Hiring the hourly workforce has always been a battle – a battle to recruit and hire the best talent faster than your competitors. But after over a year of adjusting strategies and implementing contactless talent management methods to comply with COVID restrictions, cities are reopening and businesses are ramping back up. The biggest challenge now is finding and retaining hourly workers.
So how can you use talent management technology to scale for high-volume hiring and boost applicant flow to beat the competition to the offer letter? We sat down with Adam Seubert, SVP of Product at TalentReef, to talk about some of the key innovations TalentReef has been releasing across its talent management platform to help location-based companies tackle high-volume hiring.
Q: There are some new recruiting and hiring obstacles as we come back from the pandemic – namely, applicant flow. What talent management tools or features can best help franchises struggling to boost applicant flow?
A: The primary focus of our spring product release is on recruiting, specifically the ability to quickly and easily adapt to changing market conditions and keep applicants engaged throughout the hiring process. We’ve developed a faster application, automated interview scheduling, and two-way text communications. We’ve seen great success, with an overall decrease in recruiting time of up to 84%.
Q: Let’s unpack those big feature releases. How does a faster application net more applicants?
A: We have spent time and effort conducting research with our customers on our application experience and have made some significant improvements. Our new configurable, mobile-first application process removes the requirement to have an account to apply, as well as any unnecessary information as part of the application. The result is our average time-to-apply has dropped to approximately 3 minutes. These improvements have also reduced applicant drop-off rates by up to 40%, providing up to 10x increase in applicant flow for some of our customers. In addition, we will soon be adding more features to further reduce application time, improve and add integrations to major 3rd party job boards and continue to invest in creating the best application process purpose-built for the hourly workforce.
Q: How does automated interview scheduling create a faster time-to-hire, and reduce no-shows?
A: The new TalentReef Interview Scheduling functionality allows applicants to choose from available interview times based on the hiring managers calendar or configured settings. It also allows HR and hiring managers to configure automated notifications, reminding managers and applicants of upcoming interviews and makes rescheduling for both parties simple – which greatly reduces no-shows.
Q: When it comes to communications with candidates, why is two-way communication better than something like a bot that collects information and sends it to the hiring manager?
A: We are investing a lot of development time on SMS and automated notifications which will allow our customers to be able to quickly engage with applicants and track the history of their communication with each specific applicant. The first step of that investment is adding functionality to allow hiring managers to send SMS messages directly to applicants through the TalentReef platform. This allows our customers to reach out to one or many applicants and ask qualifying questions, keeping them engaged throughout the hiring process by providing a personalized experience – something you can’t get with a bot. Hiring managers are also able to see if and when messages are received.
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When it comes to a tight labor market, you don’t have time to waste on a paper-based or disjointed, multi-platform process to get the job done quickly. Trusting an innovative talent management platform with your recruiting, hiring and retention strategy will enable you to compete more effectively in the increasingly complex hiring market and net more job applicants. See how you can build and manage great teams with TalentReef – the only platform purpose-built for location-based, high-volume hiring.
