings and four million salaries 700,000 company reviews.
Fairygodboss is another cool site that I just came across which offers job reviews for women, by women. Do you want to see how your company ranks against, for example, Fidelity, who advertises “many women in senior leadership positions, great maternity leave, and an active women’s networking group?” Benefits, work-life balance and perks all pay an equal part in high volume recruiting. If you find that the competitor down the street pays more and you can’t increase compensation, you need to understand what your selling points are to recruit those folks away.
Ok, so have your pool of candidates and understand the market place and we know that time is of the essence to hit your time to fill metric. Let’s talk about one of my favorite tools to shorten time to fill, and that is utilizing video interviews as first round interviews. Before I hear the collective groan, realize that while traditional interviews aren’t going away anytime soon, tightening up an interview process is critical to hitting your target time to fill. Glassdoor claims that average time to phone screen is approximately six to eight days. By implementing the video interview as your first step, it can dramatically shorten the length of time from initial resume screening to hire.
One option is, Powermeeter and aside from the catchy name, it can help you expedite and invite the right talent to the virtual interview table. Instead of the candidate taking off work to come in and interview, which may push the date off a week or more, why not do it tonight or tomorrow? Not only does it create a comprehensive experience for the candidate by allowing them to build their own profiles, and complete a recorded interview at their convenience, it also drives hiring manager feedback by enabling them to leave feedback for the recruiter immediately following the interview.
Sonru is another great option, particularly when you are sourcing from a multicultural candidate pool. Need to interview in Spanish or Chinese? While Sonru doesn’t translate, it does support the language characters you are going to be typing in by selecting the language. They also offer 24-hour online support for interviews. That comes in handy when populating a call center in India or sales reps in California.
Finally, EmployInsight uses job matching. They were recently acquired by Get It, LLC and they use the standard algorithms to match candidates, which is great for technical skills, but not always for customer service representatives. To counter that, EmployInsight also matches candidates based on strengths. For instance, what personality traits are we looking for in a front desk clerk? EmployInsight walks you through that profile and helps identify those candidates to expedite your sourcing process.
Assess and plan what tools available to us can empower us to make faster hiring decisions, lessening the time to fill, while increasing our offer acceptance rate. Everything you need to move fluidly through the high volume recruiting arena!