Between labor shortages and turnover, it hasn’t been a perfect year for high-volume recruiters, but 2025 is just around the corner! To help high-volume recruiting teams get prepared and be their best selves, HR.com releases an annual report featuring state-of-the-industry insights. These insights are published in the annual State of High-Volume and Hourly Hiring Report, presented in a virtual webcast event, and summarized in one convenient infographic shared below! As proud sponsors of this important research-based event, we are happy to unpack some of the most interesting takeaways from the infographic and the report. At a time of year when hope runs rampant, high-volume recruiters can gather some steam from these industry insights and supercharge their hiring strategies for the year to come.
General High-Volume Hiring Statistics
It’s expected that HR professionals, especially those that recruit in high volumes will rely on some form of AI technology, but how much? See this and more general statistics from the survey below.
- 78% of respondents believe that they are effective at high-volume recruiting.
- 52% of organizations outsource some of their high-volume recruiting process, including staffing agencies, job boards, temporary employment services, and RPO providers.
- Three-fifths of respondents plan to use AI for high-volume recruiting next year, primarily for job descriptions, interview scheduling, and sourcing more diverse candidates.
Top Challenges in High-volume Recruitment
Moving forward can sometimes mean looking back at where the high-volume hiring process had hiccups over the past year. The top high-volume recruitment challenges were reported as:
- Too many low-quality candidates (60%)
- Not enough candidates (53%)
- High employee turnover / churn (46%)
Talent shortages have been a challenge for nearly every industry. To address these shortages and attract more talent, organizations have increased:
- Wages (72%)
- Benefits and perks (52%)
- Flexibility (47%)
An emerging challenge from the industry was “ghosting” meaning a new hire doesn’t show up for the job. 29% of respondents considered “ghosting” to be a considerable problem. For another 7%, it’s a major problem. That being said, for more than half of the respondents, ghosting simply was not a problem.
High-Volume Assessments
To help overcome challenges and streamline processes, high-volume recruiters tend to rely on technology, but how much?
- Only 37% of organizations are using pre-hiring assessments for high-volume recruitment.
- High-volume recruiters or partner companies that don’t use assessment technology mostly say it’s because they don’t need it for the roles in question (49%). Another 15% said they don’t have the budget for it.
- Unfortunately, 18% have either tried a hiring assessment and found the results were unsuccessful, or feel it wouldn’t work for them.
- Job knowledge and competency tests are the most common type of assessment used by high-volume recruiters (60%), followed by cognitive ability tests (56%), and personality tests (54%).
- Only 30% of respondents plan to use AI for assessing skills in the next year.
Preparing for the Year Ahead
With a head full of industry insights, high-volume recruiters need to come out of the gates swinging next year. And many are still working on their high-volume hiring strategy. In fact, only 62% have a defined recruitment strategy for high-volume recruiting. Below are the top statistics and insights for strategy development in early 2025 and beyond.
The practices considered most effective for high-volume hiring are:
- Automating as much of the process as possible (65%)
- Removing barriers to applying (65%)
- Developing a compelling employer brand and value proposition (64%)
The tools and technologies considered most effective or high-volume recruiters are:
- Full capabilities available on mobile devices (44%)
- Automating means of gathering candidate feedback (35%)
- SMS or automated chat client (31%)
The channels considered most effective for high-volume recruiting are:
- Job boards (83%)
- Actively soliciting employee referrals (64%)
- Advertising jobs on paid social media (57%)
More than half of the respondents found that the top three most important hiring metrics are:
- Time-to-hire
- Retention rate
- Quality-of-hire
While time-to-hire is an important proxy, it doesn’t show the performance or impact of one strategy over another, as the quality-of-hire and retention rates do. The key next year will be feeding data back into the strategy and innovating since less than one-third of high-volume recruiters say that the data they use to make hiring decisions is aligned with post-hire performance data.
Download the complete infographic by clicking on the link on the menu to the left!
Image Credits
Feature Image: Unsplash/Thomas Kelly
Infographic: Property of HR.com and HiringBranch
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