5 Tips for Improving Your High Volume Staffing Strategy
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hourly workers make up about 60% of the total U.S. workforce. That’s nearly 82 million people, and in today’s new “gig economy” that number is rapidly increasing. However, you’ll be surprised to hear that most employers don’t have an adequate staffing strategy, or any strategy at all, for hourly and high-volume staffing.
Here are 5 tips for developing and improving your high-volume staffing strategy:
- Leverage the Right Technology
- Improve Your Candidate Engagement
- Keep Quality in Mind
- Consider Leveraging an RPO Partner
- Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There are some misconceptions when it comes to the hourly employee. A hiring manager might think, “they’re all replaceable” or “I can hire anyone off the street.”
Even if those things were true, the truth is hourly employee turnover rate is estimated to be 3.5 times higher than full-time workers. Without a strategy to increase retention and make employee replacement more efficient, the cost of turnover will start to eat away at your bottom line.
Let’s look more closely at those 5 tips to improving your high-volume staffing strategy:
#1 | Leverage the Right Technology
In today’s fast-paced environment, you can no longer get by without the right technology to propel you forward. For high-volume staffing, this means a candidate management platform that can:
- track stages of the hiring pipeline
- automate elements of the selection process
- short-list candidates for hiring managers
There are various tools on the market that also provide pre-employment assessments or “job matching” technology that could be useful, depending on your need.
#2 | Improve Your Candidate Engagement
Technology is not only helpful for automating tasks, it’s also being used to build up and nurture relationships with candidates over time. Some candidates may not be the right fit for a role you have right now, but they might be in the future. Keeping in touch with them increases the chance they’ll turn to your company for employment first.
#3 | Keep Quality in Mind
Although you need to hire a large number of people, and at times it may feel like your company is a revolving door, you shouldn’t throw quality completely to the wayside. In fact, screening for transferable skills such as active learning or communication should be at the forefront of your interview process.
Specific hard skills can always be taught. However, these types of soft skills are invaluable. An optimized recruitment process will help you screen for the right skills to spot qualified candidates faster and weed out the less-qualified ones.
#4 | Consider Leveraging an RPO Partner
A recruitment processing outsourcing (RPO) partner can help plan and execute your talent strategy in an efficient and cost-effective manner. It’s particularly useful during last-minute and urgent hiring needs.
In addition to scalability and cost savings, an RPO partner will be your eyes and ears on the job market. They monitor trends and collect market intel that can help inform your overall strategy and influence important decisions.
#5 | Track Key Performance Indicators
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical indicators of progress that keep your organization focused on operational improvement. Based on what your business goals are, you’ll choose which KPIs make sense to track and analyze.
In this case, knowing how long each stage of your recruitment and high-volume hiring process takes will help see where there are bottlenecks and where to make improvements. The “time-to-hire” metric is a big one to track, as it’s directly linked to cost. The longer you take to hire, the more it’s going to cost.
High-volume recruiting doesn’t have to feel like a never-ending chore. If you have the right tools and strategy in place it can be a quite pleasant experience for both candidates and employers.
