Think of how a nation goes to war. They analyze their battle tactic plan based on information they know about their infantry’s strengths and the opposing nation’s weaknesses. Different battle approaches are needed depending on the scope of an upcoming battle.
This analogy is almost like when a company decides whether to choose high-volume hiring vs. traditional hiring when attempting to fill positions.
What is the Difference Between High-Volume Hiring and Traditional Recruitment?
Let’s first discuss the main differences between these hiring approaches. High-volume recruitment is best for companies that must onboard multiple individuals simultaneously to fill many open positions. This could be to satisfy a company expansion to a new location, fulfill seasonal demand, or handle a severe internal staffing shortage. Engaging in this hiring approach is especially essential for industries with higher turnover rates or seasonal peaks in customer demand such as retail, hospitality, manufacturing, and logistics.
Traditional hiring is the way all companies are usually more comfortable with engaging in. This process is more detailed and time-consuming, but it does result in quality hires like a streamlined high-volume hiring campaign can yield. The traditional method involves hiring one or a few individuals into the company at once rather than 10 or more like in a high-volume recruitment strategy.
Best Hiring Approach for Businesses
Deciding the best approach for hiring in business involves analyzing the company’s current staffing needs. Did one individual resign their position and there is only one open requisition? Traditional hiring would work best for recruitment personnel to analyze the incoming applications to select the highest-quality candidate possible.
Maybe your company is opening a new location or needs to hire for the upcoming holiday season to fulfill higher customer demand in shopping for Black Friday and Christmas. Hence, mass hiring solutions would be the better approach if your business has these staffing needs.
Did you know that Aptitude Research found that about 65% of companies nationwide engage in high-volume hiring efforts? This statistic showcases the need for a flexible and scalable hiring process for many businesses throughout the nation. Many businesses are now relying on changing up their needs between high-volume hiring vs. traditional hiring to maintain flexibility in an ever-changing workforce.
Benefits of High-Volume Hiring
High-volume recruitment has distinct advantages. While you can hire multiple individuals in a streamlined way without sacrificing candidate quality, there are many other benefits to this method as you advance your workforce and enhance operational efficiency.
Speed and Efficiency
A high-volume hiring approach essentially reduces your time-to-hire the more your company engages in these types of recruitment campaigns.
Scalability
Despite how quickly high-volume hiring takes place, it can be scaled for effectiveness. The AI driven solutions that screens applications and analyzes resumes with your chosen keywords helps to handpick quality candidates through a large volume of applications for quicker results when moving through recruitment. Scalability is essential in high-volume recruitment because it helps with the speed and efficiency of the process.
Cost-Effectiveness
When conducting a high-volume hiring campaign, it can become more cost-effective than traditional hiring. Rather than posting a sponsored open requisition that may stay on a job board for 30 to 60 days, you can utilize other measures to attract candidates within about 20 to 30 days or less depending on your tactics. For example, you can host an open house or have your company join a local job fair event to where you spent less on recruitment supplies and transportation and contrast to that sponsored job board sitting online for upwards of a couple of months.
Data-Driven Decisions
Hiring multiple candidates at once requires data-driven decisions. Utilizing AI to analyze all the recruitment data helps to reduce bias in the hiring process. Analyzing key performance indicators such as time-to-hire, time-to-fill, candidate quality, and retention rates can refine how well current recruitment procedures occur and give recruitment personnel insights on how to improve strategies going forward.
For example, you can examine candidate behaviors and how they interact with the application process by evaluating the candidate drop-off rate. A higher candidate drop-off rate signifies candidate disengagement during the application process. Hence, recruitment and HR can work together to smooth out the bottlenecks during hiring to enhance candidate engagement.
The Advantages of Traditional Recruitment
Despite high-volume recruitment hiring many individuals at once utilizing a scalable solution, there are also advantages to opting for traditional recruitment. Let’s conduct a comparison and contrast of high-volume hiring vs. traditional hiring by examining the advantages of traditional recruitment methods.
Higher Quality of Hire
The main concern with high-volume hiring strategies are that sometimes there are bad hires or lower candidate quality. Traditional recruitment methods usually yield higher quality of new hires because of the extra time it takes to screen and interview various candidates for the position.
Reduced Turnover
Onboarding many hires for the sake of having staff could lead to lower candidate quality or individuals who may not be a true technical or cultural fit. Taking the traditional hiring approach can reduce turnover with the extra time taken to get to know each candidate before making a final hiring decision. Hence, multiple interview stages are more mainstream and traditional recruitment than in mass hiring campaigns because speed of hiring is not as much of a priority.
Greater Employee Engagement
Traditional hiring methods can enhance employee engagement. The approach allows for a more curated candidate experience to where each new employee is given the attention needed from HR and their co-workers to succeed during onboarding. Receiving the assistance and training necessary has new employees integrate into their new roles we’ll make them feel more part of the bigger picture with joining the company.
Enhanced Brand Image
Improving the employer brand is vital for success in any hiring campaign whether traditional or high-volume. However, traditional recruitment methods usually yield a better employer brand image. This approach allows for more personalized communication between candidates and their recruiters so that there’s a deeper connection and recruiters communicating to the candidates about the company culture and values.
Challenges in High-Volume Hiring vs. Traditional Hiring
Evaluating the challenges behind each hiring process is another way to decide which approach is best for your company.
High-volume hiring can lead to quality concerns. Because of the hastened procedures, companies may become concerned as to whether they hired the right candidates or not for their roles.
How to Decide the Best Hiring Approach
Now that you know more about the differences between high-volume hiring vs. traditional hiring, let’s learn more about how to decide the best hiring approach for your company.
Workforce Size and Turnover
Evaluate the current state of your workforce size. Is the workforce size able to meet current customer demand? If not, it may be time for a high-volume recruitment strategy to onboard enough staff to handle spikes in demand. Of course, the approach that you use would depend on how much staff you need at once. If you only need a few hires, a traditional recruitment method may work best. If you need 10 or more hires, this may require a more high-volume approach.
Notating current turnover rates can also unveil the best hiring approach for your company. Higher turnover could lead to more concerning internal staffing shortages. Hence, a continuous high-volume recruitment strategy would be best in this situation. Companies with lower turnover rates can be successful with traditional recruitment methods.
Role Complexity
Royal complexity is an important variable to consider when choosing which recruitment method will work best for your business. More complex roles should be fulfilled with a traditional recruitment method as you can take more time to ensure higher candidate quality. In contrast, a high-volume hiring strategy would be best for fulfilling positions that require minimal training. For example, hiring for entry-level positions such as cashiers and retail or Food service workers in hospitality.
