Even small businesses need a brand identity to attract top talent in the job market. The purpose of recruiting is to make that brand attractive to potential candidates. A strategy without clear purpose can send mixed messages during the recruitment process. Consider some of the following strategies to help focus your message.
Two Main Recruitment Strategies
Recruitment marketing can be narrowed down into two strategies, according to Lori Syliva of Rally Recruitment Marketing:
Adding more candidates into the top of the funnel, or
Getting more candidates to make it to the bottom of the funnel
Depending on the needs of your company, you may not be attracting the right kind of talent (top of the funnel). Or, you may be losing quality candidates showing interest (bottom of the funnel) because there are parts of your recruiting process are weak.
“The key,” says Sylvia, “is identifying where your biggest gaps are and focusing your strategies there. By zeroing in on the top, middle or bottom of the funnel—or all!—you can make a meaningful impact on your hiring outcomes.”
Essential Recruiting Tactics
With all the budget in the world, you could host large industry events, buy spots in nationwide advertising, and an active mail campaign. But even on a smaller budget, you can maximize your recruiting dollars by spending more effort and less money:
Internal recruiting. Sometimes the best candidate for the job already works for you. Hiring from within saves time and money. Current employees know the culture, require less training, and can be a valuable asset in a new position.
Employee referrals. Employees are effective ambassadors for your company. Referrals are hired at a rate of about 30 percent versus 7 percent by other methods. Developing an effective employee referral program with incentives takes some effort, but the results can lead to higher retention numbers and recruits that come in with company knowledge to start.
Alternative interviews. You can become known as the company who doesn’t just ask the same 10 interview questions as everyone else. Creative interview strategies include portfolio presentations, case studies and problem solving, role playing, or group interviews.
Applicant tracking software. One of the best ways you can spend your recruitment budget is on robust applicant tracking software like ApplicantStack. With integrated tracking, messaging, and sorting, you have all the candidate data at your fingertips.
Candidate Outreach
The tone you set in your recruiting communication can go a long way towards attracting top talent. Consider the following best practices for sending emails.
Be concise
Aim for 150 – 200 words, and always proofread before you hit send. Spell-check can catch spelling mistakes, but it won’t catch misused words that are spelled correctly. Some people find using an LLM like ChatGPT helpful as a proofreader or editor. Simply enter the text of your drafted email, and review the results for clarity and corrected grammatical errors. Make sure the content is accurate before you hit send.
Use a thoughtful subject line
Most of us scan email subjects quickly, so you want to be sure your email stands out and warrants a stop. Avoid cliches and phrases easily caught by spam filters.
Maintain a consistent voice
Though multiple members of the hiring team may be involved in recruiting emails, it’s valuable to generate an in-house style guide so the voice always sounds consistent. Again, AI may be a helpful tool for maintaining a consistent and professional tone.
Use a warm and engaging tone
Warm and engaging doesn’t mean either casual or overly jargon-filled. Your goal is to sound like a real person. Jenna Kalinsky from OneLitPlace suggests this exercise: “The best way to do this is to visualize the person to whom you’re writing. See their face, imagine them laughing at something you said. Then write to them from that feeling. (Even if they aren’t your favorite person, or you’ve never met them, imagine a person on the other side of your words. It helps humanize and warm your tone measurably).”
Personalize beyond the candidate’s name
Addressing someone by name is the bare minimum; how else can you foster recognition? Consider how you became introduced to them and mention that briefly – the name of a shared connection or a project you’re familiar with, for example.
Avoid pressure language
Avoid falsely urgent or overly sensational phrases like “this position won’t last,” “what are you waiting for,” “you’ve been selected for an opportunity of a lifetime,” or “you’re the winner.” Instead, use language that shows respect for the candidate’s intelligence. Spell out the opportunity in clear, concise language and include a call to action such as “after you read over the job description, I’d love to set up a call to discuss next steps.”
Automated Tools in Recruiting
HR professionals are discovering the power of automated tools to “augment and automate manual, repetitive tasks while offering personalization and data insights throughout the hiring process,” says Phenom’s Monica Montesa. “AI is the science of training machines to simulate human intelligence and develop systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.”
AI is not meant to replace human recruiters, contrary to some common beliefs. Instead, AI tools automate some of the time-consuming recruiting tasks like screening and scheduling. By removing some of the tedious aspects of hiring, you can free up human labor for more strategic, big-picture goals. Montesa suggests three helpful possibilities:
Sourcing: AI-powered matching and scoring capabilities identify the best-fit candidates automatically.
Screening: Candidates are ranked based on predefined criteria to streamline shortlisting.
Scheduling: AI chatbots and calendar integrations coordinate interviews efficiently.
Effective recruitment requires a multi-pronged approach. By developing your voice and taking advantage of all available technology tools, you can focus your recruitment message and bring the right candidates to your door. ApplicantStack makes it easier to manage the hiring process and find top candidates. Plus, onboarding tools streamline
For many job seekers, the prospect of working for a small business offers a lot. Small businesses have an earned reputation for culture, pace, and type of work that can feel refreshing when compared to a large corporation. Thus, attracting and hiring such applicants is a high priority for small businesses with open positions. While your small business can’t compete with the Googles of the world for certain types of work, you can optimize your hiring process by finding effective ways of speeding it up.
Causes of Slow Hiring in Small Businesses
Jen L’Estrange reports that while “31% of small business owners reported open positions they couldn’t fill, and 50% said they were hiring or trying to hire,” it’s also true that “44% of owners said they saw few or no qualified applicants for the roles they were trying to fill.” The friction on the applicant side is just as painful: qualified applicants meet challenges getting through AI filters, apply to hundreds of jobs to get one interview, and find networking less effective than before.
Given these struggles, identifiable issues contribute to the overall sense of frustration on both sides of the hiring process.
Too Much Focus on Quality of Hire
While it’s important to find qualified and capable candidates, small businesses can overreact to historical hiring failures and spend too much time seeking out the perfect fit, dismissing fine candidates in search of something better.
Overwork and Burnout in Hiring Staff
As small businesses grow and evolve, people may take on multiple roles to cover new responsibilities. You may end up with hiring tasks spread out among a disparate group of workers who also have other jobs, causing delays in coordination and communication.
Weak Job Descriptions
Recycled job descriptions, overreliance on AI, and vague language and clichés can cause confusion and even bad feelings if candidates find the job description doesn’t accurately reflect the job’s responsibilities. This sends you back to the beginning of the hiring process.
Excessive Interviews
Interview scheduling can be a challenge for companies with multiple people involved in the hiring process. Candidates are likely to be at some stage in the interview process with other companies, and they want to feel their time is valued. Overdoing the number or length of interviews can be a turnoff and prolong the process.
Cultural Fit Concerns
One of the advantages of working for a small business is the camaraderie and collaborative atmosphere that develops with a smaller team. That can also be a roadblock to hiring if you worry too much about how a candidate may fit into the culture.
Financial Uncertainty
Small businesses may find that original hiring plans don’t fit within new budget realities, leading to setbacks or delays for candidates already in the pipeline.
Unsuitable Technology
While small businesses may not have the budget or desire to adopt every new technology on the market, resistance to updating hiring technology can hold you back and lead to unnecessary delays in hiring.
Real Costs of a Slow Hiring Process
SHRM estimates the average cost of hiring at around $4,700, but some businesses report it can be three times that when you factor in additional costs. Some of these costs are a direct result of taking too long in the hiring process:
Lost Candidates: When small businesses can’t act quickly on a candidate, they can lose that potential hire to another company. This resets the clock on finding a new candidate, costing time, money, and emotional toll.
Additional Hiring Responsibilities: When managers and department leaders take on HR tasks, their energy is diverted from other projects that may directly affect productivity and the company’s bottom line. Delays and setbacks can compound these results.
Vacancy Costs: Unfilled roles can cost as much as hiring a new person, and that number can skyrocket if the position is revenue-generating. Plus, unfilled positions take an emotional toll on employees who take on additional responsibilities, eroding stability and potentially leading to further vacancies.
Automated Solutions to Speed Up Hiring
Adopting software that automates hiring processes can be the most important tool in overcoming slow hiring. ApplicantStack automates writing and posting job descriptions to job boards, sorts applicants by keywords, provides a communication framework that uses the candidate’s preferred method, and keeps a running checklist of tasks with reminders so each member of the hiring team knows where each candidate stands in the process. With onboarding and payroll integration, your new hire can hit the ground running without delay. These tools take away hours of manual task management and free up your time and energy to focus on the human side of hiring: bringing the right person to join your team.
Candidate drop-off is a problem that often gets overlooked in small business recruiting. Understanding this important metric can give you insight into a candidate’s application experience. It can also help you identify and make changes to keep them engaged and excited about working for your company.
Problems and Solutions in Small Business Recruiting
Prospective candidates form opinions about your company immediately when submitting an application. If you haven’t scrutinized your process recently, consider some of the following common friction points. These often cause job seekers to give up before completing their applications, along with some solutions:
Problem: Lengthy applications
Indeed found that 49 percent of applicants agree that employer applications are too long and complicated. Most people looking for work have developed a detailed resume, and requiring the same information in an application form can feel repetitive and tedious. Asking for personal information, such as a social security number, at the application stage can feel like a violation.
Solution: Require only the most important information on the initial application. Use a candidate’s resume and/or a cover letter to learn more about the details. Save detailed questions or sample work for the interview process.
Problem: Outdated technology
Modern job seekers often handle business on their phones. An application process that’s not mobile-friendly may prevent someone from filling it out at all. People looking for jobs often fill out multiple applications and lack patience with glitchy websites, slow page loads, or sites that don’t work across all browsers.
Solution: Create a minimal, mobile-friendly application with clear instructions and a user interface that’s easy to read. From the beginning, prepare the applicant for what’s coming: the number of questions, any required documents to upload, and the estimated time to fill out, and display a progress bar once they start.
Problem: Unclear next steps
As soon as they hit submit on an application, job seekers want to know where they stand. They want to know the next steps in the process, how long each step takes, and what time commitment may be required. Little to no initial feedback can feel like a form of rejection, and their experience can affect their enthusiasm about working for your company.
Solution: On the submission confirmation page, provide an estimate of the typical timeline for your hiring process. This helps job seekers evaluate whether the timeline is a good fit for their professional goals. It could read something like this: “Thank you for your application. We will review it within 7 business days and send a response. Our typical hiring process includes two rounds of video interviews, followed by a site visit. We try to accomplish those interviews within 4 to 6 weeks, but when the schedule varies, we will keep you informed at each step.” Send the same information via the candidate’s preferred communication type, email or text.
Problem: Slow follow-up
A variety of factors can contribute to delayed follow-up on applications in small businesses: understaffed and overworked hiring managers, an overwhelming number of applicants, technology that poorly organizes applicant data, and inefficient communication systems. Job seekers aren’t responsible for behind-the-scenes troubles, and yet they often suffer the consequences, leading to frustration and missed opportunities.
Solution: When you provide an estimated timeline for communication milestones, stick to it or send messages indicating any changes to the timeline. Use warm, professional language that conveys interest and encourages continued engagement. Indeed’s survey reports that over half of job seekers research the company before applying, including employee reviews and applicant experience. Prioritize communication, and your company will be known as one that didn’t keep job seekers in the dark about their place in the process.
How an Applicant Tracking System Can Help
Knowing how users experience your application process is the first step toward building something robust, intuitive, and streamlined on the back end. Recruit testers to walk through every step of the process, and report back on bottlenecks, errors, and frustrating experiences. You’ll discover which data points are most vital and use an applicant tracking system like Applicant Stack to seamlessly organize every potential candidate.
ApplicantStack features a customizable interface, where you create a profile for each candidate and a series of actionable steps to keep the process moving quickly and efficiently. Automation tools help you search for valuable keywords to categorize and prioritize the most promising candidates. Communication occurs within the software, with delivery to the candidate’s preferred format and clear cues for pending and completed tasks.
Even small corrections in your hiring process can make a big difference in avoiding abandoned applications. Adopting streamlining and automation tools can remove some of the burden from hiring managers, and recruit top talent to your business. Explore how ApplicantStack can transform the process and reduce candidate abandonment rates.
Over half the workforce in the United States is comprised of hourly employees. In 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that number as 80.5 million workers aged 18 and older, and many industries rely on hourly employees for maximum efficiency. Businesses that hire hourly workers at scale may face common challenges, but employing best practices can help overcome them.
What Industries Typically Hire Hourly Employees at Scale?
Industries that use hourly workers as the backbone of their workforce include:
Health care
Retail
Hospitality
Restaurants
Manufacturing
Construction
About 80 percent work in “service” industries: serving food, cleaning, repairing cars or homes, or providing customer care; the other 20 percent is made up of “industrial or goods-producing” industries: construction, manufacturing, food harvesting, or mining. These industries rely on hourly labor to staff multiple shifts that extend beyond a typical 8 am to 5 pm schedule, which is generally associated with salaried jobs. They may also experience increased demand for labor seasonally or in emergencies.
Challenges of Hiring Hourly Workers
Staffing at scale can present some common challenges, meaning “any structural or operational issue that prevents an organization from having the right number of people, with the right skills, in the right roles, at the right time.” These problems can include:
Recruiting inefficiencies
Slow hiring processes
Seasonal demand spike
Negative brand association
Skills and training inadequacies
Worker burnout
Low retention
Applying Hiring Best Practices for Hourly Workers
Let’s examine each of these challenges and consider how hiring best practices can help.
Recruiting inefficiencies
Hiring hourly workers often happens via job postings on common job boards. A potential candidate’s first impression of the role comes from the job description. In their haste to get the job posted, companies often use vague, cliché-filled job descriptions that don’t properly represent the responsibilities. Job seekers need accurate language with specifics like expected duties, shift hours, and compensation. Misrepresenting the job in order to lure in more applicants only costs you time and money when you lose out on candidates who feel misled.
Slow hiring process
Efficiency when hiring at scale is the only way to ensure you can hire the right number of candidates and the best-quality candidates. Hourly workers can easily move on to the next opportunity if your process is lagging behind. By using an ATS like ApplicantStack, you can generate reports that show how quickly your hiring team addresses candidates in each part of the hiring process, and identify places where you can make improvements.
Seasonal demand spike
Even when your company anticipates a spike in demand, it can still pose challenges. Advance preparation, including rewriting job descriptions, addressing lags, adding more hiring staff, or streamlining your process ahead of the hiring push can help you be ready for the extra work.
Negative brand association
The popularity of job boards can be both a blessing and a curse for companies hiring at scale. It helps when your jobs are seen by many eyes, but negative reviews can be costly to your reputation, even if you feel they’re undeserved. Though you may not be able to address each negative experience directly, some you can resolve. Take people’s criticisms seriously and consider how you can change policies to help your brand be seen more positively by those job seekers encountering it for the first time.
Skills and training inadequacies
A big hiring push can lead to overlooked skill gaps and make it challenging to give new-hire training the proper attention. A robust onboarding program is the best way to ensure your new workers are introduced to the way you do business. Pair new hires with mentors who follow a company checklist to the letter, with oversight from other managers to ensure the trainers are following all the necessary steps. Workers who receive proper onboarding are much more likely to stay with the company in the long term.
Worker burnout
That said, the high-demand environment of onboarding a large number of new hires can increase the workload and stress of current employees, especially if they feel undervalued and overlooked for their efforts. Burnout is more than just feeling stressed out – it’s a psychologically recognized “state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress.” It’s vital to address their concerns long before they get to that point. Make sure there is an open-door policy with HR or management to address concerns and conflicts, and compensate your workers fairly, especially those taking on extra training roles.
Low retention
While you will always expect some amount of attrition in a hiring push, it’s important to look for patterns. Are there certain departments where you lose more workers than others? Do certain shifts have low retention? When workers cite their reasons for leaving, do they have characteristics in common? Track these statistics and address those concerns where they are obvious and have solutions.
When your business relies on hourly workers, hiring at scale can pose challenges, but there are effective solutions. By relying on advanced software and creating an environment where concerns are addressed early, you can employ best practices for long-term success.
ApplicantStack is designed for companies that hire hourly workers. It is easy to post jobs, review candidates, schedule interviews, and stay connected throughout the process. When your hiring process needs a revamp to ensure that every role is filled with a qualified worker, make sure to implement this applicant-tracking system that makes it easier.
The most effective recruiting practices are a combination of automation and the personal touch. Implementing automation frees up your HR team to focus on the person behind the résumé, and helps your company recruit top talent. Consider some of the many benefits of automation in hiring.
What Is Automation in Recruiting?
Automation in recruiting refers to using technology tools to streamline certain repetitive or time-consuming hiring tasks. Many administrative tasks work well when handled by automated processes, freeing humans to develop relationships with the most promising candidates. Applicant tracking systems can provide the framework for automation, keeping your recruiting organized and efficient.
Recruiting Tasks That Benefit from Automation
If you envision the typical process of hiring for a new position, it may go something like this:
Begin the process of screening, culling, and categorizing applicants
Schedule initial interviews with promising candidates
Schedule later-round interviews
Send offers
Receive acceptances
Begin onboarding
Within almost all of those steps, automation can save time and energy, the most precious commodities for hiring teams.
For example:
Recruiting
Automated tools can scan popular networking sites for keywords, company connections, or specific skills to identify potential new hires who fit open positions. They can be used to organize and run internal referral programs that remind current employees about available roles and incentives for bringing quality referrals to the hiring table.
Resume screening
Automated software can screen for keywords in education, experience, and skills from the resumes of every applicant. This ensures only the most qualified applicants end up in the pile to be considered. These tools can even rank resumes so you start with those most likely to fit the open role. Automated screening can process resumes in a fraction of the time of manual screening.
Communication
For job applicants, response time along each point of the hiring process can be the deciding factor between your company and another opportunity. Automated communication ensures you make contact at each step: acknowledging receipt of the resume, a gracious rejection if the qualifications don’t match, an interview offer with an automated calendar scheduling tool, confirmation of the interview time, and a reminder as the date approaches. While personal contact is important along the way, certain parts of the process can be entrusted to the automation tools.
Onboarding
The onboarding process consists of two types of tasks: administrative and training. For the administrative half of the process, automation tools remove a tremendous workload from HR. Required payroll paperwork, benefits information, and contracts can all be managed through an automated system, with a step-by-step process that ensures all contracts, payroll information, and benefits enrollment are completed by the required deadlines. This frees up HR and managers to focus on helping new hires integrate into their teams and on providing meaningful training and mentorship.
Benefits of Automation
Improved Efficiency. As we’ve discussed, many parts of the hiring process can be time-consuming. Human workers have weekends, sickness, vacations, scheduling challenges, or urgent other projects that take priority. Efficient hiring relies on timely decision-making and communication, and automation doesn’t need time off. You can rely on it to keep a schedule.
Decreased Time-to-Hire. The moment a job is requisitioned or posted, the clock starts ticking on the time-to-hire metric, a useful way to track how quickly your company can move from posting to offer and identify bottlenecks. Automated processes are often the solution to those bottlenecks, ensuring quality hires don’t slip through because of delays.
Equitable Hiring Practices. Automation can help eliminate instances of unfair hiring by removing conscious or unconscious bias from the process. When you set your screening parameters to be fair and equitable, your tools will screen to those exact specifications. These standardized criteria can assure candidates that their resumes were reviewed objectively against the required criteria.
Better Use of Resources. When hiring teams are stretched thin, they may experience burnout, which further reduces hiring efficiency. Automation can offer them relief from certain tasks, allowing their focus to be on the more meaningful act of forming connections with the most qualified candidates. This helps you avoid quick hires to solve an immediate problem and enables you to choose the right person for the job.
Implement an Automation Tool
Some automation tools can get a bad rap in the hiring game. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the newest and shiniest tool, research which tools can really serve your company best in the long-run. Make your investments in tried-and-true technology that supports your human workers while delivering great efficiency at every step of the process.
ApplicantStack is the ideal addition to your stack, as it’s easy to implement and offers advanced automation. Recruiting and hiring can become more streamlined, ensuring that your company gets top candidates and can bring them onboard with ease.
Recruiting is a task that can have many goals. Your company may aim to achieve the quickest turnaround, attract the highest-quality hires, and foster job satisfaction and retention through robust onboarding programs and work-life balance-focused policies. To focus your goals, you may also consider how bias affects your recruiting efforts and how best to reduce it.
What Is Hiring Bias?
When certain personal facts about a potential candidate help or hinder them from receiving a job offer, that’s bias. Outright bias that discriminates against applicants because of disability, age, race, gender, or religion is prohibited by federal Equal Opportunity Employment laws, but unconscious bias can influence hiring, too.
To help understand how this may be affecting hiring decisions, examine some of the types of unconscious bias:
Halo Effect
This refers to the holistic judgment of a person based on a single positive characteristic, such as assuming that an attractive person is also competent, friendly, and collaborative.
Horn Effect
The inverse of the halo effect, this type of bias prompts holistic judgment based on an unappealing characteristic. Both the halo and the horn effect put the candidate at a disadvantage as they are held accountable for inaccurate perceptions.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias affects humans inside and outside the interview room. It describes seeking information that confirms what you already believe and filtering out information that doesn’t affirm those beliefs. In hiring, this could manifest in interviewing a man and a woman for a supervisory role. If an interviewer believes men are better managers than women, they would look for things in the interview to discount the woman candidate.
Affinity Hiring Bias
This describes a natural compulsion to hire those most like themselves. It may seem like you’re hiring someone who you perceive will best fit the culture, but different backgrounds, interests, and life experiences make up a rich workforce and can help you confront affinity bias.
Stereotype Bias
Stereotype bias occurs when you judge someone based on what you perceive as a characteristic common to their group, often applied to certain genders, races, or age groups. These are dangerous biases because they stop you from fairly assessing someone’s actual personality and qualifications in favor of an unfair and harmful perception.
Nonverbal Hiring Bias
This type of bias places heavy emphasis on certain nonverbal actions by a candidate. For example, judging someone’s hirability based on the strength of their handshake or the frequency of a smile. Communication involves both verbal and nonverbal cues, so some people may interpret and prioritize nonverbal ones. But in an interview setting, some otherwise highly competent candidates may find it challenging to pass the unwritten test of nonverbal communication.
How an ATS Helps Reduce Hiring Bias
It’s helpful to understand the nuances of unconscious bias and have a sincere desire to overcome them. An applicant-tracking system (ATS) can be a valuable tool for putting tangible reminders about fairness and bias elimination in front of each member of the hiring team. Here are some benefits:
Structured Workflow
“A workflow is a series of connected steps or tasks that are designed to achieve a specific outcome or goal. It represents the sequence of activities, processes, and tasks involved in completing a particular project or business process.”
Hiring demands this level of precision and order because each step builds on the previous, and you often have more than one person at different points in the queue.
Because hiring teams are often made up of Human Resources and other managers, it can be challenging to coordinate schedules and keep the process moving at an ideal pace. A tool like ApplicantStack keeps each candidate’s status front and center, with a clear visual of what’s been done and what’s pending. Communication within the app ensures that no email or text gets filtered out or languishes in the inbox of someone on vacation.
Standardized Evaluations
Standardized evaluations screen all candidates according to the same criteria, none of which is subjective. When a job requires a set education level, number of years of experience, or other objective criteria, the ATS can filter out candidates who don’t meet those standards. This is where standardized evaluations are strong. Once you have collected a pool of potential candidates, focusing too much on standardization can reduce people to a series of facts and figures, and doesn’t allow you to assess the many soft skills that make up a quality hire.
Still, the ATS can help you quantify and categorize valuable soft skills as described in resumes, and you can choose to interview those who best fit a set of important criteria beyond the first evaluation.
Documentation
Hiring can be an overwhelming task, particularly if your company has multiple open positions, multiple locations, or a hiring surge. The ATS’s ability to document and track every step of the process means candidates can feel assured they are all treated fairly and equally. Mistakes can happen in human processes, but in the event of an accusation, your company can produce a data trail demonstrating the consistency of your hiring process.
Overcoming unconscious bias is vital for equitable and fair hiring practices. Modern job seekers examine the reputations of companies before considering an application. ApplicantStack is a valuable tool in reducing hiring bias.
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