Why Do These Calculations Matter?
For any fast-growing organization, the quality and efficiency of your recruiting are some of the most important things to get right. You have to find the perfect balance between speed of hire and making sure that you’re getting the right people. But you can’t find this sweet spot if you don’t see the bigger picture when you start.
Let’s look at an example.
Imagine a company that is projecting that it will quadruple in size in the coming year. This brings with it a huge drive for new hires across multiple locations – all designed to manage and sustain the increased demand that the company is trying to service. The executives are stressed about this, but they build the job specs, prepare the offers, and go out in search of these people.
Recruiting at high volumes is a completely different game to when it’s done on a smaller scale. For every new hire, you require a large funnel upstream that will eventually yield the right person for that particular role. This funnel requires dedicated resources, both in time and money, to build, manage, and execute. Then, when you’re trying to do this for a large number of positions at once, the complexity multiplies.
All of a sudden, the company is facing bottlenecks in terms of personnel, timing, and other unexpected obstacles that get in the way of the hiring. This slows down the process, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to lose that speed advantage you were trying to leverage. Or, you might end up hiring sub-optimally because you’re rushing to move things along. High-volume recruiting is not something to take lightly.
This calculator is designed to give you a realistic picture of what it’s going to take to successfully complete your high-volume recruiting plan so that you can plan accordingly and carve out the resources required to achieve your objectives.
Let’s look at each piece of the calculator in turn.
Understanding the Calculator
Let’s start at the top of the funnel and work our way down as we go:
Candidate Awareness
Right at the top of the funnel, you’re looking to maximize the number of views and scale of awareness that you receive for every open position. In most cases, you’ll be utilizing email campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns, job postings, and social media channels to alert potential prospects about the opportunities that you have available. You might even be doing some targeted outreach through cold calling and other such methods. Regardless of how you do it, this piece tells you how many impressions you need to have at the top of the funnel in order to get enough awareness to fulfill your hiring criteria further down.
Candidate Engagement
This refers to candidates who respond to your outreach strategies and choose to engage with you. This could involve asking for more information, sending through a resume, or filling in your online application. As you’ll see, this represents a smaller percentage of your candidate awareness figure, but it will give you a sense of how many people you should expect to engage with based on your final outcome.
Candidates Selected for Evaluation Process
Now we get to the first round of screening. Here, you’ll work through all the candidates who engaged with you and pre-screen them for key criteria. You’ll triage those who don’t fit the bill and move the ones that do onto an assessment or behavioral-based interview. This number shows the volume of candidates that will need to be evaluated at this stage.
Candidates Presented to Hiring Team
From here, all evaluated candidates who pass the pre-screening will be presented to your hiring team properly. This will typically include a summary, resume, employment history, and any notes that have been taken so far along the way. These will then be whittled down to a shortlist that is going to have interviews with the hiring team itself.
Hiring Team Interviews
This level is the number of interviews that you need to have at this stage of the process. The higher this number is, the more challenging it is to coordinate logistics and to schedule with each candidate so that you can get them in front of the right people. But, this is a crucial step as you’re narrowing it down to your final few.
Final Interviews
Lastly, this number is the cream of the crop. The final interviews from which you’ll make your decision. You’ll conduct final interviews, check references, and then negotiate and close. In the calculator, this is the numerical input that you must provide, which signals your intention for the project. Then, the calculator builds the rest of the funnel from there.
Why Are You Doing This Yourself?
It’s likely that upon using the calculator, you discover that your high-volume recruiting plan is actually going to take a lot more than you realized. We’ve seen, time and time again, organizations that underestimate the resources and commitment required to fulfill these hiring plans, and it comes back to bite them in the end.
This is really not a process you should be tackling on your own. To take your focus off your core competencies and shift an immense amount of effort to something that you don’t have real experience in is often a mistake. Here at The Renaissance Network, we can take this off your plate.
We know how these high-volume recruitment drives work, and we’ve spent years building the networks and infrastructure to deliver quality under pressure. When you work with us, you’ll have a partner by your side who can be thoughtful, strategic, and fully focused on the project while you continue running your business.
It’s a no-brainer, and if those numbers scare you, maybe it’s time we get on a call.
