Surprise (Or Not), Hourly and High Volume (HHV) Recruitment Is Not Going Away 

According to HR.com’s State of High Volume and Hourly Recruitment, recruiters united on recruitment challenges in 2023. Whether you were an hourly or salaried recruiter; or a recruiter in a completely different industry like retail or hospitality–you were likely faced with similar daily challenges.¹ The good news for hourly and high volume recruiters, is that unlike their neighboring salaried recruiter friends facing record layoffs, there is tremendously more demand for hourly workers.² How? Simply put, sectors with hourly workers aren’t not as volatile during economic recessions, and employers are competing for quality candidates in a shrinking workforce.

Fortunately, it means HHV recruiters will be kept busy. Unfortunately, it also means their jobs to fill roles have become very difficult—with limited budgets, a small talent pool, and increasing demands from senior management. However, it is not all doom and gloom as we have started to see a few HR organizations start to test and learn new and existing HHV recruitment tactics.

Let’s dive in and see what we know so far.

What Organizations With Budget Are Learning

Let’s be forthright, not many of us have the budget to test new tools and AI in HHV recruiting. Most of us are lucky if we still have half our teams in 2024. This means we need to learn from enterprise organizations that have the budget and resources to test what works and what doesn’t work in HHV recruitment in 2024.

Key Learning #1 Diversification of complementary processes, policies and practices

Talent acquisition (TA) teams have heard all of these buzz phrases since the 2010s: improve employment branding, streamline the recruiting process, use AI technologies, offer more employee incentives, competitive wages…and so forth. During a time when the world saw record economic growth, these strategies were easier to implement… or de-prioritize. After all, employers were always hiring and candidates wanted to work. Now with the industry facing the Great Resignation, these strategies have come back to the forefront; but this time–in an unrelenting, mandatory way.³

Enterprise HR organizations in HHV recruitment have learned that you must diversify your recruitment tactics by testing an array of methods across all recruitment processes, policies, and practices. No single strategy or tactic will work unless the rest of the puzzle makes sense. For example, improving employee incentives might help with retention but it won’t be sustainable if you don’t improve the recruitment process. Increasing wages won’t work if it’s too difficult for candidates to apply or communicate with recruiters.

The key is to creatively balance recruiting technologies, services, and channels while constantly improving the candidate and recruiter experience… which leads us to the second learning.

Key Learning #2: There is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution; continued optimization is king

Enterprise organizations saw reduced applicants and higher turnover once they paused or slowed down on improving TA teams. Organizations can no longer rely on a one-size-fits-all solution like pre-COVID. In today’s reality, candidate behavior and attitudes are constantly changing. Not to mention, our recruitment teams themselves are constantly changing and this means lost institutional knowledge. It’s no wonder that we have to continue to optimize our existing processes, technologies, services, and channels. This could be in a variety of ways based on your HHV recruitment needs and industry sector. Some examples include:

• Increase the number of qualified candidates by outsourcing parts of the recruitment process so that it works in tandem with your in-house team
• Decrease applicant ghosting by offering virtual interviews and/or automating interview scheduling
• Reduce the number of assessments needed in the screening process
• Increase applicant volume by reducing the application length

It may be a daunting task to have to constantly optimize your recruitment process against a shrinking HHV workforce, but we only have to tackle it bit by bit. Pick the key metric you want to improve (time-to-fill, applicant volume) and work on making simple improvements. In a future blog, we will share optimization tactics for organizations with and without budgets.

Key Learning #3: Don’t overlook onboarding–make improvements now

Onboarding is often overlooked in hourly and high volume recruitment, but it’s become a critical part of the recruitment process for enterprise organizations. You don’t want to spend all this time, effort, and money on hiring hourly workers, only for them to quit in the first few weeks. The true cost of a bad employee onboarding could be in the millions for your organization. According to HR.com’s HHV report, 40% of new hires don’t show up for work and 54% quit in the first week. Even though hourly workers don’t need the extensive onboarding compared to a salaried position, there are still opportunities to provide a positive onboarding experience that reinforces their decision to join the team. In a recent survey by TalentBoard, they cited these common reasons employees quit:

• Lack of clarity on their roles and responsibilities or it was widely different from what they were told during the recruitment process
• Failure to introduce new hires to key team members
• Failure to answer initial questions in the first few weeks

In the same survey, successful organizations reached out to candidates prior to the first date by a text or call and that improved the candidate’s willingness to increase their relationship with their employer by 92%. Teams can also be transparent on how hourly workers can gain more responsibilities and get promoted into other roles. There are a number of ways for TA teams to improve onboarding, decrease quick quitting, and boost new employee morale.

Conclusion

We start 2024 in hourly and high volume recruitment with optimism as demand for hourly workers is not going away anytime soon. But a shrinking workforce with stiff competition has posed challenges for TA teams. It’s pertinent we learn from enterprise organizations that have the budget and resources to test a variety of tactics, technologies, and processes that we can then bring into our own organizations. Continued optimization is key for every organization as simply employing best practices is no longer the most effective strategy. In future posts, we’ll share more solutions that organizations with limited budget can try.

Stay updated with the latest trends and insights in hourly recruitment and connect with me on LinkedIn.

About Cameron Laker and Mindfield:

Mindfield is a pioneering force in Hourly Employee Recruitment, providing tailored solutions for businesses to easily attract and hire high-quality hourly workers. With deep industry expertise and cutting-edge technology, we make the hiring process simpler, more efficient, and more effective for HR and Hiring Managers.

Connect with Co-Founder Cameron Laker on Linkedin for quick tips and how-to’s or sign up to The Hourly Minute for more in-depth discussion.

¹https://www.hr.com/en/resources/free_research_white_papers/the-state-of-high-volume-and-hourly-hiring-2023_lj4k8dku.html
²https://issuu.com/hrdotcom/docs/talent_acquisition_excellence_july_2023/s/2848924
³https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/the-great-resignation-is-not-over/