8 High-Volume Hiring Strategies to Inspire Your Team

If you’re like most small businesses today, a high-volume hiring strategy isn’t on the horizon. (At least yet.) Instead, you’re simply focused on engaging applicants to enter your pipeline via your career page and engaging seemingly suitable candidates for open roles on job boards and social media.

• That said, there may be times in which your leadership requests a mass recruitment campaign — one that mandates your talent team identify, engage, and hire a large number of qualified candidates to fill critical positions that will help your company grow as desired.

In these instances, you needs to ensure every element of your recruiting — from the application process to the offer stage — is a well-oiled machine that helps you source a high quantity of prospects, present the “right” job seekers to hiring managers, schedule interviews with that those potential candidates, save time on pipeline management, and — ultimately — hire top talent.

High-volume hiring campaigns to emulate

With that in mind, here are some high-volume hiring strategies from well-known, household-name brands that — while grander in scale than your SMB TA strategy — can help you hire smarter.

1) Learn from Chewy’s benefit-focused ad campaign 

One of the more impactful high-volume hiring campaigns that I’ve seen carried out was in my local city of Reno, Nevada. One of our city’s biggest employers, Chewy, the pet ecommerce company, ran a massive campaign to hire up for their warehouse operations.

• Following employee turnover due to COVID, and an influx of other major retailers like Amazon and Tesla stealing workers, Chewy’s warehouse operations team had been decimated. So, they did a blitz on hiring — mostly carried out through YouTube video ads. 

But, rather than centering their ads around hourly pay, as many companies do, Chewy focused on their progressive benefits, such as their generous paid family policy. This had broad appeal to working parents and expecting mothers, knowing you could get ample time off after a baby was born.

The campaign only ran for a few weeks, but was incredibly effective, with their applications increasing by over 62% during the timeframe during which the ads ran.

John Ross, CEO, Test Prep Insight

2) See how Lego realized its high-volume hiring vision

One of the most far-reaching, successful high-volume hiring campaigns is from Lego, which wanted to hire people that knew its product and so they wanted those who could use Lego blocks in creative ways.

• The company turned to competition to find their workers. They had open calls for contestants, gave them a deadline, and watched their talent showcased in a Lego model. 

Every competition was in front of a live audience and the winner was hired on the spot after the final round. Not only did the company get its unique position filled but it generated a lot of news, many people watching in the audience, and inspired others to try their hand at the new hobby of Lego building.

It turned out to be an awesome branding tool as well as a recruitment strategy.

Baruch Labunski, CEO, Rank Secure

3) Look to IKEA’s “Assemble a Future” campaign

IKEA implemented a unique and strategic recruitment campaign that targeted its customers. The company placed career instructions inside its product boxes, providing guidelines on how customers can “assemble a future” that would land them a career in IKEA.

This move was made to gather many qualified applicants to fill 100 positions for their new Australian megastore. IKEA’s innovative hiring approach reduced the company’s advertising costs and ensured that they get real talents who are avid fans of IKEA products. Over 4,000 interested customers filled out the application form, and 280 of them eventually landed a job in the megastore.

Jake Smith, Owner and Managing Director, Absolute Reg

4) Try Amazon’s “job days” talent acquisition method

Amazon regularly hosts “job days,” events in which they can showcase their available roles and the career path many of their employees take throughout their time with the company.

The ecommerce conglomerate holds informal interviews in tents outside and run guided tours inside their working locations, showing people exactly what happens behind the URL. In 2017, one job day event saw 200K-plus applicants, proving that those tried-and-true recruitment strategies can work in modern times.

James Diel, CEO, Textel

5) Take a look at Google’s Equation Billboard

What’s more high volume than a billboard? Google’s 2004 billboard campaign was a massive success for the brand, which banked on using a difficult mathematical equation to draw candidates with a unique problem-solving skillset directly to them.

• The posted problem’s solution led candidates to a recruitment website URL, where the company explained that the candidate’s skills were exactly what they wanted in a hire.

While not everyone, and in fact, most of us can’t solve high-level math equations, Google advertised to a massive pool of candidates who filtered themselves into only the most qualified and perfect fit for the job.

John Li, Co-Founder and CTO, Fig Loans

6) Use McDonald’s Idea for “Snaplications”

McDonald’s Australia wanted to hire a large volume of young people to fill the many vacant entry-level positions they had across the country. However, it was failing to attract the required number of applicants. McDonald’s realized that many potential applicants would not have prior work experience, so a traditional resume was irrelevant.

• Instead, the popular chain restaurant wanted a process which had a low barrier to entry and invited applicants to sell themselves on their personality alone.

This led to the creation of Snaplications, an instant job application that could be made through the Snapchat app in 10 seconds. The campaign was a huge success, garnering 3,000 Snaplications in the first 24 hours, four times higher than the number gathered by traditional methods in one week.

The success of the campaign made it a permanent recruitment tool in Australia. It has since been adopted in the U.S. where it was used in a national campaign reaching over 100 million people.

Dean Kaplan, CEO, The Kaplan Group

7) Get insights into Aerowing’s Tinder ads campaign 

Apparently, many of us that are looking for love are also hunting for a new job. The airline Aerowing took advantage of Tinder’s massive fanbase, using Tinder Ads to ask candidates to “swipe right” if they were interested in learning more about job opportunities with the brand.

Since Tinder’s user base is so broad, the company was able to reach plenty of interested recruits, increasing the traffic to their careers portal by 40% and giving them a much deeper talent pool to tap into during their hiring process.

Anthony Martin, CEO and Founder, Choice Mutual

8) Get inspiration from Fiverr’s video parody

Fiverr launched a high-volume recruitment campaign by releasing a parody video of how recruitment videos all look the same back in 2016. As a freelance services marketplace for freelancers to promote their services and market their brands, this campaign encouraged plenty of entrepreneurs to list their services on the site.

The video showed self-awareness, sarcasm, and comedy, while effectively highlighting the company’s culture of approaching projects with an entrepreneurial mindset. The site has now over three million services listed.

Nunzio Ross, Owner and Head Director, Majesty Coffee

Whether you have high-volume hiring needs or only want to add a couple new staff members each month, JazzHR can help. Talk to us to learn all about our applicant tracking system for SMBs.