According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hourly workers make up around 60% of the U.S. workforce. Many employers, however, do not have an adequate recruitment strategy to deal with these types of workers. Hourly workers’ turnover rate is estimated at around three and a half times higher than full-time workers. Therefore, having a recruitment strategy to hire hourly employees makes sense in order to reduce turnover and protect your company’s profits. It is important to have a separate recruitment strategy for both your salaried and hourly workers, in order to source and recruit the best candidates for each employment classification. The needs and desires of hourly employees are different than full-time employees. So you need to consider this when sourcing the best candidates.
Recruiting Hourly Employees
Customize your recruitment strategy to hire hourly employees
How to hire hourly employees? You must tailor your recruitment strategy according to your audience. The strategy that you use for recruiting hourly employees will look different from the strategy you use to recruit full-time employees or senior executives. For instance, you can use recruitment platforms like, LinkedIn to recruit for salaried positions and top-level managers. However, free job boards and social media like, Facebook, are better options in relation to sourcing and recruiting hourly employees. This is because less than 36% of hourly workers use LinkedIn or have a LinkedIn profile.
Use modern hiring technology for recruiting hourly employees
Modern hiring technology will provide the functionality to deal with the modern hiring needs of hourly employees. Hourly employees value flexibility as well as high pay when looking for hourly jobs. The low rate of unemployment means that hourly workers now have the freedom to get jobs that are more suitable to their skills, while maintaining a work-life balance.
Your modern hiring technology should be able to automate communication in order to provide the best candidate experience as well as enabling your recruiters to manage a high number of candidates more efficiently. A modern hiring workforce needs to be recruited quickly so your hiring technology should be able to cope with this pace and demand for recruiting hourly employees.
You can start hiring fast with Fountain. This type of smart hiring enables you to automate repetitive tasks, which allows you to spend more time on a one-to-one basis with candidates.
Hourly employees value a simple hiring process
Hourly employees are busy. Their time is precious and if they find that your application process is too lengthy, they will simply move onto the next recruiter, which will be your competitor. This means that it is imperative to have an application portal where candidates can submit their applications 24 hours a day.
If you are looking for ways to boost the performance of your application, download our ebook now for Five Ways To Improve Your Application Performance.
Write clear job descriptions to recruit hourly employees
Writing effective job descriptions ties-in with the busyness of job applicants. Your job application should be easy to skim. It should not include large words or vague industry terms. Your application should also be written in plain and understandable language. Your job description should clearly state the skills that are required, the experience that is needed and what the hourly employees’ duties are on a day-to-day basis. Providing a clear job description increases the chances that only suitable applicants will apply for the job. Otherwise, where there is ambiguity in the job description, candidates may just choose to apply, which will be a waste of resources, even if you are using an ATS system.
Emphasize your benefits to hire hourly employees
Because hourly employees for the most part do not benefit from packages that are given to full-time employees, like health insurance and vacation pay, you need to ensure that any perk you offer is front and center in the application process. For example, if you offer a wage that is higher than your competitors, make sure you emphasize this by putting it in bold. You can also highlight aspects, like flexible scheduling or any developmental opportunities where hourly employees can progress within your company if they choose. For instance, if you are hiring for a junior chef position for your franchise restaurant, you could emphasize that your company will provide financial support and time off for courses that will enable your junior chef to progress to becoming a head chef.
Job titles should be in plain English and searchable when recruiting hourly employees
Do you know what a beverage dissemination officer is? No. Then neither would people who are applying for this job. This job title is one of many listed in an article in Business Insider about weird job titles. For your information, a beverage dissemination officer is a bartender. Your job title is the first thing that job applicants will notice. Therefore, do not introduce confusion into your application process at such an early stage. This is because your hourly employees will not want to progress any further.
When recruiting and sourcing hourly employees, you need to do everything you can to make the process as smooth and clear as possible, as hourly employees will not spend extra time trying to figure out what you mean. Using everyday language to describe your jobs also helps with Google’s rankings. Most applicants use search engines to find jobs.
Choosing common words when recruiting hourly employees will help with search engine optimization so that your jobs could show up at the top of job boards or Google search engine. Although some companies may want to show the personality of their brand by having a quirky job title, this should not be at the expense of missing out on the best job candidates because they cannot understand what you are saying. If you want to inject some brand personality into your application, it is best to put it in the body and not in the job title.
Provide non-obvious forms of compensation when recruiting hourly employees
Offering a high wage is an important aspect of any job, and essential for hiring hourly employees. However, if you offer other compensation that is not linked to pay, you may still be able to source and hire the best hourly workers. For example, Walmart started to offer English lessons to Spanish-speaking workers while they were at work as an incentive for entry-level employees in the southern states. Walmart has recently expanded this service to include a free online school program. This offering has boosted Walmart’s reputation and enabled their corporation to be seen as a more employee-friendly place, as opposed to a corporation that does not value its workers.
Enhance your brand to hire the best hourly employees
An important part of your recruiting strategy for hourly employeesn should be tied to improving your brand’s image. Hourly employees will make a decision as to whether to work for your company long before you advertise a job listing. Where your company has a positive brand image, hourly employees will be more enthusiastic about working for you. A strong brand image could be built by using social media to highlight success stories of other hourly employees and is great when it comes to recruiting them. It could also be built by emphasizing any work that your company does with nonprofits and the ways that your company invests in every single worker, including hourly employees.
Ensure mobile optimization for recruiting hourly employees
Your recruitment strategy for hourly employees should include the hiring technology that you will use to source, hire, manage and communicate with your hourly employees. The modern hiring software you use should include mobile optimization of the application process. Most people search for jobs using their mobile devices, irrespective of the type of occupation.
This means that it is vital to enable a mobile aspect of your application when hiring hourly employees. Fountain is a mobile-first software, which enables you to provide your hourly employees with an enhanced experience. It also enables your recruiters to effortlessly sort, screen and onboard successful candidates. Our recruiting technology is built with mobile devices in mind. There is no need for apps, logins or desktops. All our functionality is fully-optimized for most of the popular mobile browsers, so you can switch between your mobile device and your laptop while assessing and reviewing job applications.
Make applications as easy as possible to recruit hourly employees
Hiring hourly employees needs to be a simple and streamlined process. It has been found that conversion rates can be boosted by keeping your application process to under five minutes . When describing your job application, you can include prompts like, “It will take you less than five minutes to complete.” This prompt encourages hourly employees to complete the application, as they realize that it will not take too much of their time.
Say bye to emails and start using SMS to better recruit hourly employees
Email may not be the most efficient way to communicate with hourly employees. When formulating a recruiting strategy for hourly workers, you need to use communication techniques that will make it more efficient for your recruiters and increase the rate of engagement. Some hourly employees may not have access to email due to occasionally being in areas with no Wi-Fi. However, when you use SMS, this means that your potential hourly employees will always receive your messages.
Your modern hiring software should include the capacity to provide SMS either on a one-to-one basis or at scale. Fountain provides SMS messaging to send your qualified candidates automated messages when they apply. This communication provides a great impression of your company and enhances your brand. Your hourly employees will also continue to receive text messages and emails (if you choose) as they go through the hiring process. These messages could include prompts to:
- Upload documents.
- Schedule interviews.
- Attend events.
Utilize analytics to improve your hiring process for hourly employees
You need a recruiting system in place to measure and monitor important hiring metrics such as time to hire and cost to hire. Using a modern hiring technology platform will enable you to analyze different aspects of your recruitment strategy for hiring hourly employees.
For example:
- How long it takes your candidates to go through the hiring pipeline.
- What is the most effective type of platform?
- Which of your recruiters are managing the most applicants at the quickest rate?
Source and recruit hourly employees more intelligently
You should include in your hourly employee recruiting strategy ways to make your sourcing, recruitment, management and onboarding smarter and faster.
You can use Fountain’s Boost to hire more qualified candidates at a faster rate. It is simple. All you need to do is let us know how many hourly employees you need and we will recommend a budget for you. We will distribute your job opening to free and paid job boards and platforms for you. This smarter recruitment and hiring technique helps you to receive more applications with one click of a button. You also get to save time as we post your applications to all the relevant job boards. Most importantly, you can review your applications in one place as opposed to logging into different job boards and tracking multiple systems.
Conclusion: Recruiting hourly employees
Generally, hiring hourly employees can be challenging. However, implementing a sourcing and recruitment strategy, will make this much easier. Hourly employees have different needs so your hiring strategy should include the use of the best tools to help to meet those needs. Using Fountain, you can hire hourly employees at scale using the latest technology, like automation and SMS messaging to provide the best candidate experience.