With high volume hiring or mass hiring, it’s a numbers game. However, you’re still dealing with real people who deserve respect regardless of the hiring decision.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to make a great candidate experience.
First, you have to create a streamlined recruiting process in order to sift through all the candidates, find the right potential hires, and get them onboarded. Then you have to do it in a way candidates will love.
It’s a tall order because the things that make a recruiter’s life easier often make the candidate experience feel more sterile and cold. With new technology though, it’s easier than ever to balance recruiter needs (and time savings) with candidate experience. Here are four key reminders for your mass hiring plan.
1. Use two kinds of automation for candidate communication
Inviting dozens—or hundreds—of candidates for interviews is a tedious task. Automate as much as possible, whether behavioural or trigger-based.
Behavioural automations: This is solely based on candidate actions. For example, sending a confirmation once a candidate has booked an interview slot or submitted an asynchronous video interview.
Trigger-based automations: These automations are based on you changing something about a candidate. For example, if you move a candidate onto the next round, they get an email notification. Same would go if you move them to the “no-hire” section of your ATS.
The point of automation is two fold: free up your time while ensuring candidates are getting all the communication you need. When the task is automated, you can focus on the operations of your role but know the candidate remains informed and included throughout the process.
2. Use video and voice interviews to empower candidates to show their personalities
When you are thinking about dozens or hundreds of candidates, a phone screen with every person is not feasible. And yet you don't just want to have them fill out a form—you need to see them in action, see their personality, etc.
This is where asynchronous video and voice interviewing comes in handy. Video is great for seeing how someone interacts and engages. In particular, video helps you assess soft skills like having a bold personality. Audio, on the other hand, is great for assessing language skills and hearing how someone describes a problem or answers a question.
From an initial screening perspective, this can be super impactful because you can easily weed out obviously bad-fit candidates. And the best part is you can also use it in later parts of the interview process, for example having someone pre-record answers to basic questions so your interview time can be spent on discussion.
Async video and voice interviewing lets candidates be themselves during the process—especially if they live in a diff time zone or are already employed, this means way more flexibility to submit interviews at a time that works for them versus scheduling things with your team during business hours.
3. Use integrations to connect data between platforms
A LOT of data will move around in a high volume hiring process and you do not have the time (or mental energy) to copy-paste information from an interview platform to your ATS or anywhere else.
Broken or missing data is also a candidate experience problem, particularly if you’ve got automations set up. If a candidate’s information falls through the cracks, their whole experience can fall apart.
To avoid this problem and save yourself time, make sure you’re using all the ATS integrations you possibly can to ensure that the data flows seamlessly to where it needs to be. This saves you time but also ensures accuracy, which translates into accurate candidate communications.
4. Leverage sharing functionality to engage with internal stakeholders
Dealing with a lot of candidates means a lot of files about them. Whether that’s interview notes or candidate written submission, video, and audio. You might also have multiple attachments, whether in your own files or provided by the candidate.
All of this makes sharing features critical so you can connect with stakeholders.
This is not just about time savings, though that’s huge. It’s also about centralizing notes on the same platform from a recall perspective. If you’ve got people sending notes manually via email, collating them for stakeholder meetings is a time waste and leaves room for human error that can impact the candidate getting a fair shot.
Keeping things in a centralized (and secure) platform also helps with privacy concerns. Downloading and sharing zoom files from your computer is a messy way to share that can impact candidate privacy. Sharing directly from your interviewing tool solves this problem.
Mass hiring is a process problem
A lot of the ways we would like to recruit—high touch and incredibly personalized—don’t work with high volume jobs. You need to track a lot of people through but you don’t want them to feel like cogs in a machine. That’s why it’s important to bring the right technologies and processes in place so your team can save time and get their job done but the humans on the other side of the job application feel respected.
