5 Ways to Successfully Manage a Hiring Surge

Hiring surges. They’re a recruitment team’s worst nightmare. But they don’t have to be.

A hiring surge is when a business experiences a sharp increase in hiring activity. This increase could arise from seasonal demand, rapid business growth, a product or service launch, or a one-time event like an organizational restructure. 

When managing a hiring surge, recruiters face challenges like an increased time to fill and maintaining candidate quality while meeting volume demands. With the right strategies and tools, recruiters can maintain quality of hire and meet volume goals without succumbing to burnout. 

Plan Ahead for Scalable Recruitment

The best way to stay ahead of a hiring surge is to be proactive instead of reactive. Establishing scalable recruitment processes before a surge hits will help mitigate obstacles presented by hiring surges, like increased time to fill and candidate quality assurance. 

Here are a few reasons why scalable recruitment is a key element when successfully managing a hiring surge:

Strong Branding: Companies that engage with candidates continuously through career events, social media, and other touchpoints create a more positive image and grow interest during hiring periods.

Cost Reduction: When companies proactively invest in their talent acquisition process, they avoid the chaos of last-minute hiring. Last-minute hiring often involves expensive advertising or the inability to vet candidates properly, which can slow down business operations and impact long-term growth.

Talent Pool Diversity: With a continuous recruitment effort in place, companies can spend the time required to build a diverse talent pool that fosters innovation, addresses market challenges, and improves performance with fresh perspectives.

Some best practices to keep in mind when building a scalable recruitment process are:

• Ensure your hiring process is flexible enough to scale up or down when needed.
• Create standardized workflows to ensure consistency and efficiency when hiring in bulk.
• Leverage past data to forecast demand and prepare resources accordingly.

Leverage AI and Automation for High-Volume Efficiency

More often than not, hiring surges can lead to too-quick decision-making that results in an unfit hire or an overburdened recruiting team. With a proactive recruitment process that leverages innovative tools and services, companies can better ensure that recruiters can carefully vet new hires without exceeding their work capacity.

The rise of AI has every industry wondering how they can optimize their operations. Companies can adopt AI recruiting tools and services to support recruiting efforts during hiring surges by leveraging AI and automation to accelerate candidate sourcing, screening, and ranking. 

Automating tasks allows your team to focus on providing a positive interview and recruiting experience through consistent communication, engaging interviews, and personalized feedback.

How AI Supports Recruiting Efforts in the Real-World

An AI-powered recruiting service like Arya can automate 90% of sourcing and recruiting efforts. By taking over tedious, time-consuming tasks, AI allows your hiring teams to focus on tasks that only humans can do. 

For example, an industry-leading recruiting agency came to Arya with a problem. The average time required for sourcing and shortlisting candidates in this company-specific industry is one to four weeks. The staffing agency needed to broaden its talent pool to quickly find top talent to meet its client’s needs and increase the bottom line.

With Arya, the staffing agency received a valuable talent pool of over 850 million candidate profiles spanning over 150 industries. With Arya’s auto-search feature, the staffing agency generated a list of high-quality talent in less than five minutes, saving its recruiters up to 12 hours in sourcing time.

Build and Maintain a Talent Pipeline

Adequately preparing for a hiring surge allows recruiters to connect with high-quality talent, even when they’re not ready for a career change. With time saved through automation, recruiters can nurture these relationships over time and keep quality candidates in their pipeline for future growth.

In addition to strengthening candidate quality, a talent pipeline also reduces time-to-fill by having pre-vetted candidates ready for engagement, saving time and reducing the risk of employee burnout.

How to Build a Talent Pipeline

Here are some essential methods for building a talent pipeline.

Continuously Engage Candidates: When building a high-quality talent pipeline, engage passive candidates year-round (even when not hiring actively). As mentioned above, engaging passive clients who may not be looking for a career change allows companies to build relationships and improve brand perception. 

When a hiring surge occurs, the passive clients already know and trust your brand. This trust could ultimately convince them to make a role switch.

Leverage AI-Driven Talent Curation Tools: The power of AI can transform how companies curate talent. With Arya’s Targeted Candidate Sourcing capability, companies can increase candidate quality by 70% by predicting the likelihood of a candidate’s success in a role. 

Maintain Contact with Former Employees and Contract Workers: Consider maintaining contact with former or temporary employees. As these employees have already worked with your company, your recruiting team accurately understands how their skills and experience would benefit the company in the future. 

How a Leading Healthcare Provider Elevated its Talent Acquisition Strategy with AI 

When a nationally recognized healthcare provider with over 10,000 employees needed to level up its recruiting process, it turned to Arya for help. With Arya’s Applicants On Demand service, the healthcare provider saw a 42% increase in month-over-month applicant growth. With its growth in valuable candidates, the healthcare provider expanded its services from one to 10 states in just ten months. 

Partner with Outsourced Solutions for Overflow

Sometimes, the effort required to manage a hiring surge is just too much to take on at once. Knowing when to outsource or augment your hiring efforts will help alleviate the pressure on your recruiting teams and ensure you find quality candidates for your hard-to-fill roles.

The most common occasions when companies should consider external help are during seasonal hiring peaks or when your recruiting teams are overwhelmed with hiring needs. 

Arya’s Applicants On Demand service delivers qualified talent across various industries to help your recruiting team tackle overflow or high-priority hires without the threat of burnout. With Arya doing the heavy lifting of sourcing, qualifying, and engaging candidates, your team can save 25 to 30 hours of recruiting work monthly. 

Use Data to Inform and Optimize Your Hiring Strategies

With a data-driven recruiting practice in place, recruiting teams can use predictive analytics to forecast hiring surges and refine talent search efforts. Recruiting teams should track metrics like labor market trends, candidate quality, and culture fit when using predictive analytics. 

Understanding labor market trends will help recruiting teams accurately predict and prepare for upcoming hiring needs. Tracking candidate quality and culture fit will help optimize recruitment efforts, ensuring that only the best-fit prospects make it to the interview stage. 

Using data-driven methods for hiring efforts also enables recruiting teams to make real-time adjustments during the hiring process to match demand to talent supply as accurately as possible. With knowledge of market trends, candidate quality, and culture fit, recruiting teams can suggest a candidate for a role that may not seem like a strong fit at first glance but will ultimately better support the role’s unique needs.

Conquer Hiring Surges with Proactive Strategies

Managing a hiring surge doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Implementing scalable recruitment processes and leveraging technology like AI can help companies maintain high candidate quality and reduce time-to-fill, even during periods of rapid hiring. 

With a strong talent pipeline, outsourcing recruitment efforts during peak times, and leveraging data-driven recruitment strategies, recruiters can revolutionize their day-to-day processes to ensure success.

Leoforce is here to help you manage your next hiring surge with flexible solutions built for recruiting teams of all sizes. Arya Boost is your AI-enhanced recruiting solution that leverages the power of AI to source high quality candidates within hours of a job opening. Applicants on Demand is a white glove recruiting service that delivers you a list of qualified, engaged, and pre-vetted applicants in a true pay-for-performance model. Contact us today to get started.