Expanding the scope of business operations or opening a new branch for the business is a significant business decision that requires support from the entire organization. Especially from the hiring team that needs to focus on recruiting new employees to fill the new job positions that arise from business expansion. Having the right mass hiring strategies in place is important for successful recruitment.

The mass hiring process requires a great deal of planning and coordination within the recruitment team. One of the most successful strategies for high-volume hiring is using a pre-employment skill assessment test. Pre-employment assessments enable a fast screening process to handle mass hiring.

What is Mass Hiring?

As the name suggests, mass hiring is all about hiring at scale to fill high-volume resource requirements. Mass recruitment is the practice of screening, shortlisting, and onboarding new employees at scale within a short time frame. The traditional hiring process is effective for filling a few vacancies, while mass recruitment is all about attracting, qualifying, and onboarding a high volume of employees at once.

Recruitment teams go for a mass recruitment process when a company is growing rapidly or is opening a new operational facility, which is when many employees are required at once. In mass hiring, the focus is on hiring velocity, automation, and efficiency unlike in low-volume hiring where the focus is on quality and manual effort.

Following traditional, manual hiring methods becomes untenable at scale. Every part of the hiring process, starting from screening up to onboarding needs to be reviewed and speeded up.

Hiring at scale comes with inherent challenges. The obvious challenge in mass hiring is a drop in the quality of hire. Another challenge is sub-optimal candidate experience due to the very short timeframe available for hiring candidates. According to Software Advice, 63% of job seekers are likely to reject a job offer due to bad candidate experience.

Other Challenges in Mass Hiring Include

• Time Limitation – Hiring large volumes within a very short duration of time is the biggest challenge of mass recruitment. Hiring steps like talent sourcing, applicant screening, and onboarding lead to a pile-up of significant pressure on the time and resources of recruitment.
• Reaching Out to the Right Talent – The sourcing process is the first and most important step in recruitment. Due to the time crunch, hiring teams have to cut down on the time spent on sourcing talent. As a result, the sourcing step is hurried and lacks clear planning or coordination.
• Quality of Applicants – When the job listings are not promoted to the right platform, they will not attract the right candidates. Wrong platforms will lead to minor qualified candidates, which affects the quality of the hiring process.
• Coordination and Communication – The hiring process requires good coordination and communication between the team members. As mass hiring is constrained by time, coordination and communication are compromised.
• Lack of Technology – Hiring teams that stick to manual recruitment methods for hiring at scale are at a great disadvantage. Using a pre-employment assessment tool not only speeds up mass hiring but also makes it more effective.

Although mass hiring is adopted to speed up recruitment, some inherent disadvantages/challenges can be overcome with a strategic hiring plan. Among the mass hiring challenges of 2023, the most prominent is the lack of software adoption. Hesitancy in adopting new and advanced technology for hiring can slow down and render the mass hiring process ineffective.

When to go for Mass Hiring?

While mass hiring is done by many large employers, the objective and goals of the mass recruitment process may differ in each industry. Technology and analytics companies plan mass hiring for recruiting permanent employees like software engineers, business and data analysts, and voice support. Retail and manufacturing industries on the other hand go for mass hiring to fill temporary workers for seasonal work. For example, Amazon hired a record number of temporary workers (1,50,000) in the last holiday season.

Here are some of the scenarios where mass recruitment is most suitable:

• High Volume Recruitment – Higher volume recruitment needs can be tackled by mass hiring. Several candidates can be hired at the same time within a short period via mass hiring. Hiring teams using pre-employment software like SkillRobo can handle mass hiring more effectively.
• Saving Resources and Money- Mass hiring translates to mass savings. Organizations can reduce hiring expenses via mass hiring drastically. Bulk recruiting reduces wasteful advertising, administrative expenses, and employee/application costs.
• Branding the Business – The presence of many prospects boosts the organization’s possibilities of indirect marketing. Mass recruitment drives increase the visibility of the brand across marketing channels.
• Hiring Resource Unavailability – Mass recruitment is an ideal solution when there is a resource crunch within the hiring team. When there aren’t enough resources available, the hiring team can take the help of pre-employment skill assessment software to hire at scale.

Know the Process of Mass Hiring

Strategic planning is key to the success of mass hiring. A well-planned mass recruitment procedure delivers the expected results. The mass hiring/recruitment plan must consider the following parameters.

• Assess the Resource Requirements – Before deciding on mass hiring, the recruitment team must assess the current resource scenario first. Analysis of the current resource requirements helps decide whether mass recruitment is required or not. Department heads must put forward the resource requirements within their team to the head of recruitment. The hiring head will then consolidate all the requirements and consider the available infrastructure to decide on mass recruitment.
• Retention Plan – Even before an organization goes for mass hiring, focussing on developing internal talent and skill levels is important. Once the skill requirement details are received from various department heads, the hiring manager needs to first look at the internal talent pool to check if the requirements can be met with internally available resources. This helps improve employee engagement.
• Assessing the Interview Process – Overlooks or mistakes during the interview process are common in mass hiring. Charting the right set of interview questions saves time and money during the hiring process and sets the expectations clear during the interview process. Having a clear set of questions also helps in submitting feedback on the candidate and minimizes bias during the interview.
• Focus on Candidate Experience – The hiring process is the first encounter that the candidate has with the employer. The way the candidate is treated during the hiring process will show how they will be treated as employees. So, it is important to ensure a positive and engaging candidate experience during the entire hiring cycle- from skill assessment to interview to onboarding.

Planning is essential to tackle bulk hiring. Here are some high-volume recruiting tactics that help in the effective implementation of mass hiring.

Effective Implementation of Mass Hiring

1- Making an Effective Sourcing Plan – the sourcing step is crucial for the success of the hiring process. To have access to a large candidate pool, companies must develop a plan for good awareness of mass recruitment. Plans such as ….

• Using social media platforms and job promotion portals
• Referral schemes for employees
• Hosting a virtual walk-in event for diverse audiences
• Creating advertisements on the website

…are effective ways to build an effective sourcing strategy.

2- Partnering with Recruitment Agencies – This is a time-tested way to source the best talent. For mass recruitment drives, employers need the help of experts in their hiring process. Partnering with an external hiring agency helps source successfully and attract suitable candidates. Partnering with such agencies reduces the pressure on hiring managers.

3- Pre-employment Solution in the Hiring Process – The use of pre-employment skill assessment software is a fast-evolving trend in the recruitment space. Hiring managers are increasingly using pre-employment assessment software to make the recruitment process more manageable and efficient. Especially when it comes to mass hiring, the use of skill assessment software proves extremely beneficial for the hiring team. Pre-employment software helps store resumes, evaluate the skill levels of candidates, and track the progress of the hiring process.

4- Referrals for Mass Hiring – The main challenge in mass hiring is finding suitable candidates. Employee referral schemes are useful in finding the right candidates in the mass hiring process.

5- Effective Interview Process – Once the candidate clears the skill assessment test, the interview is next. Preparing a set of relevant interview questions ensures a comprehensive evaluation of candidates and saves a lot of time and energy for hiring managers.

Best Practices in the Mass Hiring Process

There are several ways in which you can plan for the mass hiring drive, as per the requirements of your organization. We have put together a list of best practices in mass hiring for the best results:

Create a mass hiring plan – Whether you foresee rapid expansion in your business or not, it is wise to have a mass hiring plan that can be activated as soon as things take off. The mass hiring plan depends largely on the recruitment funnel. The plan is broken down into tasks and subtasks based on the way the recruitment funnel spans out.

The most common parts of the recruitment funnel include

• Awareness
• Attraction
• Interest
• Applying
• Evaluating
• Interviewing
• and Hiring

Consider every step of the recruitment funnel in terms of its ability to process a high volume of candidates speedily and effectively.

Ask questions like –

• Where are bottlenecks likely to occur?
• What can be fast-tracked?
• Which step can be potentially skipped?

Expand Candidate Sourcing – The success of the mass hiring process depends on the volume of candidates coming through the funnel. Therefore, expanding the sourcing base is important for mass hiring.

How to Grow Your Candidate Pool?

• Hire temporary workers to focus on candidate sourcing
• Outsource the sourcing process to external agencies
• Launch a bounty referral scheme to encourage employees to refer candidates
• Expand the digital channels where you post the job requirements for a wider reach
• Ramp up the social media recruitment campaign so that more people view your ads

Track the Applicant Numbers – According to a recent statistic, the applicant-to-hire ratio across industries globally is 1 hire per 25 applications. While this seems like a manageable ratio for low-volume hiring, it becomes a daunting number when hiring at scale. So, maintaining a low healthy applicant-to-hire ratio is essential in mass hiring.

Tracking the Candidates – Usage of applicant tracking systems (ATS) in mass hiring is very effective in tracking candidates at scale. Automating the job application process, candidate data capture, storage, and parsing resumes are some of the uses of applicant tracking systems.

Plan Hiring Automation Well- No doubt automation is essential in hiring, but poorly planned recruitment automation can lead to a terrible candidate experience. Improper planning of hiring automation leads to lengthy or hard-to-use job applications and inadequate and impersonal automated communication.

Fast and Effective Screening – Automated resume screening process and pre-employment skill assessments enable fast and effective screening of candidates. Automated skill assessments are highly effective in mass hiring processes. They are reliable indicators of future performance as they allow you to gauge candidate performance levels even before they are hired.

Communicating with Candidates – Maintaining a steady communication thread with prospective hires from screening to onboarding is important in mass hiring. Very often, due to the large volume of applicants in mass hiring, communication channels are interrupted. Focussing on the continuity of the communication thread creates a positive and inclusive candidate experience.

Conclusion

Using technological tools in the mass hiring process is key to quick and efficient hiring. Making a pre-employment skill assessment tool like Skillrobo a part of your bulk hiring strategies helps you derive maximum benefits out of mass hiring.

SkillRobo is a fully customizable skill assessment tool that can be used by the hiring team to create customized and effective skill assessments as per the requirements of the role.

To explore more about the features of SkillRobo, Sign Up to visit our website now.