Your hiring team’s guide to scaling hiring

Scaling hiring can be challenging for companies.

Hiring 1-2 new employees per quarter is relatively easy, especially if you’re hiring for similar positions. But what if you need to hire 15 or 20? 

If your business is growing, you need to be able to meet your staffing needs and recruit top talent at scale.

In this article, we’ll guide you through the ten-step process of creating a hiring strategy that’s adapted to rapid business growth.

1. Assess your company culture

Many companies sacrifice company culture when they’re experiencing rapid growth, so before you start hiring at scale, you need to first look at your organizational culture, define what makes it unique, and decide how you want to preserve this. 

Your company culture—its core values, beliefs, and way of doing things that set it apart from its competitors—is a key asset when attracting top talent.

Having a strong culture will aid you when hiring at scale. For example, 71% of workers apply for a position based on referrals from current employees who speak highly of their company.

When candidates look at a company that they want to work at, they consider its culture and whether or not it aligns with their own values and belief systems—this is especially true for Gen Z candidates.

Hiring talent that comes close to your own company culture will help with retention levels and productivity and save you time and money in the future. 

There are many ways to assess your company culture and find out what your company’s core values are. Understanding your company culture will aid you in choosing the right candidates and give you insights into the direction in which your company should grow in terms of not only business performance but also values. It’ll also help you improve on what you already have in place. 

You can then use software tools, like TestGorilla’s culture add test, to help you sift through candidates and be objective about whom you want to hire, eliminating bias and reducing time to hire. 

2. Consider hiring a few people at once (i.e., batch hiring)

If you’re scaling hiring and recruitment, you can consider batch hiring, or hiring 2-3 employees for a similar role, to onboard them simultaneously. 

Once you have shortlisted several suitable candidates for a given position using pre-employment skills assessments, you can invite them to an interview on the same day. Grouping interviews is beneficial for interviewers because they can focus on and prepare for the interviews instead of being distracted by other tasks. 

This saves time and effort, as it allows one person to stay focused on the task of interviewing.

When scaling hiring, it is crucial to use structured interviews, in which you ask the same questions in the same or a similar order because they help you compare candidates objectively while minimizing bias.

You can then onboard several successful applicants at once in order to optimize your onboarding process and make it less resource-intensive. 

The first couple of months are crucial for building rapport with your new employees and integrating them successfully into your company. In this period, you need to check in on them daily at first, and then weekly, to make sure the onboarding process is going well.

Set clear expectations, and do not overwhelm them with too much new information all at once. Once they start getting the hang of their new role and see that your workplace is inclusive, their productivity will naturally lift off. 

Onboarding a few candidates at once will speed up the onboarding process and make new employees naturally feel like a part of a group.

3. Create a candidate persona for each different opening

A candidate persona is a fictional representation of your ideal candidate.

Having such a persona will help you identify candidates who are not only perfect for the job description but can also contribute to your future business success. 

You can create a persona for each opening you have. Once you have done this a few times, you can also use the candidate personas you have made in the future, making your hiring process more efficient. 

Before creating a candidate persona, you need to gather data by analyzing your best employees. Start by discussing with your team leads what makes their top performers unique. 

Information on demographics, background, and qualifications is important when choosing candidates. However, if you’re not careful, this information can be restrictive by causing you to limit your potential talent pool. 

Instead, focus on overarching traits and characteristics you want to see in future employees rather than the specific details.

A diverse workforce will help you thrive. This is especially true when it comes to gender and ethnic diversity. For example, companies with a higher percentage (30% or more) of women executives outperform companies with 10-30% women executives. 

For this reason, it’s particularly important to make diversity and inclusion a priority when hiring at scale. 

4. Use an ATS to automate the hiring process

An ATS (or applicant tracking system) allows you to combine most of your recruiting tools into one platform and assess your candidates quickly and efficiently, making the hiring process faster. 

A good ATS will help you to:

• Reduce time and money spent on administrative tasks related to the interviewing process and give you more time to focus on hiring the right people

• Build a talent pool of qualified candidates who were unsuccessful in the past but might prove to be the right fit for a future role

• Create a careers page that will attract applicants from the get-go

• Integrate your existing hiring tools, such as job boards and candidate sourcing platforms, to provide you with a more efficient tech stack

• Track and manage candidate applications by automatically filtering candidacies to help you narrow down the applicant pool and find the best talent

Obviously, you need to find the right ATS that meets your organization’s needs.

Since there are many ATSs to choose from, we have compiled a list of the top ten ATSs along with their pros and cons to consider when making your choice. 

5. Use pre-employment skills tests to screen candidates and identify top talent

To scale hiring effectively, you need to be able to quickly identify top talent.

Pre-employment skills tests are one of the best ways to do that, as they help you compare candidates’ skills and abilities at scale while also reducing bias. 

Skills tests are particularly effective when screening hundreds of applicants, regardless of the role they are applying for. 

You can test candidates’ cognitive abilities, which will help you assess their aptitude for dealing with complex tasks. Additionally, you can assess their language skills to determine their communication capabilities, which are important for all day-to-day tasks, especially if you’re expanding globally. You can also evaluate different role-specific skills. 

As discussed above, company culture is vital, so having applicants take a personality test will help you gain a deeper understanding of your candidates and select those with high culture add potential, regardless of their backgrounds. This will help you hire a diverse and inclusive workforce at scale. 

TestGorilla’s skills tests each require around 10 minutes to complete, and you can create assessments of 2-5 tests. Because the tests are quick to take, the dropout rates are low, meaning that scaling recruitment is easier and more efficient. 

6. Shortlist the best candidates and invite them to an interview

Only invite your best applicants to an interview to make this process as fast and efficient as possible.

First of all, you need to develop shortlist criteria for candidates who pass your initial screening.

Doing this before you post the job ad will help you to reduce bias and discrimination and keep you focused on what you are looking for so you don’t settle on someone who is just not the right fit.

Reducing bias when hiring a lot of employees quickly is crucial, as it helps you hire the best talent and not miss out on any opportunities.

Different types of unconscious bias can impact your hiring process, like gender, racial, cultural, and confirmation bias, among others. You should take steps to curtail each type of bias in your hiring process. 

Along with automating part of the screening process via ATSs, you can conduct phone, video, or in-person structured interviews in which you systematically ask all interviewees the same questions, regardless of their backgrounds. Taking detailed notes during interviews will also help you to compare and shortlist the best candidates later on.  

7. Always keep disqualified candidates informed

Remember to keep disqualified candidates informed to provide a positive candidate experience. This demonstrates that you value their time and effort. You can also automate this step to make it easier.

Candidates are less likely to apply again in the future when they don’t receive any feedback on how well they did in the interview.

When scaling hiring, it’s essential to provide a positive candidate experience. Even if you disqualify someone now, they might be the right fit for another position in the future; additionally, bad experiences will harm your employer brand. 

Applicants talk to each other, and if they had a bad experience, they will tell their friends and colleagues, who might decide against coming in for an interview with you even if the job description fits their wants and needs.

Not only that, but candidates can share their negative experiences on social media, which will lead to damage to your business’ reputation over time. This causes you to miss out on potentially highly skilled talent, who might choose to work for your competitor instead. 

You can even keep a file of candidates who impressed you and encourage them to apply for future openings in your rejection letter. This will make them feel appreciated and ensure that your company as a whole receives some positive feedback.

8. Hire your best applicant(s)

Once you have gone through your screening tests and interviews and finally have a couple of names down, it’s time to make an offer to your top candidate(s) and, if they accept, welcome them to the team and begin the onboarding process. If you’re batch hiring, you might hire the best two or three applicants. 

When scaling hiring, you need to make hiring decisions fast in order to be able to extend offers to your best candidates before your competitors hire them.

If you organize your hiring process well (with the help of an ATS, skills tests, and structured interviews), this last part will be easy. Make sure you’re also proposing competitive compensation for the position, location, and necessary skills.

9. Track performance 

Tracking your new hires’ performance allows you to optimize your hiring process. This way, you can keep what’s working and quickly get rid of what isn’t.

You can do this by measuring the quality of hire over time. This is the added value each new employee brings to the company. You can measure the quality of hire by tracking job performance, productivity, and retention rate using feedback forms from each employee and their team lead.

Having such data will help you decide what works best for your company when hiring new employees and get rid of what didn’t work in previous hiring attempts.

Build a well-structured onboarding process, too. This will help you reduce turnover and improve business performance. You can onboard employees with similar roles as a group. 

10. Optimize the onboarding process

Having a formal onboarding program is essential to make your new employees feel welcomed and happy and to keep retention levels high.

Onboarding is something you need to think about before you hire new personnel. You can define the process by asking yourself questions such as:

• How long will the onboarding program last?

• What do new employees need to know about the company?

• What goals do you want to set for your new employees?

• How will you measure the success of your onboarding program?

The first days and months are crucial for setting the tone, clearly defining objectives, and clarifying what the new employee’s roles are. It is also important for them to get to know their co-workers and feel included from the get-go.

Weekly and monthly check-ins are essential to make sure your new hires feel comfortable and have settled in nicely into their new role.

At the end of the first six months, it is time to assess their performance, see how they have done so far, and make sure they know this information. This will inform you on whether you made the right hiring choice and help you to draft a hiring process for future applications that functions better at scale.  

Scaling hiring is easy with the right tools and approach

Hiring top talent at scale is crucial when your company is growing rapidly. Knowing how to do this the right way will help you save time and hire the best candidates quickly and efficiently. 

In this article, we have highlighted several good practices that will help you to not only attract the best talent out there but also choose the people who best fit your job description. 

Scaling hiring does take time and effort at first, but by using software tools and screening tests and assessing your own company values, you can reduce your time to hire and keep a high retention rate while making hiring at scale even quicker in the future.  

With TestGorilla, you’ll find the recruitment process to be simpler, faster, and much more effective. Get started for free today and start making better hiring decisions, faster and bias-free.