Your business is doing great and growing rapidly.

Due to the recent increase in sales, it’s time to open a new branch in your company to keep up the pace and develop further. 

As a result, you may need to hire a large number of people FAST. 

However, high-volume hiring might create headaches for your recruitment managers. 

After all, they need to find, interview, and onboard many candidates in a short time without sacrificing the quality of hire you’re looking for. 

To get this right, dive into this article to discover: 

• What mass hiring is
• Five essential steps in bulk hiring
• Best practices to ensure a successful mass hiring process

Table of Contents

What Is Mass Hiring?

5 Essential Steps in Mass Hiring

Mass Hiring Best Practices

What Is Mass Hiring?

Mass hiring is a strategy that allows companies to recruit and employ many people in a short time frame. 

It usually happens when a company develops beyond its current structure and might quickly need many new hires at the same time. 

While it’s a process constrained by time, the number of people you hire is unique to each company. 

For instance, a small business with ten employees that usually hires one new person a year might recruit five people in a single month and consider it mass hiring. 

There are three primary benefits of mass-volume hiring practices, and these are: 

• Saving costs: Due to mass recruiting, companies drastically reduce expenses, such as wasteful advertising, employee costs, and administrative expenditures.
• Optimizing recruiting processes: A mass hiring event makes companies want to have access to HR tools that address their recruiting pain points, so they automate pre-screening or interview schedules. This way, recruiters save time and money and improve their digital recruitment efforts. 
• Building your employer brand: Your company’s reputation is paramount to employee engagement and efforts to attract new talent, often common HR challenges. Job seekers usually research a company before sending their job applications, so having positive reviews will greatly influence their decision. 

But is mass hiring THAT different from traditional hiring? 

Mass hiring vs. Traditional hiring

Traditional hiring focuses on filling just one or a few vacancies at a time over a more extended period, while mass hiring involves adding a large volume of employees in a short time span. 

Furthermore, you have to be mindful when creating a mass recruitment process because you need to outline a good plan, from candidate screening to beyond the onboarding process. 

Without careful consideration, a mass hiring plan can have two potential risks:

• A poor candidate experience
• A drop in quality of hire

In these cases, your hiring team might need HR tech to quickly find suitable candidates and avoid the challenges arising from this fast-paced approach to high-volume hiring. 

So what makes a mass hiring event a good recruitment strategy? 

Follow us to the next section to discover the five essential steps in creating a successful mass hiring process. 

5 Essential Steps in Mass Hiring

As specified above, mass hiring requires careful planning, from the interview process to retaining potential candidates. 

Due to its fast-pace, consider these steps in your next mass hiring strategy. 

1. Assess whether mass hiring is what you really need

Before you begin bombarding people’s inboxes with mass emails or contacting them on professional social media channels, such as LinkedIn, consider whether you need mass hiring or whether a simple promotion will do. 

Sounds confusing? 

Let’s say you need to scale your workforce to accommodate the changes of your rapid growth. In this case, you might need to mass-hire people and fill the vacant roles quickly. 

However, consider hiring from within first. 

Promoting people you’ve invested in and who are already familiar with your company is a more efficient strategy than consuming time, money, and resources in mass hiring. 

Besides, developing current employees creates a happier workforce. 

To figure out precisely what you’re looking for, think about: 

• What roles you need to fill
• Their responsibilities
• Who they’ll be answering to

Doing this ensures you understand your needs and helps you give mass hiring the attention it deserves. 

2. Know exactly what you’re looking for

Mass hiring allows you to fill positions and grow your company quickly, but it only gives you a little time to find the right candidates. 

As a result, it might be difficult to assess the skills of your applicants and ensure they’re the right fit for the job.

Yet you still have to do it. 

So, to fulfill your staffing needs with team members that bring value to your company and satisfy the job requirements, you need to establish key selection criteria, such as:

• Skills
• Attributes
• Knowledge
• Qualifications

Devising a list of day-to-day activities for each job will make the screening process more manageable. 

For example, let’s look at the SaaS Content Writer position. Try to think of top qualities and abilities that make a great writer, such as attention to detail or familiarity with SaaS services. 

Make sure to include other personal qualities in the job description as well, such as the ability to work in a team. 

3. Set up the right infrastructure

After figuring out your goals, you must ensure your infrastructure can support hiring so many people.

For example, if you’re looking for in-person employees, you might need to work on your budget to support their development and provide them with the necessary equipment. 

On the other hand, you should also think about less tangible things, such as the ability to retain employees after joining your company.

For instance, an essential part of hiring is ensuring you have positive onboarding and orientation experiences. You can elevate this process by using the following: 

• Informative onboarding videos
• Thoughtful new hire welcome kits 
• Warming welcome letters 

Failing to make a good first impression during this critical stage in the employee lifecycle will result in lousy candidate experiences and wasted time, money, and potential. 

Author’s Tip: Here are some thoughtful ways to welcome new employees into your organization. 

4. Map out a plan

Mass hiring requires a solid plan with tangible goals. 

Imagine this: you need to hire 20 programmers in two months. Setting a goal will ensure you determine the number of candidates you need at each stage to hit your objective. 

So, after identifying your goals, your recruiting team can create a strategy with milestones they need to hit at each step. 

For example, you can break the entire process down into before, during, and after mass hiring; that will save you a lot of time and ensure you complete all the essential steps.

Author’s Tip: Everyone involved should clearly know the goals and expectations they need to accomplish. 

5. Don’t be afraid to pivot when necessary

Hiring at speed still needs that personal touch that every traditional hiring process gets, and it shouldn’t feel like you’re “speed dating” through multiple candidates. 

It might make them feel you don’t have time to get to know them, which would give them the wrong impression that you’re also not spending enough time with your employees. 

While it’s a time-constrained process, the quality of hire is still necessary, and shifting your perception plays a massive role in establishing your relationship with the employee. 

For example, you could ask someone to monitor interviewers during the process and have regular debriefing meetings where you can address any problems that might arise. 

Otherwise, it might look like your company lacks the unity to organize a successful mass hiring effort. 

***

So, now you know the secrets of creating excellent mass hiring plans.

Let’s go further and discover the bulk hiring best practices that’ll elevate your process to new heights. 

Mass Hiring Best Practices

Mass hiring is more than an outcome; it’s an experience that attracts top talent and ensures your business grows.

So, to set future hires up for success in your company’s culture, apply these mass hiring best practices. 

Candidate experience should be a priority

Sure, you want to hire as many candidates as possible to fill positions FAST—and resume your business activities to start receiving the desired results.

But you must remember that mass hiring shouldn’t lose the personalized experience job applicants seek. 

During this process, even if all things happen at once, your hiring manager must ensure that they offer the best experience possible and take into account how candidates feel throughout the hiring process. 

It’s a great indicator of how you might treat them once you hire them.

Failing to create a positive experience might set you back because you might employ disengaged people. As a result, falling behind in the job market might hinder your growth and innovation initiatives. 

Strive to remove biases

Be wary of bias in your recruitment process. 

When done at speed and with so many candidates to interview, bias might slink unknowingly into the hiring process, damaging your brand’s reputation. 

Generally, bias is a strong feeling in favor of or against a group of people, often based on unfair judgment—and it has no place in any company. 

There are two types of bias: 

• Conscious bias refers to intentionally biased attitudes that the person is aware of. Most companies have zero-tolerance policies towards racism or homophobia, and most engage in diversity hiring to strengthen their position in the industry. 
• Unconscious bias is biased attitudes and social stereotypes outside the person’s control. It’s harder to eliminate, but being aware of it is one step toward getting rid of it. 

So, during the mass hiring process, you should establish objective criteria, use neutral language, and avoid making assumptions or jokes about the candidates, such as presuming someone’s gender. 

Always plan for retention

Hiring a candidate is only one part of a successful mass hiring process.

The second part is ensuring you retain them in the company, without them seeking alternative employment opportunities elsewhere.

In a nutshell, employee retention is a strategy that will keep your employees happy in their positions, which benefits your organization’s health and success in the long run. 

Here are the benefits of having a high retention rate: 

• Enhanced organizational culture
• Better customer experience
• Improved employee morale

Author’s Tip: Branded merchandise also plays a vital role in your employee retention strategy, as it cost-effectively builds awareness. 

Don’t ignore red flags for the sake of the headcount

Sometimes, HR professionals are under pressure to quickly hire as many candidates as they can, which might lead them to accidentally hire unfit and unproductive people. 

If they’re cutting corners, they might ignore obvious red flags in candidates, such as: 

• Strange body language, such as slacked posture
• Lack of passion for the role or company
• Rudeness, sloppiness, or tardiness
• Complaining and taking no accountability for past mistakes
• Being unprepared and not asking any questions

As a result, hiring the wrong candidates might reflect poorly on the company. 

They’d be disengaged from their work, perform poorly on the job, and could even be up for disciplinary action. 

You can avoid this by clearly defining what you’re looking for and establishing your own red flags tailored to your company. 

Moreover, you can use automated resume screening and skills assessment to see how candidates perform the job before they get the position, and catch any potential lies. 

As a result, you can find the best candidates for the role using specific metrics. 

Level Up Your HR Game

Bulk hiring might look intimidating, but any small effort you make can significantly benefit all parties involved.

Plus, with these tips and tricks at your disposal, you can maintain candidate quality even if you engage in a mass hiring event and streamline the process rapidly and cost-effectively. 

But let’s talk about something else.

By looking inside our HR glossary, you can discover other human resources terms that you might find interesting.