High-volume recruitment. Bulk recruitment. Mass hiring. Whatever you call it, most global organisations have at some stage needed to sign up a large number of new employees in a short window of time.
It’s a long-established practice, but it’s increasingly challenging when demand for top talent regularly outweighs supply. Whether your company is opening a new location or needs more hands on deck at peak times, you must use every tool at your disposal to engage your target market and fill your vacancies.
While technologies such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and video interviewing platforms are key to streamlining this process, you must reach and connect with candidates first – and few things help you do this more than a strong employer brand.
Here, we’ll explain how well-managed recruitment branding strategies enhance your hiring efforts, and how you can activate your employer brand to attract and retain potential candidates.
What is high-volume recruitment?
High-volume recruitment is when an organisation looks to hire a significant number of candidates in a short space of time.
Commonly used in retail, hospitality, customer service and practically any industry with fluctuating workforce demands, this strategy is deployed in many circumstances, like when:
- Seasonal demand for products or services peaks, such as during Christmas
- A business rapidly expands or opens new locations
- Employee turnover reached a high point
- An organisation offers a lot of entry-level positions, such as call centre operators
- Contract workers are replaced
Studies have shown that approximately 65% of businesses worldwide have high-volume recruiting needs, while around 73% of large organisations depend on this approach.
Why is a strong employer brand important for your recruitment efforts?
Your employer brand is your shopfront to potential candidates. It’s the values, perks, incentives and motivators that resonate with your target audience, stretching from the first job ad a prospect sees, right through to your day-to-day company culture.
In a highly competitive talent landscape, your employer brand is your chance to stand out from your competitors and secure exceptional recruits. It’s your brand’s identity for your workforce, and is crucial for bringing the right people on board.
How does employer branding differ between high-volume recruitment and traditional hiring?
It’s easy to overlook the importance of a solid employer brand for high-volume recruitment. For entry-level or temporary roles, candidates aren’t going to care about how clean or well-managed your employer branding looks, right?
Wrong. Over 75% of job seekers research an employer’s brand before applying for a role, while 69% of candidates say they would reject job offers from companies with a bad employer brand. When you’re trying to fill roles fast, you can’t afford this degree of rejection.
In many ways, a strong employer brand is more vital in high-volume campaigns than in typical hiring cycles. Because you’re advertising on many job boards and platforms at once, a negative reputation or lack of clarity can cause candidates to question why you have so many openings.
This uncertainty may deter high-calibre candidates from applying, causing your campaigns to suffer and drag out longer.
What are the key elements of a strong employer brand for high-volume recruitment?
Employer branding in recruitment at any level requires multiple key elements to achieve consistent success:
- A clear and compelling Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
- Consistent, engaging content across all channels
- Personalised experiences for candidates, from pre-application to the onboarding process
- A well-constructed careers page outlining your company mission and values
- Carefully monitored and managed listings on employer review sites like Glassdoor
- Employee advocates who promote your organisation within their own networks
A successful employer brand strategy is layered and consistent at every touch point – and this is just as critical for mass hires as it is for individual roles.
4 ways your employer brand helps with mass hiring
High-volume recruitment is fraught with challenges. Immediately it conjures up ideas of mass generic emails, automated responses and candidates left in limbo.
An impressive employer brand can help overcome many challenges associated with volume hiring, ensuring each potential employee feels special even when reaching out to thousands at a time.
1. Eliminate ill-fitting candidates
The biggest headache for large-scale recruitment is sorting applications to find suitable candidates. You can easily waste hours on this process, pushing your campaigns back with every ill-suited application.
With a clear, coherent and ever-present employer brand, candidates can immediately see your company values, benefits and culture, and visualise if they “fit” in your organisation. This helps reduce the number of inappropriate entries, resulting in higher-quality applications.
2. Reduce time and cost to hire
With so many roles needing to be filled, time is of the essence in high-volume recruitment marketing. A good employer brand is estimated to slash the time and cost of hiring in half, which results in substantial savings when you’re trying to fill dozens of spaces at once.
3. Improve employee retention
Focusing solely on filling positions quickly can compromise the long-term retention of your candidates. If this leads to a rushed interview and onboarding process, it becomes difficult to hold onto new hires, taking you back to square one.
Research shows that strong employer branding reduces staff turnover rates by 28%. This helps you retain top talent for longer, so you don’t lose employees to your competitors and need to rely on high-volume campaigns regularly.
4. Grow your collection of advocates
Finally, it’s no great secret that potential candidates trust the word of employees more than employers – particularly if they’re already sceptical about the number of openings available.
Encouraging your existing employees to reinforce the reasons to work for your company on social media, employer review sites and word of mouth helps silence any doubt from your prospects.
Activating your employer brand for volume recruitment campaigns
Now you understand the difference an excellent employer brand makes for high-volume recruitment, how can you best “activate” it to reap the rewards?
Our employer brand solutions have empowered many world-renowned brands to navigate these turbulent times with ease and control, so here are our 6 top tips to help you achieve the same:
1. Understand your roles and ideal candidate personas
Knowing your target audience is even more pressing for high-volume recruitment than conventional hiring – you don’t want to be inundated with hundreds of irrelevant resumes for each role.
Take time to distinguish what skills, experience and characteristics the ideal person would possess for every position you have available. This will ensure your job adverts are tailored to these expectations, so you receive more appropriate job applicants.
Plus, understanding what makes your candidates tick will help you adapt your recruitment branding to the values most meaningful to them – do they prefer flexible hours, remote working or development opportunities?
2. Centralise your recruitment branding strategy
A disparate employer brand strategy creates inconsistency, which damages both your reputation and ability to hire in pressing times.
Bringing every element of your employer brand identity – guidelines, EVP, tone of voice, employee handbooks and more – under one dedicated brand hub will help ensure your materials are aligned, whether you’re reaching out about one position or dozens.
3. Harness tools to create personalised content
With mass hiring campaigns, it’s all too easy to send the same formulaic emails, adverts and job descriptions to each audience. But for the best results, it’s important to speak to candidates on a personal level – their wants, their language, their culture.
Particularly if you’re hiring for positions in a different country, it’s vital to translate your employer branding for local markets. With the right brand management platform, localising recruitment campaign collateral for specific audiences can be done in minutes, enabling you to tailor messages without major losses of time or resources.
Remember: think global, but act local.
4. Prioritise your candidate experiences
Employer branding doesn’t end with the application process. So many organisations have lost potential hires at the final hurdle due to a negative or frustrating candidate experience. You must carry your branding and company culture through this process as well.
Consider:
- What do candidates first see at an interview or video call?
- How can we streamline and uncomplicate this process?
- What materials can we provide prospects to help them understand our work culture?
- Who is best placed to support and guide new hires for a particular role?
Getting this important stage right does more than secure top talent – it can also greatly benefit your employee retention rates.
5. Stay consistent across all channels
Consistency is key to any recruitment campaign, but it’s especially challenging when advertising for many jobs concurrently on multiple platforms. Any break in brand consistency can lessen your appeal to candidates, and present your company as low-grade and disjointed.
To lock down your employer brand identity, invest in intelligent, on-brand design templates. This framework will ensure those responsible for creating your recruitment materials never deviate from your core branding, while offering enough freedom for their creativity to shine.
Furthermore, consider implementing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution to support these templates. This comprehensive online library of assets can make sure your teams worldwide have instant access to the right content for their campaigns, keeping your local recruitment efforts in lockstep with your global identity.
6. Plan your campaigns with precision
Coordinating high-volume recruitment campaigns can be a real struggle without a centralised, birds-eye view of all activity – particularly when multiple locations or countries are involved in this drive.
Equipping your teams with proven campaign execution tools helps them organise activities more effectively. This minimises waste and provides much-needed stability during substantial times of change and upheaval within your organisation.
How can we adapt our employer branding strategies in periods of high-volume recruitment?
During high-volume recruitment, there are many ways you can adapt your employer branding to make a meaningful positive impact:
- Emphasise your employer values and unique selling points to immediately capture the attention of applicants
- Leverage technology for automated screening and personalised communication to improve the speed and quality of your recruitment processes
- Harness a wider range of recruitment channels, such as social media and job boards, to maximise visibility
- Offer referral incentives to your existing employees to encourage them to play an active role in your campaigns
- Showcase your company culture through testimonials and success stories to give candidates a tangible sense of life in your organisation
Master your employer brand, maximise your recruitment efforts
Many of the biggest headaches attached to high-volume recruitment can be reduced or eliminated altogether with a healthy, consistent employer brand. We hope this article has helped you recognise this, and advised on how you can harness it to engage candidates on a mass scale.
One final piece of advice – continue to review and refine the performance of your recruitment campaigns. Candidates’ priorities and attitudes constantly evolve, and change from location to location. Investing in real-time campaign data and analytics keeps you on top of these trends, and illustrates what assets and activities are reaping results for your organisation.
Combined with further talent acquisition software, you can build an employer brand that connects with audiences globally and locally. Meaning that whenever there’s an urgent need to bring people on board, your organisation is at the front of the queue.
