While the Department of Labor continues to report that approximately 60% of today’s employees are hourly workers, companies that hire this profile continue to be stumped in solving the mystery of hiring solid talent within the market parameters of wage and benefits and the impending ACA (Affordable Care Act) requirements.
Companies typically look at the “traditional data” related to their recruitment efforts when focused on improvement: different hiring ratios, websites for job postings and internal social media and marketing programs. While these initiatives do reveal insight that helps recruiting hourly applicants, organizations can go a bit deeper with other types of data and the supporting analysis to further improve the both the quantity and quality of hire.
Survey Says: recruitment industry survey results are pretty consistent over the years with the following key stats: full time job seekers are typically applying with a minimum of three different employers until they’re hired, they last about 72 hours in the pipeline if they haven’t received any communication from the potential employer and their retention rate averages 18-24 months. Part-timers are applying for positions with up to five potential companies simultaneously and last 24-32 hours in the pipeline if left unattended. If you’re reviewing applications a couple of times each week, you may be losing candidates simply because of the time lapse. Make sure candidates are at least phone screened within the first sixteen hours of application submission to ensure chances of interviewing them before they move onto the next opportunity.
Dissect the Drop Off Rate: in working with one organization, we discovered one of the most common reasons applicants were being disqualified was related to the established driving requirements, specifically that all front line associates be able to drive manual and have a minimum of five years of driving experience. Upon further consideration we realized we could change both the manual and number of years driving experience; literally overnight the percentage of applicants materially increased with this one small change. It’s not unusual for us in our work to find a direct correlation between the drop off rate and an internal policy that can at least be considered for modification to better the pipeline volume.
More is Better: an easy solution to improve the quality and speed of hours is to institute a Group Interview Program where the company representatives can interview several applicants within one session. These sessions can either be set on a timed basis, e.g., once or twice a week, or to complement mass hiring in the case of location openings. We’ve seen operators improve their hiring ratio from ten interviews yielding two hires to one interview of sixteen yielding 7 hires; a 44% increase in hires not to mention the hours hiring managers save every week in moving away from one on one interviews.
Are you interested in more information about improving your recruitment program? uDrive subscribers have access to tools and templates that can help. These can be found in the Recruitment and HR Tools sections of uDrive.
