Hourly Employees – Three Key Tactics to Improve Hiring Results

Hourly Employees – Three Key Tactics to improve hiring results

In 2021 Red Seat started a new service, Fractional Recruiting.   Our offering was met with significant client demand from companies needing help with recruiting and hiring hourly employees.  It is an understatement that the current market for hourly employees is highly competitive.  Good candidates are difficult to come by, and no-shows for interviews are standard fare.  

We found that our proven approach to retained recruiting and hiring provided a great foundation when it came to hiring hourly employees.  To get the job done we felt we needed to re-work and refine our approach.  The rework, it turns out, was an amplification of the things we already do well and refinement of our proven principles of hiring.  Here are a few of our key learnings:     

#1 Sell your company.  Sell your job. 

Hourly labor and technical talent want to work for great companies that take care of their employees and pay competitive wages.  This past year we worked with our Fractional Recruiting clients to define and refine their hiring message.  Every ad, every marketing message, needs to answer the candidate question ‘why do I want to work there’.  We learned not to bury the message or dress it up in fancy wording.  Our best ads explained to prospective candidates in an honest and straightforward way tangible reasons why they should apply to the position.    

To get to ‘why does someone want to work here', is to find the heartbeat of why your employees love your company and then communicate that ‘why’ in your job ad.  Having a job ad that communicates why a candidate wants to work at your company is the single most dramatic thing you can do to increase resume traffic.  We know this because our clearly written ads that get at the heart of why our client companies are great places to work have proved very successful at increasing quality resume traffic.

#2 Advertise Smart

While Indeed.com is a necessary resource for advertising and sourcing candidates, many of our clients have overspent on this dominant resource and are unaware of, or have underutilized, key tools on Indeed.com’s platform.  Spending to sponsor ads on Indeed.com is a part of almost all job marketing plans, though we have found that the tools on Indeed.com to find and reach out to candidates is where success lies.  (Interested in a quick tutorial?  Call us for a no-charge review of the top 3 ways to get the most out of Indeed.com without spending a fortune.) 

Spending wisely includes identifying other free and low-cost resources to find potential candidates.  The job advertising market is constantly changing, and popular sites vary by geography.  Each position we work on has a different twist that changes up how we go to market.  This past year we have found that sites where we can invite candidates to apply are the most effective, and utilizing social media is a stealth tactic that is winning us increased resume traffic.  

#3 Step three: Speed and efficiency 

In days gone by, the time to hire of 2 – 3 weeks was a quick turnaround.  Today’s hiring market requires immediate action.  For hourly, technical, and even for many staff-level positions, our goal is to contact applicants within 24 hours and get them to our client company for an interview within 72 hours of receiving a resume. 

If your hiring process is not bullet-train fast, now is the time to sit down and figure out how to cut out unnecessary steps and condense the timing of the process.  Start with how you receive resumes and who reviews them, refine the questions you need to ask, commit to ensuring key interviewers’ availability, and have your offer process ready to go.  There is a direct correlation between the speed at which our clients effectively execute the hiring process and their success at securing new hires.  A one-day lag at any point in the process exponentially increases your chances of losing a candidate to another company.  

In 2022, we expect that the market will continue to change, constrict, and generally require new tactics and solutions to find and secure quality talent.  We’ll continue to keep a close pulse on the market, revise our approach as needed, and develop new solutions to best serve our clients in filing jobs that keep their businesses thriving.  We are always interested to hear about your hiring challenges and to offer insight into how we can help you get the job done or ideas that you can implement today to help get candidates through your door.  For more information, check out our website www.redseat.com, or call (952) 893-0020.