Attracting workers for many types of businesses is getting very difficult in the post-COVID era. Employers are extremely competitive in hiring the best candidates from any talent pool. High-volume recruitment drives, such as those conducted by a mortgage staffing agency, could mean you’re quickly running out of high-quality talent. The same is true of the hotel, restaurant, and hospitality industry.
With the competition doing everything it can to snap up the best workers, businesses would do well to adjust their talent acquisition strategy accordingly. This could mean an increased focus on hiring hourly workers instead of full-time permanent employees. Here are some hiring tips that can work across a broad range of businesses that want to hire more workers on an hourly compensation:
Table of Contents
Pitch the Role with Enthusiasm
Hiring someone for an open role is never easy. Hiring someone for an hourly rate can be even harder, especially for entry-level roles. How can a business ensure better hiring success? Believing in the role and the value it offers is a good place to start. The candidates need to see the enthusiasm and serious attention from recruiters to be enthusiastic and serious themselves about the role. Unless businesses value their workers and communicate that value to incoming candidates, most recruitment efforts will fall flat.
Route Your Hiring Across Multiple Locations
Many businesses have multiple locations in a city, state, or business. This means that businesses may have to route their new hires accordingly. This involves being aware of talent overflows (or deficits) at each location and hiring candidates accordingly. There is also the candidate aspect to consider.
A long commute or relocation could discourage a new hire and may be counterproductive to your efforts. A centralized hiring system, however, could be more efficient at sorting and routing candidates for business needs. This could drive down the risks of both unsuccessful onboarding as well as subsequent attrition.
Focus on Hiring from Groups with Higher Unemployment
Hiring should always be equitable and fair. While you may find it harder to recruit among certain demographics, others may have high unemployment or underemployment rates. Hiring from the underemployed demographic can often offer businesses many valuable advantages.
The biggest advantage is access to candidates who are more motivated to acquire income or work. It can also become part of the brand identity for an employer. Businesses could find it easier to hire temps, permanent, and even contract-to-hire workers with a more favorable reputation among candidates.
Map Out Benefits, Growth, and Career Enhancement
Onboarding hourly workers will be a complex and difficult process. Retaining them could be even harder, especially if a business offers very little to their career or personal goals. Higher employee turnover rates are always bad, and they usually represent inefficiencies and flaws in workforce policies.
The businesses most successful at retaining hourly workers are the ones that offer good compensation, benefits, and a future. Nobody wants to work a dead-end job for the long term. As such, employers may have to realign the compensation and growth plans associated with hourly roles.
Always Ask Current Workers for Referrals
Existing workforces can be valuable ways to source new workers. Asking existing workers to refer people from their own network can supplement primary recruitment efforts. Moreover, nobody is a better ambassador for an employer than an existing employee. Their networks would be more interested in hearing the “inside story” from a familiar face than the usually embellished job descriptions.
It could also save businesses a lot of time and effort. Incentivizing the referral process could raise the chances of successful new hiring even more.
Reevaluate Older Applicants
Many businesses have a collection of applicants for just about every role advertised. Many of these pools are comprised of candidates who applied for earlier openings. However, they shouldn’t be excluded from consideration for a later role, simply because they were unsuitable for an earlier one. When hiring hourly workers in volume, businesses should always reevaluate rejected candidates in the context of a new hourly role.
Of course, this must never include workers terminated for disciplinary reasons. As an added precaution, businesses may also want to exclude candidates that have been the subject of more than one workplace investigation process.
Flesh Out Your Benefits Program
The right benefits program is a key factor in successful recruitment efforts. Paying better than the competition may seem like an expensive way to hire new hourly workers, but it is more likely to make a business seem like an appealing prospect.
The additional spending could very well translate into increased motivation and better output. Most performance appraisal methods should be able to tell businesses how well their benefits programs are working. Monitoring and tweaking them accordingly could help.
