How to successfully hire at scale

You hire successfully at scale by getting three things right at once: every role in front of the people who actually fit it, an application that a candidate can finish on a phone in minutes, and a way of seeing every application that arrives rather than the first few. Most employers fix one of the three and wonder why the numbers barely move, because the loss simply moves to the stage they did not fix.

That is the short version. The longer version is about where, in a large frontline business, the people you need actually get lost.

Scale changes what the problem is

When a restaurant group, a gym chain or a contract caterer talks about hiring at scale, they rarely mean one big campaign. They mean the same handful of roles, chefs, front of house, personal trainers, cleaners, being refilled continuously across a hundred or more sites, each with a general manager who has a rota to run and a central team trying to see all of it at once.

At that scale, the instinct is to buy more reach. More job boards, more social campaigns, a bigger media budget. Sometimes that is the right call for a specific role in a specific town. But as a general answer it tends to pour more people into a process that was already losing them, and the spend that brought them is gone whether they apply or not.

So it helps to look at the whole path a candidate takes, from the moment they see the role to the moment someone on your team decides, and ask where it leaks.

Put each role in front of the right people

Reach matters, but reach you can see matters more. The useful question is not how many people saw a vacancy but which channels produced applications, and which of those applications turned into hires, by role and by location.

That is what job distribution is for. Every role goes out from one connection to the boards and channels that suit it, paid reach goes behind the roles that need it rather than the ones that fill themselves, and every application is attributed back to the source that brought it. When wagamama moved its recruitment marketing onto this model, it took 23,000+ applications at a cost per application of £4.89, which is what spending on the channels that deliver looks like in practice. The wagamama case study sets out how.

Make applying take minutes, on a phone

The frontline candidate is usually already working. They are looking at your role on a phone, between shifts or on the bus home, and they will give it a few minutes. If the apply button opens a long form built for a desktop, asks them to create an account and wants a CV they do not have, most of them will leave, and nobody on your team will know they were ever there.

Conversational apply replaces that form with an application that adapts to the role and the region, asks only what the role needs, and lands the finished application in the ATS you already run. When Compass Group put conversational apply in front of its Tribepad ATS, completed applications rose 42%, with no change to the HR systems behind it. That is the whole point: the change was in what the candidate met, which is where the loss had been. The Compass Group case study has the detail.

The candidate’s questions belong here too. A retail assistant weighing up a Christmas temp role on her lunch break wants to know whether the shifts stop in January, what it pays and which store she would be in. The Candidate Agent answers from your own approved content while she is still on the page, and hands to a person when judgment is needed.

See every application, not just the first screen

This is the part most scale hiring gets wrong, and it gets worse the better the first two stages work. When hundreds of applications arrive for one role, a busy team reads the first screen and stops. The strong candidate who applied a day after the advert went live never gets opened, and takes the first offer that does come back.

Adding recruiters buys reading time at the pace of a person. A blunt keyword rule rejects people nobody has looked at. Neither is a good answer.

The Hiring Agent scores every application against the criteria your team chose, as it arrives, with reasoning your team can read. It puts the strongest evidence first and leaves both the rejecting and the hiring to people. A person opens the reasoning, checks the evidence and decides, in the ATS you already use. Agents do the admin, humans do the hiring. Structured screening, which asks a role’s basic requirements first, is in development with design partners, so plan around what is live today.

Measure the whole path, then fix the worst stage

None of this works if you can only see the ends of the process: job board invoices at one end, hires in the ATS at the other. You need to know where people came from, whether they started and finished the application, whether anyone looked at it and what the resulting hire cost, by site and by role. Then you fix the stage that is losing the most people, not the one that is easiest to talk about in a meeting.

What to do next

Start by tracing ten recent hires and ten candidates who dropped out, and write down where each one came from and where each one stopped. It is a slightly uncomfortable afternoon, but it usually tells you which of the three stages to fix first.

If the answer is too many applications and not enough time to read them, the quality in volume page explains how we approach it. For more on hiring many people into similar roles, read the rest of our writing on high-volume hiring.