What is Bulk Hiring?
The pandemic had given rise to mass-scale unemployment. Forbes states that in the US alone for every single job opening there are two unemployed individuals. Furthermore, in the UK, recruiters have seen a 1363% hike in applications for certain job positions. Organizations too have enlarged their openings and have opted for bulk hiring to implement diverse talents to meet their objectives. The Economist says, that firms around the world have spent over $400 billion in HR services for the same. So what is bulk hiring?
Bulk hiring or mass recruitment refers to the process of screening, shortlisting, and recruiting candidates on a large scale in a shorter time based on organizational requirements.
But is it only to hire candidates in bulk that organizations choose to mass hire candidates? Well, no. Organizations enjoy other benefits from the bulk hiring process some of which we have discussed in the following section.
What are the advantages of Mass Hiring?
There are three main reasons for which companies have started opting for mass hiring. These include:
Cost Savings
Mass hiring has enabled organizations to cut down costs in a massive manner. Bulk hiring helps to cut down unnecessary advertising and administration costs as well as applicants and staff expenses. This gradually cuts down the hiring costs massively in the end.
Company Branding
The presence of innumerous candidates automatically increases the chances of indirect marketing for the organization. Job seekers tend to enlist and create an impression as soon as they observe a brand in passing. In this association between candidates and recruiters, organizations get a huge benefit from irregular brand showcasing.
Tech-enabled Optimization
Bulk hiring opens up gates for organizations to access technology in the market that answers their recruitment pain points. Technology today has enabled organizations to automate pre-screening, interview scheduling, and interview candidates in bulk. This not only saves recruiters time but also reduces hiring costs.
What are the Challenges of Bulk Hiring?
However, bulk hiring comes with a lot of challenges. These challenges can lead to slackened recruitment processes. Some of these challenges include:
Time Constraints
Mass recruitment involves a lot of time-consuming processes like talent sourcing, bulk resume sifting, and mass interviews often put a lot of strain on your time as well as resources.
Talent Reach and Sourcing
Recruiters, especially those who lack proper bulk recruitment skills and resources, often face a lot of challenges when it comes to developing a clear strategy to promote job openings during high volume recruiting.
Talent Quality
Improper resourcing can lead recruiters to low-quality talents with low standard skills and experience. This often delays the recruitment process.
Missing out on the Right Talent
The bulk hiring process is often long and cumbersome. With rounds of interviews for better analysis, candidates often get tired and fail to show their utmost potential in the end. This often leads to missing out on the right candidates that may meet the organization’s requirements.
Excess Stress and Pressure
Being a chaotic process with immense workload and teamwork, pressure and stress are experienced by both candidates and recruiters. Candidates get tensed to meet employees with the right confidence while recruiters often worry about missing out on the right talent while tackling the immense workload.
Communication and Coordination
Individuals often form a poor impression of an organization if recruiters fail to respond to them on time. Furthermore, the hiring process is a hectic one that requires the entire collaboration of the recruitment team. Improper communication can create bottlenecks in the whole process. Hence, communication also gets affected between both internal and external stakeholders when it comes to mass recruitment.
So, how can a mass recruiter overcome these challenges? Hence, we have listed a few bulk hiring strategies that allow a mass recruiter to easily source talents for an enhanced recruitment process.
10 Effective Bulk Hiring Strategies for Optimized Recruitment
To overcome the above-listed challenges we have compiled a list of 10 bulk hiring strategies that major organizations globally have used for seamless high volume recruiting.
Develop a Bulk Recruitment Plan
The first mass recruitment strategy to start with includes developing an effective bulk recruitment plan. For that, you would need to involve a data analyst, a few people who can sift resumes and screen candidates, and the help of your senior executives. You can start with:
- Creating a goal of the type and number of talents you need to fill in
- Analyzing the current situation of the local job market for availability
- Define the necessary candidate skill-sets and experience to develop a to-the-point job description
- Set up a recruitment timeline and break the stages of mass recruitment into stages
- Pre-determine which job roles need to be filled in earlier than others
- Start with the bulk hiring process as soon as possible
- Create an overall budget for your bulk hiring process
Now we can move on to the second of bulk hiring strategies that includes candidate sourcing.
Expand your Horizons for Talent Sourcing
Identifying potential candidates in this market can be quite challenging if you do not utilize multiple channels. Hence, some of the channels that you can utilize to source candidates faster and effectively includes:
- Programmatic ads
- Traditional (radio and television) and social media
- Campus recruitments
- Networking
- Walk-in applications
- Nonprofit and government organization partnerships
- Training events and programs
- Existing employee referrals and much more
But you may lose up on some candidates if you fail to bring them on a single platform. Hence, the third of all the bulk hiring strategies include guiding candidates to a single destination.
Guide your Candidates to a Single Platform
Candidates may slip out through the gaps if they fail to realize the destination they are headed to. Hence, you need to develop a landing page that can easily integrate with all your candidate sourcing channels. Furthermore, you can think of using a QR code or a link to easily lead candidates to the landing page that can enable a faster bulk hiring process.
On the other hand, you can also ask for their contact information and send across the necessary details through it. Integrating online applications with your existing ATS helps you to select the right candidates and eliminate those who are deemed to be unsuitable.
Moreover, you can also integrate cognitive technologies like AI to optimize your candidate sourcing and at the end your overall recruitment process.
Increase the pace of your Screening Process
Once you advertise your job opening on various channels, you will get a bulk of resumes and candidate applications in your hand. However, if you do not haste, you will likely miss out on many suitable candidates. Hence, the fourth on the list of bulk hiring strategies include optimizing the screening processes. One of the best ways to accelerate this process includes integrating smart technologies to automate the entire screening process.
Technologies like AI, analyze candidates’ experience, education, and skill-sets to rank candidates accordingly. Moreover, if you have a particular set of skills and experience in mind you can conduct online assessments and leverage AI to bring out the most suitable candidates for the position.
Eliminate Cattle Calls during Interviews
The fifth in the list of bulk hiring strategies include eliminating cattle calls from interview processes. Rather than making a cattle call, interview those candidates who have succeeded in the first round of mass recruitment assessment. In this way, not only will you save time and energy, but also will encourage candidates. Furthermore, you enhance candidate experience in this way and reduce the chances of missing out on the apt candidates.
However, you must make sure that your interview process is structured. Candidates must receive the same questions and must be treated fairly throughout the entire recruitment process. This will help you to judge the potential of candidates objectively, narrow down suitable candidates easily and remove discrimination and bias.
Track your Candidates
The sixth in the line of bulk hiring strategies include candidate tracking. It is quite natural that you will lose valuable information about candidates when you opt for mass hiring. This can create a problem when you need certain data urgently.
With innumerous candidates applying, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can help a mass recruiter to segment data and categorize it effectively. An ATS not only helps you in attracting a diverse set of candidates but also helps in data collection, storage, screening, and organizing, enabling a mass recruiter to keep a track of the entire candidate pipeline.
Increase Feedback Density
Candidates often want feedback from organizations at every stage of the bulk hiring process. Hence, the seventh in the list of bulk hiring strategies include providing feedback to candidates as frequently as possible. You can provide feedback to candidates via:
- Mass emails containing feedback, next selection step, or other opportunities
- Redirect them to social media platforms with constant updates about the mass recruitment process
- FAQ responses using conversational AI or chatbots
Whether there is a delay in the mass hiring process, or a candidate has proved unsuccessful, make sure to provide them constant feedback about the scenario. If you find potential future candidates, reply to them about getting back to them as soon as there is an opening. Remember the more they hear from you, whether it is a positive or negative response, they will feel more included which can in the end enhance their experience.
Arrange your Onboarding Process
Onboarding is a great opportunity to increase the experience of your new employees. So the eight in the list of bulk hiring strategies include developing a structured onboarding and training procedure. For that, you can sort recruits into groups based on their positions such that they can engage with their colleagues. However, do not forget them once they have broken the ice. Rather frequently check on their progress and inclusion in the work environment.
Enquire New Recruits for Referrals
Mass recruitment or no mass recruitment, you should always have a broad reach to talents. Hence, ask recruits for referrals. There is always a chance of employees resigning and this can be your golden opportunity to hire suitable candidates for that.
Never Undermine Bulk Hiring Costs
The last in the line of bulk hiring strategies is keeping your mass hire expenditure in check. Despite having a budget, mass hire expenditure often rises above the line. From advertising to expensive interviews and onboarding, a mass recruiter must keep expenses in the budget even though it may feel impossible. One way of reducing mass recruitment expenditure is by utilizing HRMS software for automating major recruitment processes to save both time and additional costs.
We have heard so much about leveraging technology to enhance bulk recruitment. But how does technology accelerate mass hiring? Hence, we have listed some of how cognitive technologies like AI have enhanced the bulk hiring process enabling recruiters to accurately select candidates, automate major processes, and cut down additional costs.
How AI accelerates Bulk Hiring?
According to Statista, in 2017 recruiters worldwide have stated that AI had accelerated the following areas in bulk recruitment.
Today AI has gained much power and has enhanced these processes extremely, especially interviewing candidates using AI-based video interview solutions. Let’s check out deeply how AI has optimized these bulk hiring processes today.
Enhanced Candidate Sourcing
When it comes to sourcing candidates for just one position, recruiters can easily search through a few job boards and social media platforms to find the ideal fit. However, high volume recruiting is not so easy. Recruiters need to surf through multiple channels to find the right candidates for their positions.
AI-based solutions easily integrate with various job boards and social media sites for effective candidate tracking. Furthermore, AI also helps to manage applications sourced from campus recruitment, walk-in applications, events, and training programs. Hence, AI helps recruiters to identify and manage quality talents among the bulk of applications efficiently using automation.
Mass Applicant Screening Automation
Recruiters spend about 40% of their time just sifting through resumes. AI helps a mass recruiter to automate this entire process. Using text analysis and Machine Learning algorithms, AI solutions analyze keywords to highlight and sort candidates based on their knowledge, skills, and experience. Furthermore, AI solutions rank candidates based on the above criteria such that recruiters can easily sort through the right candidates and elevate them to the next round.
Moreover, AI-based bulk recruitment software also provides gamification assessment options. This facility helps recruiters to easily test candidates’ skillsets and abilities for data-driven decision-making when it comes to screening the right candidates.
Interview Scheduling Automation
Interview scheduling is a time-consuming process. Recruiters run back and forth between applicants and senior management executives to select the best time for interview scheduling. AI automates the entire interview scheduling process for mass hiring.
Once recruiters set up an interview window, candidates can automatically schedule an interview as per their convenience (in the case of one-way interviews) or as per recruiter availability (in the case of two-way interviews). Moreover, candidates can opt for reminders for upcoming notifications or reschedule an interview if they missed the former. Hence, AI optimizes the recruitment velocity and provides candidates with advanced experience.
Asynchronous Interview
Not only so, but AI has also automated the interview processes, enabling recruiters to select top candidates with absolute accuracy. Using AI software, candidates appear for an interview without the presence of an interviewer.
Candidates need to record their responses in video formats to the predetermined questionnaire, which recruiters can add in text, audio, and video formats. Furthermore, candidates can preview their answers and re-record their responses if necessary. The responses are automatically stored in the cloud database for further review.
Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Sentiment Analysis and Computer Vision technology, these solutions analyze candidate responses thoroughly. Candidates’ performances are judged based on their word choice, pitch, pace, iris movement, hand gestures, and body language.
Furthermore, the software generates an accurate report and sorts candidates accordingly. Recruiters can manually check their performance and share these reports to other members of the organization and even candidates as feedback. This enhances the recruitment speed, adds enhancement to candidate experience, and enables recruiters to select better candidates.
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But how trustworthy is AI and which companies have been using AI in bulk recruitment presently? The names in the following section will probably open your eyes that AI for mass recruitment is in high demand.
Which companies have opted for AI-based High Volume Recruiting?
About 88% of organizations across the globe have started using AI in some major sections of their HR process. Among these, some of the big shots that have been using AI for bulk hiring include:
Unilever
Unilever uses AI-based solutions for mass hiring and has experienced an optimized hiring process. The MNC has managed to save £1 million annually along with a 16% hike in hiring diversity and a 90% decrease in hiring time.
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation famously known as IBM is one of the most renowned American Information Technology companies to use AI in their bulk hiring process. The company has been getting its hands on top talents using game-based assessments, aptitude analytics, and personality assessments.
Walmart
Being the world’s largest retail corporation, Walmart hires thousands of candidates to meet its rising workload. AI-based bulk hiring solutions have helped Walmart to manage mass candidates, reduce additional expenditure and thereby, accelerate the mass hiring process.
Shell
The British-Dutch oil and gas MNC, Shell uses AI-based mass hire solutions to hire candidates enmass. The company has used the Turnkey Solution C-factor by The Talent Games to assess talents in multiple areas. Analyzing cognitive capabilities, aptitude, and behavioral skills, Shell has been getting experienced and top talents to meet their organizational requirements.
Grameenphone
A leading Bangladesh-based telecommunications provider, Grameenphone has leveraged AI-based gamification assessments to optimize their bulk hiring process. This not only has helped them to find talents who are qualified but also those who share the company’s mission and vision. Hence, Grameenphone has added a touch of fun to elevate their bulk recruitment and candidate experience.
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Conclusion
Traditional recruitment models in today’s changing world need constant modification to keep up with modern trends. Plus recruiters constantly need to hassle to manage candidates and data accurately. Forbes says, the expenditure behind one recruitment costs around 150% of an employee’s salary. Hence, AI has extended its helping hand to keep things in check.
There is no doubt that AI provides endless possibilities when it comes to recruitment and Human Resource Management. Forbes says that AI reduces recruitment time, enhances quality hires, reduces bias, and saves much hiring costs. Furthermore, AI also helps to detect personality traits including Dark Triad, DISC, and MBTI using sentiment analysis. Hence, AI has removed the hassle from recruitment processes to provide an easy passage to hire the best and accurate talents enmass.
Why is Birbal the Effective Tool for Bulk Hiring?
Birbal has been widely used by some of the renowned names of different sectors across the globe. Since the single data and AI-enabled platform allow recruiters to automate entire Human Resource Management processes for enhanced internal as well as external stakeholder and operation management.
Birbal uses text analysis, NLP, face and gesture recognition, sentiment analysis, Computer Vision, and Data Analytics models to bring out the most intricate details about candidates in the forefront. Hence, Birbal enables you to make data-driven decisions and automate major workloads for enhanced and efficient bulk hiring. Get a free trial today and enter the world of automation and innovation!
