Recruiting, hiring, and retaining the right people, at the right time, is essential to the success of your business. In order to run an effective hiring process, you first need to look at the type of recruiting you are doing. At a high level, you are recruiting two types of workers: high-volume (also considered hourly) or corporate. It’s important to understand their key differences, and how your process is going to change depending on which one you’re hiring.
A few examples of an hourly worker would be a cashier, grocery deliverer, waiter, truck driver, and the list goes on. These are jobs that require less prior experience, so they typically have a minimal online presence. They are also likely to work multiple jobs at once. Fountain's experience working with on-demand workers suggests they could have anywhere from 2-3 jobs at any given time.
A corporate employee is anyone that is salaried and hired to perform a specialized function within a company. This can range anywhere from an Account Executive to a Director of Engineering. Regardless of their occupation, these workers typically have a stronger online presence. They have detailed LinkedIn profiles, resumes tailored to specific roles, and their experience can be specific to a certain industry.
These differences change the way you screen and evaluate candidates throughout your hiring process.
Efficiency in different forms
Every recruiter wants their process to be efficient. But what does that mean?
Since corporate positions are more specialized and harder-to-fill, recruiters are typically only hiring between four or five jobs at any given time. With the national average of open requisitions per recruiter fluctuating between thirty to forty, hourly recruiters are going to have a much higher number of open positions.
To have an efficient corporate recruiting, it’s crucial to align the hiring team before a search. Each interviewer should have a clear understanding of what stage of the interview they’re involved in, and why. Without this alignment you run the risk of interviewers being unprepared for interviews, repeating questions, and inadequately vetting these candidates. A messy interview process is also leaving candidates with a poor impression of your company.
Now let's say you’re an hourly talent acquisition specialist. It's likely that you’re hiring for many of open positions, across many different locations.
You’re in full charge of the application, qualification, and hiring of these employees. An efficient process for you is going to be as simple and automated as possible while ensuring candidates are having a positive interview experience.
The best way to look at this is by identifying that corporate recruiting is going to be much more involved, strategic, and manual, while hourly recruiting is going to be much more individual, simple, and automated.
Let’s take a deeper look at each step.
It starts with the application
Regardless of the type of hiring you are going to be doing, both will start with an application.
In corporate recruiting, you are going to want a lot of information upfront. This will be an in-depth vetting of work experience, and there are a couple of areas you’ll be focusing on when looking at an application.
The first thing you’ll be looking for is relevance. Depending on the level of role, you’ll likely want to see some prior experience either in the role or in a similar industry. As you increase in seniority, this will be increasingly prevalent.
The next thing you’ll want to look for is a track record of success. For sales, it’s easy. Some variation of quota and metrics should give you an understanding of their success in previous roles. That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. What you should look for is their ranking on the team. More often than not, I’d rather move forward with a candidate that’s at 87% of quota while being the best of 8 reps, as opposed to a candidate who is at 110% of quota but the middle of the pack at their company. For roles outside of sales, a great indicator of success is tenure.
With this in mind, the last thing you’ll want to keep an eye out for is large gaps in employment. There are plenty of valid reasons to have a gap or two in your employment history, so you’ll want to look for patterns. If a candidate is consistently only working for one company between six months to a year, that should raise a few red flags.
With hourly, you’ll require significantly less information up front. Most workers in this segment don't have a resume, or it’s not applicable to the role. This is a high volume segment, where most of your efforts in the application stage should be around reducing the friction between application and getting them in the pipeline.
Be open-minded with their prior history. Oftentimes there are unnecessary barriers in place preventing you from making key hires. Using the barista example, is prior experience really necessary? With around 82 million workers being paid hourly, there are 500 thousand barista roles. While that may seem like a lot, you’re actually cutting yourself off from 99.4% of the workforce.
Consider alternatives to the traditional application process. Text-to-apply is becoming increasingly popular in the hourly recruiting space, with texts having a 98% open rate, compared to email at a 22% open rate. With 70% of hourly workers seeking work at multiple jobs, instituting this change will dramatically increase the number of candidates you’re able to get into your pipeline.
Now that you’ve determined this is a viable candidate, it’s time to further qualify them.
Both require qualification, but with a clear distinction
You now have a candidate in the pipeline. What are you looking for, and how are vetting for it?
For a corporate position, you’re going to have multiple stages and multiple stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. Candidates will go through an average of 3 rounds of interview, with that number increasing for more technical positions.
With hourly recruiting, you take a different approach. Considering 70% of hourly workers seeking work at multiple jobs, they value a simple interview process.
This is going to be more of a checklist of qualifications. Whether it’s certifications, car availability, or licensing, it really depends on the type of work they will be doing.
Are you assessing, or selling?
When in the final stages of recruiting, you can just as often be selling the candidate on the opportunity as much as you are assessing them.
With 73% of candidates being passive job seekers, and top candidates only being available for 10 days before getting hired, you need to move quickly for the right person.
This doesn't mean you should break your process, rather you should expedite it. That interview you scheduled for next Tuesday could probably happen this Friday. The average interview process is 22.9 days. Each step in the interview process contributes to the length, so reducing the time between steps will shorten your process and allow you to hire the best talent.
Hourly recruiting is very rarely going to have this component to the search. With most roles having a set compensation rate, you’re not going to be doing much negotiation. Here you will want to focus primarily on moving quickly and limiting steps.
High-volume recruiting is all about efficiency. Because individuals seeking hourly positions are typically applying for multiple positions, you need to move quickly on strong candidates.
Final Thoughts
Companies are often hiring a mixture of both hourly and corporate employees. If this is the case, you’ll need to utilize tools that can support both processes. With 60% of the workforce consisting of hourly workers, it is beneficial to find tools that remove friction. As someone that’s done their fair share of recruiting, it’s nearly impossible to successfully hire at volume and scale with corporate recruiting tools.
If your company hires for both hourly and corporate employees, with 70% of your workforce being hourly employees, doesn’t it make sense to utilize a tool that supports the majority of your hiring? It’s also much easier to add manual steps within an hourly recruiting tool that already allows a high level of automation, as opposed to trying to automate steps within a corporate recruiting tool.
Fountain is the Labor ATS for high volume hourly hiring that works smarter and harder for you.
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