Resources for IT Managers

1. Assuming HR Will Manage and Administer a Mass Hiring

If your organization regularly conducts mass hiring due to seasonality, market trends, or other predictable factors, it’s likely that its HR team has the processes and experience in place to manage and administer another hiring event.

However, if your firm is considering hiring a multitude of candidates for the very first time, or has done so infrequently, it would be wise to assess whether your human resources team actually has the resources to take on a project of this scale.

No matter how qualified and experienced the people in your organization’s HR department are at recruiting, screening resumes and applications, interviewing candidates, negotiating salaries and benefits, and overseeing a gazillion other duties unrelated to the onboarding process, they may not be the right ones to manage and oversee a mass hiring.

Simply put, mass hiring is a project. It is an event. Your HR team may lack the project management skills required to successfully oversee a mass hire. Or they may not have the time to break away from ongoing daily duties. Given the scale of a particular mass hire, the HR team could simply be too small to efficiently manage it.

Evaluate your HR’s readiness to hire en masse, and consider what additional resources might be necessary — be it a project manager, a special taskforce to oversee the large-scale hire, additional HR personnel, an outsourced consulting firm, or the possibility of staggering the hires in stages, if time allows.

2. Underestimating the Cost of Mass Hiring

If you think your organization’s cost-per-hire metrics apply in a mass hiring situation — think again! The budget required to recruit and fill a hundred or a thousand positions at the same time will be significantly higher than a standard CPH would indicate.

A mass hiring typically requires extensive advertising efforts in order to reach enough potential candidates. That’s particularly the case in industries that have rebounded from the Great Recession and redoubled their hiring efforts. You may find your firm competing for the same talent as well-known companies with a lot more money to spend.

And if your HR team doesn’t have the necessary resources to perform a mass hire as outlined above, it could be costly to reallocate them from elsewhere in your organization or bring them in from outside. Additionally, if staging a mass-hiring event, you’ll need sufficient space, staff, tables and chairs, signage, and the like.

Take care in planning every step of a mass hiring so you can budget accurately.

3. Not Developing a Rapid Screening Process

When faced with thousands of applicants, the typical processes used to eliminate one candidate or move another forward need to occur at warp speed.

Though there’s no one methodology that guarantees success, your organization should create a short list of imperative qualifications or skills — no more than three or four — needed for each position to be filled during a mass hire.

Use these to unflinchingly sort applicants into three categories.

All qualifications present and accounted for? The resume goes into “moving forward” status. Missing a vital skill, or all of them? The resume goes into “we’ll keep your application on file” status. The final category is for those few resumes that are a “definite maybe.” These should be a minority. Reserve the category for candidates who don’t quite meet the requirements, but who stand out in some unique, compelling, and positive way in their resumes or cover letters.

4. Failing to Have a Mass Hire Plan in Place

A mother and daughter who shared a love and talent for sewing joined forces and began selling clothing at their local farmers’ market. Imagine their joy when someone approached them to produce an entire apparel line consisting of ten different garments in a variety of sizes and fabrics!

That joy turned to panic when they realized it would be impossible for them to produce the large quantities required unless they hired at least a dozen extra pairs of hands. They spent months evaluating the work of seamstresses, but weren’t able to find enough in time to fulfill the contract.

Whether your organization is a mom-and-daughter shop, a Fortune 500 behemoth, or falls somewhere in between, it should have a strategy to quickly scale up its labor force.

Where did you find your most talented workers? Who are the superstars at competing companies? How will you use social media to spread the word that your organization is ready to ramp up production and needs qualified candidates today? Be sure to involve your employees; they’ll likely have friends in their online networks actively looking for work or who are unhappy with their current employment.

In addition to avoiding these critical mistakes when mass hiring, keep in mind that everything you do during the process leaves an impression of your organization in the candidates’ minds. Keep it organized and professional. Communicate clearly with applicants so they know what to expect — especially when you’ll be letting them know whether or not they’ll be joining your team!