How Retailers Can Leverage Technology in Their Recruiting Strategies: Part 2

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Continuing with the topic of digital transformation, I’ll dive deeper into some of the strategies and technologies talent acquisition leaders can utilize to uplevel their recruiting process. 

Scheduled job postings generate 10x more candidates than manual postings

These are referred to as programmatic job postings. The tools and technologies available to target, retarget, and acquire people to buy products and services can be applied to your talent acquisition funnel. You can be really specific about not only where you’re advertising, but also to whom you’re posting. 

In the older days recruiters would manually post an advertisement and hope that they got some great leads or candidates. These days are long gone. There are many tools out there that you can use to be much smarter about using programmatic technology. 

Whether they’re on Facebook, Instagram, Indeed, or Google, you can use these strategies to reach candidates that are the best fit for your opportunities. 

Chatbots can help candidates qualify themselves in or out of the process 

This is the natural progression of the text to apply process. If you begin the relationship with a text application, you need to be able to continue the engagement. 

Manual responses to every sms job application is unrealistic. You need a tool that automates a portion of the communication with candidates. Chatbots can answer questions about the opportunity, company, and role.

You’ll be much more effective at filling your roles when this becomes part of your hiring process. We’ve found that using a chatbot to engage these applicants throughout the process increases the likelihood of them staying in the funnel longer. You’ll have higher retention, higher conversions, a better overall fill rates. 

Automating workflows can save hours or days waiting for IT

At Fountain, we always stress the importance of automation. A lot of recruiting teams set up their job application process years ago, and ver very rarely revisit it. This portion of the recruiting process that we’d recommend you revist it quarterly. 

Always be tweaking your workflows to save time and move people more quickly through the interview process. When do you ask to run a background check? When do you ask people for what their schedule might be? Asking these questions early can really save you a lot of potentially wasted time. 

I would also encourage you, from a digital transformation perspective, to always be running A/B tests. For example, if I post the exact same job description twice, but one of the postings also includes the hourly wage for the role, you can track the changes in application rates. I would guess two things would happen: 

1. The job posting without the wage will get more applicants 
2. The job posting with the wage will have higher conversion rates. 
   

But, you can only know certain if you’re A/B testing. 

Use SMS messaging to reach more candidates

If you send the same people emails vs test messages, you’re going to get significantly more responses with SMS. This should be your default method of communication with candidates. This is especially true for high volume, hourly roles.

Whether you’re hiring retail associates, or are a logistics and supply chain recruiter hiring warehouse workers, this is a great strategy to keep candidates engaged at a higher rate. 

A couple of statistics to leave you with: 

• Mobile first - removing passwords lead to a 30% increase in conversions
• By 2025, 72,6% of internet uses will access the web via their mobile devices only
• SMS has a 98% open rate versus email at 11%