Is your business being attacked by the inability to fill your hourly jobs? Do you feel as if you are waging war against the competition to fill your hourly jobs? Without these critical hires in place, production is stifled, customer service suffers, and delivery of your product may literally fail.
Companies have a hard enough time meeting the needs of their core business, and they don’t need the challenges of hiring hourly eating up their time, money, and resources. They often just wish there was a magic bullet to recruit hourly employees. Unfortunately, there is no perfect pool of hourly job seekers waiting to be reached out to. Yet, there are solutions. Real solutions. There are solid and repeatable ways to gain a competitive advantage with your recruiting process.
Want to know how? Here are three steps that you MUST have in place to win:
1. Advertise Intelligently – Know the Right Sources for Hourly Talent
2. Engage Hourly Talent on their Terms
3. Win the War with Communication
1. Advertise intelligently
It’s safe to assume that you do not have unlimited dollars to spend on recruiting your hourly employees. Most companies waste huge amounts of money on hourly job advertising, posting generically to job boards like Indeed, ZipRecruiter or Monster, hoping for successful outcomes. Most hiring managers would admit this strategy is expensive and often fails to yield the desired results. Unless you have visibility to the relevant data, it is impossible to know when to post, where to post, what job title or description to use. What works for salary does not work for hourly, and good sources differ by geography. For example, what works in Atlanta may not work in Pittsburgh.
You are wasting your company’s money if you advertise on job boards and don’t analytically track by market, by job, and what sources work best, in real time. Further, you are wasting your company’s money if you don’t leverage all non-paid sources aggressively, including Google and Facebook. One simple tactic to employ this strategy is to recruit your customers! They are familiar and loyal to your brand and could be potential candidates. Another smart move is to enhance your Facebook job advertising with text to apply codes. In addition, you can leverage those same text to apply codes for referrals, on now hiring signs, flyers, job fairs, etc.
If you have not developed the technology or tools to advertise intelligently, your job advertising process can be manual and overwhelming. You should take a look at solutions that can automate posting for you. A pay-per-performance model is a great solution to help if you can’t manage the demands of posting manually. Once your advertising strategy has been addressed, you will begin to see better results for your dollars spent.
2. Engage hourly talent on their terms
Your hourly candidates are mobile and you better be too! Most companies assume that they have a mobile apply process, but just because someone can technically apply to your job from a phone, does not mean it’s easy to complete. In fact, the opposite is probably true. Your mobile apply experience may actually be much worse than your regular online process and could be a reason you struggle to get candidates.
Here are a few things to consider:
- How many steps does it take to get to the actual application?
- Can you upload a resume from your phone without adding your LinkedIn profile? Remember: the vast majority of hourly workers don’t have LinkedIn.
- Does the application reflect the duties of the specific position?
- Does the application process represent your brand well?
- How long does the page take to load?
Ideally, you should have a short and engaging application that’s easy for a job seeker to complete. Don’t just stop at mobile. Offer new apply avenues that enhance your brand. As an example, some new and popular methods are Text to Apply and Facebook Messenger Apply. It’s all about giving job seekers more options and, as a result, you will see a drastic increase in your candidate volume.
3. Win the war with communication
The first company to reach a candidate is most likely to get the hire. Speed of recruiting is simply critical. It is the difference between winning and losing the war.
The best advertising and engagement strategies are rendered worthless if you don’t win the war of communication. The good news – it’s simple! The best way to reach those candidates is through text message. In the hourly targeted recruiting market, over 90% of viable candidates will respond within minutes if you reach out to them immediately. Do you know the average time it takes your team to reach out to a candidate after they’ve applied to a position?
Jobalign data shows that this response rate drops off materially in the first 24 hours, and further after two days. Most companies do not track the average time it takes to initially contact candidates, and if they do, it is typically greater than two days. Not only is this outcome a waste of money, but frankly it does damage to your brand if you are not responsive and polite to inquiring candidates.
But how is this done at scale, hiring hundreds or thousands of hourly workers? How is this done with multiple recruiters working simultaneously on the same pool of hires? How is this done with regulatory compliance?
First, recruiters should not be using their personal phone for text based recruiting. Buying company phones for your HR department is a pricey solution and is not compliant. An enterprise-grade platform that allows equal access for applicants via text-based communication, has the security that your IT departments demand as well as the auditing function that your legal team would require, is the solution. Emerging technologies like Jobalign have built enterprise-grade texting tools to help communicate with candidates more effectively.
Win the war!
These three simple steps will assure that you out maneuver your competition, and keep your business running smoothly. Hourly recruiting doesn’t need to be so hard, but in our experience, you must follow each of these steps without fail if you want to win!
At Jobalign, we make it our job to help you win this war in hourly hiring. It is our mission. If you are interested in learning more about advertising to hourly candidates, engaging hourly candidates on their terms, and putting text solutions in place to out-communicate the competition– please reach out to us at Jobalign!