High-Volume Hiring Candidate Experience Research Webinar

Research conducted with talent acquisition leaders and recruiters across industries looks at how organizations handle high-volume and hourly hiring, from sourcing channels to candidate communication to where the process breaks down.

Key findings and practical takeaways include:

• Most high-volume hiring teams expect budgets to grow over the next two years, driven by missed hiring goals, rising turnover, and a competitive labor market where candidates jump jobs for meaningful pay increases.
• Referrals remain the top sourcing channel for finding candidates, while texting, email, and messaging apps dominate ongoing communication, with texting producing far higher response rates than email and much faster replies, often within minutes.
• Text outreach works best when candidates opt in immediately after applying, when messages reference the specific job or previous conversation, and when the same phone number is used throughout the relationship rather than switching numbers mid-conversation.
• Recruiters should never text candidates from personal cell phones. Using a dedicated platform with admin controls keeps communication logged, protects against compliance issues, and avoids the risk of a departed employee walking off with an active number.
• More than half of respondents identified hourly wage roles as a top hiring priority, with candidate ghosting during interview and onboarding stages cited as a major challenge.
• Administrative tasks, especially manual interview scheduling, still consume significant recruiter time despite widely available automation tools. Automated scheduling is described as a baseline requirement rather than a differentiator.
• Generative AI and automation now allow personalized candidate engagement at scale, with some high-volume employers automating a large share of the early screening process so recruiters only step in when it matters.
• Candidate experience scores have been trending downward, largely attributed to recruiter bandwidth constraints, reinforcing the case for automating repetitive parts of the process while preserving a human touch at key moments.

The findings point to a widening gap between organizations that have modernized their communication and screening processes and those still relying on manual outreach, with texting and workflow automation increasingly separating high-performing hiring teams from the rest.