Rapid expansion, new markets and exciting product launches all share one common challenge: the need to build a new workforce quickly. Mass hiring is the answer when your company needs to rapidly bring on board a large number of new employees. But how do you ensure you’re attracting and selecting the best talent without sacrificing quality or efficiency? This article shows how to strengthen your recruiting efforts to hire more people quickly.

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Article Roadmap

• What Is Mass Hiring?
• Strategies For Effective Mass Hiring
  • Create a Plan
  • Expand Your Talent Sourcing Methods
  • Automate the Selection Process
  • Enhance Candidate Experience and Communicate
  • Conduct Effective Interviews
  • Plan the Training and Onboarding Process
  • Ask For Feedback and Referrals From New Hires
  • Implement a Data-Driven Process
• Best Practices
• Next Steps

What Is Mass Hiring?

Mass hiring is a recruiting activity that hires many candidates relatively quickly. Organizations experiencing rapid expansion or seasonal demand often use this approach. Interview lengths are shorter than a traditional hiring process, and recruiters prefer group discussions and assessment tools to screen multiple candidates simultaneously.

Strategies For Effective Mass Hiring

Mass hiring is all about streamlining the talent selection and onboarding processes at scale, calling for a robust strategy capable of efficiently screening high volumes of applicants. Bulk hiring isn’t exactly popular in the recruitment world, but sometimes it’s a necessary part of the game. Let’s explore top strategies to boost this process:

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1. Create a Plan

High-volume hiring requires redesigning your internal processes to support the intake of more new employees than average. Being clear about your goals at each step lets your team keep their eyes on the prize.

Start by breaking down the hiring process into critical phases — before, during and after mass hiring. Then, analyze these critical stages for their ability to process large batches of potential hires.

Before Hiring

You need to consider several factors before rolling out your job opportunities. Be clear about the following goals before the applications roll in:

• Count the open roles – Knowing the number of vacancies provides insight into your hiring goals. By the end of the bulk-hiring process, you should be able to fill every available position with an ideal candidate.
• Develop a strategy – Identify and include the best channels for reaching a large candidate pool. Include paid job advertisements and outreach campaigns in your recruitment strategy. Define and incorporate DEI goals in your efforts.
• Define skills and assessment criteria – Identifying and noting every position’s unique requirements is essential to determining perfect matches. These requirements are a checklist to consider when you’re evaluating candidates.
• Prepare the hiring team – Hiring managers, talent acquisition professionals and recruiters have different roles in the candidate selection process. Defining each person’s responsibilities ensures clarity about the tasks.
• Estimate the hiring timeline – Break down the process and set timelines for various hiring activities. Setting timelines helps you track the process and determine if your targets are realistic. The start and due dates for each hiring stage define clear benchmarks for the process.
• Calculate the costs – Next, consider all the fixed and overhead expenses like job posts, advertising and recruiter salaries to set a budget. Eventually, your hiring tools and activities must yield value, so the computed cost per hire is the north star guiding your recruiting efforts.

During Talent Selection

Once you start receiving applications, here’s what you need to have a definitive plan for:

• Communicating the hiring timeline and deciding vital points to send updates and feedback about employment status to manage expectations.
• Developing standardized interview questions and objective evaluation criteria.
• Monitor resource usage and adjust as needed to streamline the process.
• Deciding when to extend offers.
• Developing a structured onboarding framework in place.

After Hiring

• Set the onboarding and training timeline.
• Collect the relevant documents
• Add new employees into HR systems and provide access to relevant systems, company assets, facilities and accounts.
• Determine additional IT resources required for new hire influx.

2. Expand Your Talent Sourcing Methods

Communicating job opportunities to a broader candidate base requires multiple talent-sourcing channels. Enhancing how you reach out to potential hires is crucial to strengthening your recruitment strategy.

Evaluate your existing mix of internal and external sourcing methods by asking the following questions:

• Which are your top-performing talent sources?
• How does each source rank in terms of the number and quality of hires?
• Are internal talent-sourcing channels like upskilling programs, employee referrals, nominations and succession plans part of your strategy?
• Where and when will you advertise job openings?
• Who coordinates logistics for in-person hiring events?

Specifically, focus on channels that yield a high application rate. Evaluate and rank every recruiting method to determine where to allocate your resources and where to reduce costs.

Consider the following ways to expand your recruitment marketing efforts:

• College Recruitment Drives: Early-career candidates are enthusiastic about starting their careers and bringing fresh perspectives to the workplace. Targeting educational institutions lets you tap into a large talent pool eager to learn.
• Social Media: LinkedIn’s business community is ever-growing. This social employment platform has 28 million users with the #OpentoWork frames in their profiles, 61 million users actively searching for jobs each week and 140 job applications submitted per second. Being present on employment sites and social media makes your company accessible to millions of active and passive job seekers.
• Job Boards: Posting ads on job boards promotes the visibility of your company’s current job opportunities. Indeed alone welcomed over 564.3 million unique global visitors from November 2022 to April 2023. Developing job posts and dispersing them across various job boards casts a wider net across the talent market.

Zoho lets recruiting teams directly post job openings across multiple job boards, social media and careers sites to reach a large talent market. Source

• Career Sites: Job seekers interested in your company will likely skim through your career sites to check for job opportunities. A well-structured career page showcases vacancies to attract the right talent.
• Staffing Agencies: Outsourcing hiring services from staffing or recruiting companies gains you access to specialized knowledge and ready-made talent networks.
• Walk-In Applications: Opening the doors to walk-in applications encourages spontaneous candidate engagement. A process for candidates to submit their applications on-site is effective for immediate and personal touchpoints and on-the-spot assessment.

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3. Automate the Selection Process

When hiring many new employees, automation plays a crucial role in more ways than one. First, break down the process and identify activities, workflows and actions you can automate. Ask the following key questions:

• Which recruitment tasks are repetitive and time-consuming?
• What parts require consistency and standardization?
• Where can automation improve candidate engagement and communication?
• Which metrics are essential for evaluating recruitment performance?
• Where can technology enhance collaboration among hiring teams?

Develop multiple configurable workflows in Workable and set times and dates to auto-send email updates. Source

Consider the following tools to improve productivity at different stages:

• Applicant Tracking Systems: Streamline candidate information collection and auto-generate similar applicant profiles.
• Pre-Employment Assessment Tools: Evaluate relevant skills, competencies and characteristics with standardized tests and scorecards. Access scoresheets to shortlist top-performing candidates.
• Behavioral Assessment: Use scientifically validated frameworks to analyze behavioral tendencies, personalities and soft skills, and generate holistic candidate profiles indicating overall fit.
• Interview Scheduling Software: Leverage a company-wide calendar to schedule group and panel interviews. Assign key people who will be conducting interviews.
• Background Check Software: Auto-request background verification searches in bulk for shortlisted candidates and access reports.

4. Enhance Candidate Experience and Communicate

Poor candidate experience can severely damage your company’s competitive position in the market and discourage potential talent from applying. A recent CareerPlug survey found that 28% of candidates shared negative experiences online. In the age of social media, bad reviews can spread like wildfire, making it critical to be considerate of applicants during and after the hiring process.

But here’s the good news: the same survey found that 57% of candidates shared a positive review online after having a good experience.

Provide clear and timely updates to candidates. Inform them about their application status, share insights into company culture and offer support throughout the process.

Communicate with candidates in bulk with Greenhouse Recruiting’s mass emailing feature. Source

Use the following questions to determine how and when to engage applicants:

• How much information about the job will you provide during the screening process?
• Which stage of the selection process observes the most candidate drop-offs?
• Where in the process do you want to disclose compensation details?
• How will you notify candidates when they don’t get the job?
• How long will it take to deploy offer letters?
• Which are the most common questions we receive from candidates? How do we address them?
• Is there a possibility for on-the-spot offers? How will you let potential hires know?

Also, consider evaluating your recruiting software and how tools support smooth internal and external communication. Specifically, assess the system’s capacity to send mass rejection emails and offer letters.

5. Conduct Effective Interviews

Consistency in your approach is crucial, especially when dealing with lots of applicants. Conduct interviews once you have a more manageable qualified shortlist. Create a structured interview process with a mix of behavioral, situational and technical questions. Following are the top interview formats:

• Structured Interviews: Devise predetermined questions to ask all candidates, ensuring consistency in evaluation. Structured interviews are useful for assessing specific skills and competencies.
• Behavioral Interviews: Ask candidates about past experiences and how they handled specific situations. This format helps predict future potential and determine alignment, providing insights into a candidate’s problem-solving and decision-making skills.
• Assessment Centers: Let potential hires participate in various exercises, simulations or tasks relevant to the job. Consider this method if you have roles requiring technical skills and competencies.

6. Plan the Training and Onboarding Process

While your recruiting team breathes a sigh of relief when chosen candidates accept the employment terms, the process isn’t over yet. The final stage is integrating new hires into your organization.

The first 90 days are crucial to acquaint new hires with the team and workplace. The early days are when reality sets in, so leverage that time to deliver the expectations set during the hiring process and cultivate good habits from the start.

The onboarding and training plan should answer the following:

• How long will onboarding and training last?
• Who are the key personnel in charge of conducting training? What resources will they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively?
• What documents will you need from new hires to proceed with employment?
• How often will you need to check in with new hires during the first 90 days?

Develop and assign onboarding plans to new hires in Greenhouse Recruiting. Source

Develop a step-by-step onboarding checklist to streamline role acclimatization. An effective employee orientation program involves the following:

• Offer visibility on the line of reporting.
• Provide training materials and learning resources.
• Acquaint new hires with internal processes, tools and teams.
• Set up professional emails and ID cards.
• Provide access to resources relevant to their position.

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7. Ask For Feedback and Referrals From New Hires

Turning the mic to your new hires helps identify internal hiring weaknesses and provides a basis to diagnose underlying issues. Consider how you can collect transparent and honest feedback:

• Is there a way for your employees, old and new, to anonymously submit feedback?
• How do you gauge new hires to collect feedback?
• How can you encourage new employees to rate your company positively on employment review sites like Glassdoor?

If there are still vacancies in your organization, consider expanding employee referrals to your new hires. Allow your existing workforce to peer into social and professional networks to invite contacts.

ICIMS has a built-in talent connection portal, allowing your existing employees to recommend potential hires. Source

No one wants to recommend someone who isn’t up to mark, especially when incentives are on the line. That accountability makes employee referrals reliable sources.

8. Implement a Data-Driven Process

Today, recruitment is highly digital, leaving valuable data in its wake. Time to fill, recruiter efficiency, quality of candidate pools, number of applications from talent sourcing channels and overall recruiting costs are jigsaw pieces that, when put together, reveal the bigger picture: your hiring strategy’s effectiveness.

Leveraging data specific to your internal teams, company and industry enables you to make informed hiring decisions. Instead of hunches and assumptions, rely on relevant recruiting metrics to guide the process.

SmartRecruiters allows recruiting teams to track diversity metrics with detailed data visualization options. Source

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Best Practices

Mass hiring appears as a standard approach for hiring many new employees, but don’t let that stop you from prioritizing a thoughtful and empathetic approach. Personalization is key to creating an effective strategy. Focus on the following aspects to improve the process:

1. Avoid Cattle Calling

It’s easy to forget that candidates are more than just their resumes, especially when dealing with an avalanche of applications. While time is of the essence, and there’s a tendency to treat people like numbers, it’s crucial to remember that each applicant is unique.

Instead of conducting generic, large-scale communication, prioritize targeted and personalized outreach. Customize your job ads to include specific skill sets and qualifications to attract talent genuinely interested in the available role. Even a simple act, like personalizing your emails to address qualified talent by their names, contributes to establishing that ever-important initial connection.

2. Provide Clear Expectations

When handling large-scale recruitment, kicking things off smoothly without major errors is crucial. While a few candidates dropping out is normal, an unusually high drop-off rate signals issues in your process. To fix this, clearly communicate role details, expectations and the hiring process upfront to prevent misunderstandings and minimize disruptions.

• Craft detailed and specific job descriptions, outlining the key responsibilities, skills and qualifications required for each role.
• Articulate performance expectations and standards so candidates know what the job entails.
• Share your company’s culture, values and long-term vision to attract candidates.
• Include the base pay in job descriptions or reveal compensation early to avoid unrealistic expectations.

3. Enhance Employer Branding

Mass hiring occurs for entry-level positions, which usually attract early-career candidates. Many applicants are just starting their careers and only know your company by its branding.

Zoho Recruit provides tools to customize career pages with employer branding elements. Source

Josh Bersin, HR thought leader, emphasizes the importance of being strategic with your employer branding. He says,

… Carefully refine, redefine, and communicate your employment brand. And I don’t mean your logo or tagline. What does your company do and why? Why should a high-value job seeker or college grad select your company to join? And are you ready to pay a competitive wage in this inflationary economy?”

Your potential hires’ perceptions of your company are vital to staying competitive and receiving applications from desired talent. Maintain a strong online presence, showcase company culture and share employee success stories to position your organization as the best option.

4. Learn From Mistakes

Last but not least: never shrug off frequently reviewing the process. Collect insights from your recruiting teams and new hires on hiring process difficulties. Glean your findings to uncover any trends and recurring issues. Consider evaluating the following aspects:

• Existing IT capabilities to support a large influx of new employees
• Bottlenecks in the hiring plan
• New hire’s productivity after the onboarding period

Your mass hiring strategy must evolve with your company. Pick up on cues and adjust your framework accordingly to suit your evolving business requirements instead of starting from scratch.

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Next Steps

Building a successful workforce through mass hiring requires careful planning, effective execution, and a commitment to continuous improvement. By implementing these strategies and prioritizing a positive candidate experience, you attract and retain the best talent to fuel your company’s growth.

Ready to take your mass hiring strategy to the next level? Check out our free requirements template to assess your needs and find the recruiting solutions that best fit your company.

What are your biggest challenges and best practices for mass hiring? Are we missing out on any vital steps? Share your thoughts in the comments below.