It’s a familiar scenario for recruiters everywhere: too much to do and too little time to explore too few options. In the world of high-volume recruiting, however, the pressures exerted by deadlines and uncompleted tasks are exponentially worse.

By “high-volume recruiting,” we’re simply referring to the practice of filling a large number of positions. In the public mind this practice is most frequently associated with seasonal retail employment, when companies must temporarily increase their staff to address a surge in consumer demand (e.g., the Christmas shopping season), but it occurs as well with corporations that are rapidly expanding the scope of their business operations or establishing a new department.

How can a high-volume recruiter find success without losing their minds? Here we present a few potentially helpful suggestions.

Ask Candidates for Referrals – If you need to locate tons of candidates in a short window of time, then you need to explore every option possible. That means you can’t afford to rely solely on the old standbys like internet job boards (although, naturally, they shouldn’t be ignored, either).

One way to increase the number of valid leads available to you is to ask your candidates whether they have friends or family who might be interested in a job opportunity. If this sounds like a desperate tactic, don’t worry—many positions get filled this way.

Simplify the Application – We’ve said this before, but it’s a particularly important consideration when it comes to high-volume recruiting: You need to streamline the application process. It’s imperative to collect as many applications as you realistically can, so don’t ask for lots of extraneous information—that might discourage candidates who are pressed for time.

In any event, your applicants likely won’t have a ton of work-related data that you could analyze, especially if you’re recruiting for entry-level positions.

Use Resume Parsing – You probably don’t have time to read every resume that arrives in your inbox. This is where a top-notch applicant tracking software package can save you—by giving you automated tools so you can retrieve pertinent data without the need to examine each and every resume yourself.