6 front-line recruitment strategies that are hurting your hiring process

Is your front-line recruitment strategy fragmented?

Recruitment for front-line positions is often decentralized, meaning Hiring Managers are left alone to recruit with often little support from head office. Your Hiring Managers require tools to make informed hiring decisions. Ensuring hiring managers know where to find great candidates, how to screen them appropriately and how to properly onboard those candidates will often relate directly to how successful that candidate will be.

So, you default to acquiring another new piece of technology or investing in a couple of posts on the newest job board, but the quality of your candidates still does not increase. These are just two examples, but in fact, there are 6 common recruitment strategies when looking at recruitment for front-line positions, and they often do not work together in a streamlined process. In addition, if you aren’t tracking the results of your efforts, then it becomes very difficult to make improvements to fix unknown inefficiencies. When these pieces don’t work together, recruitment strategies often fail.

1. Job Boards – Job boards are a great way to attract applicants, and being part of a database that allows for candidates to get specific about the type of position they are looking to acquire only makes sense. However, far too many companies heavily rely on the post-and-pray job board model. Companies are spending way too much money on individual job postings that aren’t being optimized or tracked.

2. Recruitment Technology – Many companies will implement some flavor of the latest recruitment technology. Maybe an Applicant Tracking System or a behavioral assessment tool, but they soon learn that it really doesn’t connect any of the pieces. Instead, it just adds another element into the stress of recruitment and another variable into an already fragmented, inconsistent process.

3. Walk-ins & Referrals – Are you waiting for the next walk-in candidate to enter through the front door? Is your current employee base continually referring their unemployed friends? Managing walk-in candidates and in-house recruiters that are working part time poses a struggle when looking to scale up and down with the needs of your organization. Since the process isn’t consistent, results are often unpredictable.

4. Hiring Manager owned – Many organizations default to saying, “it’s our Hiring Manager’s job to look after recruiting”. Without the proper resources to drive success, how can quality candidates be expected every time?

5. Foreign Workers – The Temporary Foreign Workers Program has experienced fundamental changes over the past 12 months making it very difficult and expensive to bring in talent from outside of Canada. Previously foreign workers were brought into the country to help fill lower paying roles.

6. Recruiting Agencies – Recruiting agencies can be very expensive and never truly own the process. They are also often difficult to leverage for management and specialty positions. When recruitment for a role is outsourced, often proper engagement in the process is not made. A recruiting agency needs to be your partner and work with you to attract quality candidates for your open jobs.

Front-line recruitment is an essential and fast-paced role for your business. It requires attention to detail and a well thought-out, through process. Because of the availability of work for front-line workers, good candidates do not stay on the market for very long. You must be able to duplicate the steps you take to attract and screen candidates every time, but also create a manageable program for the recruitment team to be successful. Skipped steps and inconsistencies will lead to a fragmented approach to your recruitment strategy.

About Mindfield

Mindfield is a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine professional recruiters, simple to use technology and a data-driven hiring strategy that promises to improve the quality of your hourly workforce. This approach focuses on tying business outcomes such as sales performance, tenure, and engagement to the selection, hiring and measurement of quality candidates.