With today's low unemployment rates, businesses often struggle to attract and hire talent regardless of position. Many companies are finding that for high-volume, hourly hiring in particular, where technology driven applicant flow models once provided sufficient talent, they can no longer meet their hiring needs. Companies are challenged with attracting more candidates to apply and reducing the fallout of candidates once they enter the application process.
In capacity constrained markets, reducing candidate fallout is often the only feasible approach to meeting hiring goals without compromising quality of hire or resorting to much more costly recruiting strategies such as increased wage rates or relocation programs. With over 50% of our headcount focused on hourly hiring, PSG Global Solutions works with our clients in capacity constrained markets to attract additional applicants and reduce fallout.
Increasing Hires Using the Existing Talent Pool
Fallouts are not a deficiency of the workforce itself, but simply a byproduct of the "War for Talent". While qualified talent is available in many metropolitan labor pools, these candidates often have multiple offers from competing employers, resulting in increased fallout as the candidate progresses through each prospective employer's recruiting processes.
Some large organizations react to the problem by attempting the difficult feat of adding more candidates to the top of the funnel. A more effective approach is to increase the efficiency of the funnel while building and nurturing relationships with each applicant to reduce fallout as they progress through the recruiting funnel.
Strategically investing in activities designed to keep candidates interested and ultimately get them hired faster can drive down a company's overall cost per hire and prove more effective than simply expanding candidate sourcing at the top of the funnel.
One of our Fortune 50 clients was having difficulty nurturing industrial workers through the hiring lifecycle to fill close to 5,000 open positions for an anticipated production surge. The client contemplated investing more money into their baseline process flow to add more candidates to the funnel, but the projected costs were far beyond their desired budgets. Working with PSG Global Solutions to reduce candidate fallout, they were able to fill their open positions at well below anticipated costs.
Before using PSG's support, bringing 5,000 candidates through the hiring lifecycle would have cost close to $1M. Once we worked with the client to design a new process for managing candidates through the application and placement process, our team of offshore recruiters was able to implement recruitment funnel strategies that onboarded the necessary additional hires at a cost per incremental hire 40% lower than their baseline cost per hire. Being more attentive to candidate engagement allowed us to meet hiring targets and save close to $350K in a capacity constrained market moving more candidates successfully through the funnel, meeting client hiring goals, and saving our client money.
Funnel management activities for this client included the following activities:
- Hiring Event Calls PSG recruiters called candidates that had been invited to job fairs to get them excited about the event by effectively communicating the client Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and confirming their attendance.
- New Hire Orientation PSG recruiters called new hires who had been extended offers to confirm their acceptance and availability to attend their orientation, answering any logistics related questions to ensure they make it to the training location.
New Approaches to Increase Applicant Pool
Keeping your recruitment funnel supplied with hourly professionals is becoming more challenging. Marketing campaigns, job postings, and hiring events that once guided a regular supply of hourly workers into large and well-respected companies now fail to yield the required volume of applicants. Many of the sourcing techniques that were once exclusive to the realm of professional staffing are now needed to fill industrial recruiting pipelines. These strategies include both active and passive sourcing on job boards as well as multi-channel candidate engagement to generate interest and drive increased applicant flow.
If done onshore, these sourcing techniques can significantly increase the cost per hire for applicants added to the funnel with active and passive sourcing techniques. By leveraging offshore resources and multi-channel candidate engagement techniques, companies can drive down the cost per hire by over 50% compared to onshore resources using more traditional sourcing and screening techniques.
Some approaches PSG has developed working with our clients include the following:
- Applicant Processing and Screening Before we focus on candidate funnel management, our offshore recruiters go through the process of evaluating, screening, and scheduling applicants for face to face interviews at client locations with onsite client recruiters.
- Candidate Outreach If there is a lack of initial applicants, our offshore recruiters proactively address the shortage. We review our clients' ATS and mine job boards to guide our outreach strategies. Leveraging multi-channel contact methods, our team sources new candidates and generates additional applicants.
- Onboarding One of the most crucial legs of the hiring lifecycle is the final stretch. Our offshore recruiters reach out to candidates about start dates and manage onboarding processes to prevent costly candidate fallout and lower cost per incremental hire.
- Rapid Response Support PSG provides call center support to rapidly respond to applicants as well as support calls to branches. Calling an applicant within 15 minutes of receiving their application typically results in a 50% connect rate compared to the industry standard connect rate of about 15%. Even then, applicants might be called within hours or days of the application receipt. Additionally, PSG resources can handle all calls to the branches, enabling branch resources to focus on higher value activities with candidates at the branch.
By implementing funnel management activities and new strategies in candidate attraction, companies can meet hiring needs in a low unemployment environment while realizing a better ROI for their investments.
Want to increase the effectiveness of your applicant driven recruiting process while lowering your cost per hire?
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