Strategies for Overcoming High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on October 17, 2022June 26, 2026 by akessler

High-volume recruitment is one of the most demanding disciplines in talent acquisition. Whether you’re staffing a contact center, scaling a logistics network, preparing for a seasonal retail surge or maintaining a large healthcare workforce, the challenge is the same: hire large numbers of the right people, quickly, without letting quality slip or burning out your team.

The organizations that do this well aren’t just working harder—they’re working differently. This guide explores the most common high-volume hiring challenges and the strategies that leading talent acquisition teams are using to overcome them.

👉 Get our ebook: 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

What is High-Volume Recruitment?

High-volume recruitment involves sourcing, screening, interviewing and hiring large numbers of candidates for similar openings or job types, often within compressed timeframes. It’s common across sectors including retail, hospitality, logistics, healthcare, contact centers, travel and government—and it requires a fundamentally different approach to talent acquisition than professional or specialist hiring.

The core tension in high-volume recruitment is speed versus quality. Move too slowly and candidates drop out or accept offers elsewhere. Move too fast without the right processes and you compromise on hire quality, driving up attrition and starting the cycle again. Getting this balance right—consistently, at scale—is what separates high-performing high-volume programs from those that are perpetually in firefighting mode.

The Biggest High-Volume Hiring Challenges—and How to Solve Them

Challenge 1: Candidate Drop-Off and Ghosting

Candidate drop-off—where applicants disengage partway through the process—and ghosting—where candidates simply stop responding or fail to show up—are among the most costly and frustrating problems in high-volume recruitment. When you’re processing hundreds or thousands of applications, even a modest drop-off rate translates into significant wasted effort and extended time-to-fill.

The root cause is almost always the same: a process that moves too slowly, communicates too infrequently, or asks too much of candidates. Today’s high-volume candidates—many of whom are applying to multiple employers simultaneously—have limited tolerance for lengthy applications, long gaps between process stages or radio silence from recruiters. If a competitor makes an offer first, or the application simply feels like too much effort, they’ll move on.

How to address it:

Audit your application process ruthlessly. Every question that isn’t genuinely necessary to advance a candidate is a potential drop-off point. Streamline the process to capture only what’s needed at each stage, and reserve more detailed information gathering for later in the funnel when candidates are more committed.

Look at where processes can be automated so that at every touchpoint—application confirmation, status updates, interview scheduling, offer—communication happens quickly and consistently. Candidates should never be left wondering where they stand. SMS and messaging tools are particularly effective in high-volume contexts, where candidates may not regularly check email.

Reduce the time between process stages wherever possible. Speed is itself a candidate experience differentiator in high-volume markets. The organizations that move fastest tend to secure the best candidates.

An RPO partner is particularly well-placed to address drop-off and ghosting. With dedicated volume recruiting expertise and access to the latest talent technology—AI-enabled CRM, automated scheduling, pipeline analytics—a high-volume RPO solution keeps candidates moving through your funnel efficiently while freeing your internal team from the administrative burden of managing large applicant volumes manually.

Challenge 2: Maintaining Quality of Hire at Scale

Speed pressure in high-volume recruitment creates a persistent temptation to cut corners on assessment, like skipping interview stages, loosening criteria or defaulting to “warm body” hiring when vacancies feel urgent. The short-term relief this provides is almost always offset by higher attrition, lower performance and the cost of rehiring.

The challenge is that traditional assessment approaches—often designed for professional or specialist hiring—don’t translate well to volume contexts. They’re too slow, too resource-intensive and often measure the wrong things.

How to address it:

Start by challenging the assumptions underpinning your current criteria. The skills and background that seem like obvious requirements for a role aren’t always the ones that predict success. At PeopleScout, when working with a high-volume RPO client struggling to hire for customer service roles, we interviewed their most successful customer-facing employees and found that prior customer service experience was not a predictor of performance, but problem-solving aptitude was. That insight expanded their talent pool significantly while improving quality of hire and reducing attrition.

Redesign your candidate assessment to evaluate both hard and soft skills efficiently. For high-volume roles, soft skills, like attitude, adaptability, work ethic and communication style, are often the stronger predictors of success and retention. PeopleScout’s 1XP assessment model is built specifically for high-volume contexts, helping organizations evaluate what actually matters without adding time to the process.

Structured, consistent assessments also reduce bias and support diversity hiring goals—an important consideration for high-volume programs that are often the largest source of diverse talent entry points into an organization.

Challenge 3: Recruiter and Hiring Manager Burnout

High-volume hiring puts enormous pressure on internal teams. When recruitment processes are inefficient, hiring managers are pulled into administrative tasks they’re not equipped or resourced for—screening resumes and CVs, chasing candidates, coordinating interviews—on top of their day jobs. Recruiters managing large requisition loads without adequate technology quickly reach a point where quality suffers simply because there aren’t enough hours.

This is a structural problem, not a motivation problem. Asking people to work harder within a broken process doesn’t fix it.

How to address it:

Identify which parts of your recruitment process are consuming the most recruiter and hiring manager time and ask whether they can be streamlined. Scheduling, application screening, reference verification and background checks are all areas where automation or RPO support can dramatically reduce the administrative burden on your team—without compromising candidate experience.

Modular RPO solutions can also help you augment your internal team. By selectively outsourcing specific components of your hiring process, you allow an RPO partner to absorb the volume-intensive elements so your recruiters and hiring managers can focus on the decisions and interactions that genuinely require time and attention. This isn’t just about capacity—it’s about directing your internal resources toward the highest-value parts of the hiring process.

Challenge 4: Scaling Up and Down for Seasonal Demand

Many high-volume hiring programs aren’t steady-state—they spike. Retail ramps up for peak trading periods. Hospitality and travel scale dramatically for summer or holiday seasons. Tax and financial services see surges at predictable points in the year. Building and then dismantling a large internal recruitment team to match these peaks is expensive, inefficient and disruptive.

How to address it:

Build scalability into your recruitment model rather than treating it as an emergency response. This means establishing talent pipelines and candidate communities year-round—not just when the hiring surge hits—so you’re converting warm candidates rather than starting from scratch each season.

RPO partnerships are particularly well-suited to seasonal high-volume programs because the engagement model is designed to flex. A high-volume RPO partner can scale delivery resources up or down in line with your hiring calendar, providing a consistent, experienced recruiting team without the overhead of permanent headcount.

Why RPO is the Right Solution for High-Volume Hiring

Most high-volume hiring challenges share a common root: a recruitment model built for normal hiring volumes, stretched beyond what it can reliably deliver. Bolt-on fixes—an extra job board, a temporary agency, an additional internal recruiter—rarely address the underlying process and technology gaps that are driving the problem.

Recruitment process outsourcing is designed specifically to address this. A high-volume RPO partner brings:

Purpose-built processes for high-volume contexts, designed around candidate behavior, dropout patterns and assessment approaches that work at scale
Talent technology that organizations often can’t justify building or buying independently including AI-powered sourcing, automated candidate engagement, predictive analytics and pipeline reporting
Dedicated recruiting expertise that your internal team can draw on without having to build and maintain the capability in-house
Scalable delivery that flexes with your hiring calendar rather than forcing you to over- or under-resource for predictable peaks
Talent advisory capabilities like employer branding, recruitment marketing and assessment design, that address the upstream factors affecting your ability to attract and convert candidates at scale

PeopleScout’s high-volume RPO solution is purpose-built for organizations managing large-scale, fast-paced hiring programs across retail, hospitality, logistics, healthcare and beyond.

👉 Explore PeopleScout’s high-volume RPO solution

👉 Get our ebook: 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on October 17, 2022July 8, 2024 by akessler

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Competition for hourly talent is steep, with high demand from call centers, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs.

Talent acquisition leaders are facing the most tumultuous job market in recent memory with an impossible combination of soaring job openings and a labor shortage.

So, how do they compete for hourly talent when the competition is so fierce?
And how can they prepare for seasonal peaks?
More importantly, how can they increase speed without sacrificing on quality-of-hire?

Download our ebook to learn 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges. It’s a must-read for any talent acquisition team focused on solving critical problems in their high-volume hiring programs.

High-Volume Hiring in the Contact Center: 3 Challenges and How to Tackle Them

Posted on August 4, 2022September 6, 2024 by akessler

In our world of e-commerce and online banking, consumers want slick digital experiences. But they still want the human touch when they run into a problem. Despite the growth of digital channels, excellent customer service is still a must-have in a business landscape where companies compete on customer experience. High-volume hiring in the contact center has never been more important or more challenging.

Customer queries are more complex and high-value, and contact center agents are now expected to not only answer calls, but interact with customers through chats, emails and social media. Contact centers need highly-skilled talent who are comfortable working in a myriad of technology platforms. Customer service representatives (CSRs) must also exhibit strong soft skills like listening and empathy—especially as consumers are experiencing more financial hardships and mental health struggles post-pandemic.

Indeed, 84% of contact center leaders—whether part of a BPO or an internal contact center—believe the pandemic permanently elevated the importance of the contact center for their business. But, it’s hard to deliver against your service levels when you’re struggling to hire or when you’re losing staff amidst the Great Resignation. Since 2019, the number of vacancies has increased, while the number of applicants per opening has dropped by 50%.

(Source: Indeed)

So, how can a contact center director and talent acquisition leader team up to tackle today’s tough landscape? Here are three top recruitment challenges in the contact center and tips for overcoming them.

1. Use Your Employer Brand to Attract the Right Kind of Talent

ContactBabel’s Contact Center Decision Maker’s Guide states that contact center attrition reached 23% in 2022, with 1 in 6 operations experiencing annual attrition of over 30%. This results in contact centers making over 212,000 hires annually. With turnover like this, how to make high-volume hiring more effective is always on the minds of contact center directors.

As consumer behavior has changed, a different set of skills is needed in customer service. Contact center agents need to exercise problem solving and analytical skills while also displaying empathy to customers who may be upset or emotional. Agents who lack these skills are more likely to struggle to resolve customer issues and to suffer from increased stress levels.

By honing your employer value proposition and attraction messaging, you can stand out amongst your competition but also zero in the characteristics you need for your contact center. By shifting your mindset from focusing on getting the most applications, or even those with customer service experience, to getting applications with the right profile, you can reduce attrition by increase the likelihood of your new hires being successful.

Case Study: Finding Candidates with Problem Solving Skills

We helped Direct Line, a British insurance provider, improve their recruitment outcomes in the contact center through employer branding and recruitment marketing. We found their ideal candidate profile was someone with strong analytical skills and who could proactively problem solve—rather than those with past experience in customer service.

We then expanded our search efforts, looking for candidates who would have honed these skills in non-customer service roles who would be interested in making a career change. Not only did this open the doors for Direct Line to access a new pool of talent, but it also helped to increase the quality of their hires and reduce attrition.

2. Rethink Your Assessment Center to Reduce Drop-Off Rate

With growing complexity in customer service, organizations need contact center agents with strong listening skills and written communication skills (for chat, email and social media enquiries) as well as the ability to self-manage and multitask. Leveraging candidate assessment tools to find candidates with the right combination of skills and behaviors is imperative to the success of your contact center.

(Source: Co ntactBabel)

Case Study: Moving the Assessment Stage Forward

One of our longest standing clients, tasked us with high-volume recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) for their financial services customer contact centers. The bank needed to recruit more staff to meet their service levels and create a great experience for their customers. We designed the customer contact recruitment process from scratch, including a recruitment marketing campaign.

As part of this new process, we advised the client to introduce an online test immediately after the candidate applied using an automated email. This caught them while the application was still front of mind and also ensured that only best-fit candidates progressed. This meant that hiring managers were committing their time to top talent and helped to reduce the overall time to hire. As a result of identifying high quality candidates sooner, we were able to reduce the attrition rate to just 11%, well below the industry average.

More Assessment Center Tips to Reduce Drop Off

Here are some more assessment center tips:

Try introducing assessment tasks earlier in the process or combining assessment stages. This helps increase hiring speed and keep candidates engaged.
Rather than traditional multiple-choice tests, try a role play scenario or an interactive experience that gives the candidates a real-life feel of what their day-to-day job will look like. The benefits are two-fold—you get a better idea of how candidates will perform in the role, and they get a better idea of what to expect before they accept the offer.
Ensure candidates are prepared for the assessment center by offering webinars, instruction videos and even practices tests. This helps to eliminate nervousness and boost confidence amongst candidates—reducing candidate drop-off before the assessment center phase.

Learn more about our whole-person model for assessments and how we leverage it for evaluating customer service reps for the contact and other high-volume hiring situations.

3. Boost Your Communications to Eliminate Ghosting

Newly hired customer service reps are increasingly ‘ghosting’ their call center jobs—not showing up for day one with no reason given and often no communication from the candidate at all. According to an Indeed survey on ghosting in the workplace, 22% of candidates say they have accepted a job offer but didn’t show up for the first day of work.

Following the tips above on finding the ideal candidate profile and assessing for the right skills to start with, will help reduce ghosting on day one. In addition, you can also work to speed up the recruitment process and improve communications to keep candidates engaged after offer acceptance.

Speeding Up the Recruitment Process

With so many contact centers vying for customer service talent, employer response time is crucial as you want to beat the by being the first to move the candidate through the recruitment process. About a quarter of candidates state the reason for their ghosting was because the hiring process was too long or too slow. So, take a look at your recruitment process. Are there any steps you could eliminate or combine? Are there ways you could reduce the time between steps?

If it’s feasible for your organization, you might consider moving to same-day offers, even if they’re contingent upon reference verification, background checks or drug testing. Also, moving the start date up will reduce the likelihood of a competing offer turning your candidate’s head. Waiting for your next training class could be risky, so think about running smaller training classes more frequently to accelerate hiring.

Staying Connected with Regular Communication

Communication is also a key part of combatting ghosting during the crucial period offer and onboarding. Staying in touch with candidates is imperative to keep them interested. If you ghost your brand-new hire by forgetting to check in, they’re more likely to ghost you in turn. The same Indeed study found that 77% of jobseekers saying they’ve been ghosted by an employer.

Assessing the touchpoints between your organization and the offer holder is an important way for employers to ensure they keep the lines of communication open and increase engagement with candidates. Are you using your CRM to the fullest? Investing in creating content that showcases your employer value proposition (EVP) and sending it out regularly to your candidates via engaging emails will ensure they are reminded regularly of the value you offer—whether through benefits, flexibility, growth opportunities, diversity and inclusion initiatives and more.

Personal touchpoints are another way to stay connected. Check-in emails from the recruiter or even messages of congratulations from the hiring manager will help candidates feel valued and special. You might consider asking existing employees to act as an ambassador and share some onboarding materials with more information about your organization, your culture and values or your employee resource groups (ERGs) so they start feeling like a part of the team.

These small gestures can help your candidate feel connected to the organization before they start—and could end up being what keeps them from changing their mind when they receive a competing offer.

RPO for the Contact Center

Facing a recruitment landscape in which you need high-volume hiring to support your contact center operations? Learn strategies to speed up your hiring process and deliver on customer service quality by downloading our 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges.