What is volume hiring?

Volume hiring is when an employer recruits lots of people – potentially thousands – in a set period of time. It’s similar to usual hiring, just on a much larger scale. 

 There are a few common reasons for volume hiring:

• Seasonal drives, often in retail or hospitality
• Graduate recruitment
• To support rapid business growth
• To staff a new office or department

What are the main challenges of volume hiring?

Guessing what “volume hiring” means is pretty straightforward. But actually doing it well is much harder! Here’s a few of the key challenges involved: 

Screening efficiently

More roles means more applications and more work for talent acquisition teams. So, in volume recruitment, efficiency becomes more important than ever.

But it’s far from guaranteed, of course! Especially if your typical screening process involves manual screening.  

That’s why TA teams often need to adapt their volume hiring processes, so they can move quicker and avoid getting stuck in the mud for months on end. 

Seeing true potential

As you might’ve guessed, though, efficiency is a double-edged sword. 

Go too fast, focus too much on efficiency, and you risk missing out on incredible people who have the potential to succeed in your roles. Whizzing through a volume hiring process can mean you only scratch the surface of what makes each candidate unique and valuable. You sacrifice insight for speed.

So, the holy grail for volume hiring is speed without sacrifice. Always finding the right people, while never wasting a second. Easier said than done, of course.

Candidate experience

High volumes also risk affecting your candidates’ experience. Honestly, candidates can feel like cattle at the best of times. But, when you’re screening hundreds, thousands of candidates, this can get much worse. Long processes, no time for feedback – it all adds up.

But why’s that an issue? Well, because your candidates’ experience matters – not least for your employer brand. Research by IBM found that 60% of candidates tell their family and friends about their experiences, meaning a negative one can have wide-reaching implications. In short, how you treat your candidates today will affect your access to talent tomorrow.

Key aspects of their experience to consider include:

• Setting timescales, and managing expectations
• Interview scheduling
• Using technology to support how you screen

How Arctic Shores supports your volume hiring process

Now you know what volume hiring is, and the biggest barriers to doing it well, here’s how Arctic Shores’ behaviour-based assessment helps you clear all those barriers: 

Efficiency at high volumes

First, a quick example of how our psychometric assessment keeps your volume hiring efficient, and effective, at scale, and at pace:

Capita, responding to the pandemic, needed to quickly hire thousands of people for its Customer Management roles. They asked us for help, and, eventually, we screened 12,000 candidates in just one campaign year. 

65% of those candidates completed our assessment within 24 hours of being invited, giving the Capita team near-instant access to insight they needed. This way, they could tackle their high volumes without any manual CV review. Capita were pretty pleased, calling it a “phenomenal” result. We were pretty pleased too.

Seeing more in people

As you saw earlier, though, volume recruitment is about more than efficiency. It’s about speed without sacrificing the fair, objective insight you need to make the right screening decisions.  

Our game-based assessment uses engaging online tasks to measure your candidates’ unique behaviour and natural strengths in action. Based on decades of neuroscientific research, these tasks take you see beyond the CV, beyond the ordinary measures of human potential. Instead, use them to measure traits like creativity, resilience, learning agility, and dozens more.

This approach gives you the objective insight you need to screen for your volume hiring based solely on potential. It’s even letting our customers do away with the CV entirely, especially in early careers roles. 

Engaging your candidates

We’ll get right to it – 91% of candidates enjoy our behaviour-based assessment. Where they’d usually find a long, long list of statements or questions to respond to, the tasks in our assessment let them get into a state of flow. That means they often forget they’re being assessed at all, responding intuitively to each task. This makes for a more relaxed, engaging experience.

And, what’s more, they get instant feedback once they’re done. We’ll automatically send them a report, showing all the natural strengths we saw in their assessment responses. So, whether they’re successful or not, they can always take something valuable from your process. 

So, if you’re hiring at high volumes, and find that 1) it takes too long, 2) it’s hard to keep your candidates engaged, and 3) it’s difficult to see their true potential, then you’re in the right place. Click here, and see how our assessment can help you.

Download our Playbook for CV-less hiring to find out more about how hiring for potential can transform your hiring process.