3 Secrets to High Volume Hiring Success with Brazen from Neiman Marcus

Established in 1907, Neiman Marcus Group (NMG) is a key player in the realm of luxury retailing. Based in Dallas, Texas, individuals can find NMG's services at 36 Neiman Marcus locations, two Bergdorf Goodman stores and five Last Call outlets. The Greater Dallas/Fort Worth area is the biggest market region for NMG as five stores are located there, employing around 10,000 people from all parts of the country, making it a long-time player in the high-volume recruiting game.

And high-volume recruiting is more challenging than ever with recruiter bandwidth at an all-time low. To deal, many organizations have turned to technological solutions to improve their hiring results.

One of these was Neiman Marcus Group, which used virtual hiring events to hit their recruiting goals and deliver exceptional candidate experiences across the U.S.. In 2022 the hiring team was given an ambitious challenge — to find, screen and hire 300 sales associates in only 3 months, cover end-of-the-year seasonal hiring needs, and build up their talent pipeline for both their in-person and remote roles across the organization. And through their partnership with Brazen, they delivered! In just 3 hours, they interviewed more than 400 people across the country, setting new records of success in their hiring process.

From early talent attraction, to driving innovation across their national recruiting strategy, to expanding DEI programs, to adopting a cutting-edge hybrid-recruiting approach (you can learn all about it by watching the exclusive on-demand webinar recording here!), Neiman Marcus’ talent attraction team is a testament of the amazing things that can be achieved with virtual hiring events (particularly for high-volume hiring!). “Between September and October of last year, we hired 1,500 people to our stores, which we couldn’t have done without Brazen,” said Carolyn Attar, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager for Stores at the Neiman Marcus Group.

If you want to reach similar results in your high-volume hiring process, here are some tips you can integrate into your strategy in 2023.

1. Get your employer branding, reps, and jobs in front of more people

If your candidate sourcing is on-point but your internal processes aren’t optimized to support the high influx of prospective applicants as they enter your ATS, you are left with a huge problem. While expanding your team or increasing your budget may seem like likely answers, most TA teams don’t have the luxury of either, having to do more with less resources. That’s where a virtual recruiting platform comes in. “The biggest pain point that Brazen solves for Neiman Marcus is high-volume hiring and getting through a large number of candidates quickly. We don't have any other technology that can get us through screening hundreds of candidates in just a couple hours like we do with Brazen. That's where it has the greatest impact for me is that in a two-to-three hour period we can interview hundreds of people and quickly move forward with the top candidates,” Attar said.

2. Start conversations faster

Don’t limit face-to-face interactions to the tail-end of your hiring process. Better and more transparent communication is proven to pay off when it comes to building positive candidate relationships and reducing candidate ghosting at all stages in the hiring funnel. Virtual hiring events are FAST, accessible, convenient, and easy-to-attend alternatives to traditional in-person hiring events, giving a wide array of candidates many ways to stay in touch with recruiters and hiring managers before, during, and after the fact, such as via automated emails, video, audio, and text chat. Furthermore, documented interactions are collected under each candidate’s profile, allowing new representatives to know exactly where certain conversations left off for seamless transitions. As Attar said, “we brought Brazen on in the first place to help improve our high volume recruitment and we needed to be able to talk to more people and do it in a way that was efficient and effective.”

3. Use data to discover what’s really working (and what isn’t)

“The ROI we get from Brazen is a huge savings of our recruiters time,” claimed Attar. And this reduction in overall time-to-hire is particularly noteworthy because their team didn’t need any additional staff or resources to achieve it (other than the Brazen platform, of course!).

Our tip? Tie event performance to your hiring data to measure effectiveness. Brazen’s virtual hiring event platform lets you keep track of the number of registrants, attendees, chats, event attendance rates, and which of the candidates have moved on to the next stage. By tracking hiring data on top, it is also possible to measure chats-to-hires and easier to calculate the cost-per-hire, giving recruiting teams even more insight into what’s currently working in their hiring process and what could use some improvement down the road.

Bonus Tip: Use virtual recruiting technology to deliver stronger candidate experiences–at scale

“Brazen helps to elevate the candidate experience because it allows for a more human connection as opposed to the automated messages most candidates get from companies. Asking a candidate to join an event and come talk to a real person and allowing the candidates to ask questions results in more candidates showing up to interviews,” Attar said. 

In retail, this is a big advantage for stakeholders as well. Store managers are consistently kept on their feet with daily managerial tasks, so they don’t have endless amounts of time to devote to the recruitment process on top of their regular duties. Virtual recruiting events and technology allow them to make the most of their time–with considerably less effort!–and work alongside the hiring team to deliver more engaging, customized, and personal candidate experiences that lead to better, longer-lasting recruiting results.

Like this post? Try these!

• Scale High Volume Hiring with Virtual Recruiting Events

• 83% of Job Seekers Prefer Virtual Recruiting Events
• Work Smarter, Not Harder: Using Tech to Amplify Great Candidate Experiences

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