High volume hiring is the process of hiring for a large number of open positions during a specific period. The number of jobs being hired for depends on the company, but it can range anywhere from hundreds to thousands of positions. Typically, the need for high volume hiring arises as a result of organizational growth, seasonal demand, or new store openings.

Regardless of how large your company is, recruiting qualified candidates is a challenge, and when you’re engaged in high volume hiring, the challenge of recruiting is magnified. Typical problems in high volume hiring include the same challenges seen on a smaller scale: time to fill, cost per hire, and maintaining the candidate experience. However, these challenges are amplified when your organization needs to hire a lot of talent in a short amount of time.

High volume hiring doesn’t have to put you and your entire team in a state of constant stress and anxiety. Recruitment technology is continuously improving and it can help your organization take the edge off and make the whole process more manageable. Here are some critical tactics you can employ to prepare your team for high volume hiring.

Programmatic Recruitment

Programmatic recruitment is one of the industries hottest tech trends. By 2020, nearly all of recruitment advertising will be programmatic. Programmatic recruitment automates the buying, placing, and optimizing of your job ads. In a nutshell, it makes sure your job ads are seen by the right people on the right sites at the right time.

Why should you think about incorporating it into your tech stack? Well, it will eliminate inefficient processes and unnecessary spending that’s common to traditional recruitment advertising, which means, you can finally stop managing multiple job ad vendors, consolidating data from various sources, waiting for results and spending tons of money on sites that aren’t a good fit for your job postings. However, how exactly does programmatic recruitment work, and how can it improve your high volume hiring? We can break it down into four, digestible pieces.

1. Automation

When it comes to high volume hiring, your team only has so much bandwidth. You have a limited amount of time to hire good candidates so the more of the hiring process you streamline, the better- that’s where automation comes in. Automation is a series of tasks that operate in the background, autonomously, based on rules that have been set. If you’re using an applicant tracking system, then part of your recruitment process is already being automated. In addition to applicant tracking systems, automation also involves:

• Updating employee files
• Sending emails to job candidates
• Generating questionnaires for candidate screenings
• Employee appraisals
• Onboarding
• Offboarding
• Vacation and leave requests

Unfortunately, automation, alone, is not enough to give your high volume hiring process the accuracy and efficiency it needs. According to CIO.com, over 75% of applicants are automatically eliminated in the hiring process by an ATS and 62% of companies admit that they filter out some qualified candidates by mistake. That’s why it is important to employ other tactics in conjunction with automation.

2. Big Data

Now with high volume hiring, comes high volume data. Every job post, every applicant, and every hire compiles information in your database; everything in your recruitment process can be tied back to a single blip of data. To the untrained eye, this is just insignificant and unrelated data points, but in reality, it’s an intricate web of statistics that could give your recruitment a strategic boost. But sifting through years and years of data and making relevant connections is an impossible undertaking for a human. This is certainly not the case for a computer. Enter Big Data.

Big Data is the process of collecting, analyzing, and connecting large quantities of data from different sources to find insights that may not be so obvious on the surface. These powerful insights translate into better decisions made by you and your recruiting team. For example, if you got a lukewarm response from Job Board A the last time you hired for a specific position, but had countless applicants from Job Board B, you’d know to allocate more spend to Job Board B. By tapping into Big Data and letting it guide your process, you’re setting yourself up for a better ROI and a better candidate pool without any of guesswork.

But to be truly effective, Big Data cannot work on its own. It needs a little help from its friends.

3. Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics and Big Data go hand-in-hand, Predictive Analytics is all about finding small patterns in the analytics that Big Data has highlighted as relevant. These stats may have impacted past outcomes such as job ad performance or applicant engagement, which means it’s vital for you to know. Once patterns or attributes are determined, you can build out strategies to improve your decision-making process and can transform hard-coded rules into “adaptive logic” that produce better results.

Predictive analytics makes data actionable. That helps you make smarter, more proactive decisions about your hiring and sourcing strategies. It can also help you make better use of your budget.

The ability to extract meaningful data and actually put it to use is unique for high volume hiring teams. No longer in the dark, you now have easy access to market data as well as data from your own experiences, to gain a more accurate picture of how your job ads will perform.

4. Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

None of these things could be possible without the assistance from Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. All the tech above, could not possibly work without these two pieces of the puzzle.

Machine Learning is a subset of AI that trains machines to learn by automatically using mathematical models and calculations. Based on this, predictive models are built and automatically updated as new information and data are introduced.

Artificial Intelligence allows computers to make complex decisions without human intervention. AI also takes things into account that are not planned for by using self-learning algorithms to learn. Using this, recruitment processes and outcomes are significantly improved.

Here are just a few things AI can allow you to do right now:

• Screen, categorize, and source job candidates
• Pose questions to potential candidates
• Track the activity of job seekers
• Reveal patterns in-house that help you take action before an employee quits

Ultimately, employing all of these tactics will set your high volume hiring up for success by lowering your cost per hire, time to hire, and improving your quality of hire all while maintaining a steady influx of qualified candidates.