Almost every job posting site makes the same promise of filling your inbox with piles of resumes that will solve your recruiting problems. It sounds simple, but the actual reality is that a huge amount of time is required to process any number of resumes. A resume only represents an applicant, a faceless list of skills and experience that need to be vetted. Time is needed to screen the resumes and verify past experience with previous employers. Then follows phone and in-person interviews to get a clearer picture of the actual individual.
What you are looking for is a candidate. Someone not only with the right set of skills and experience but someone that has been vetted and has the right personality that will fit your existing team. Someone who is qualified and will be an asset.
Technological Advancements
The journey to finding a candidate has been enhanced but also muddled by technology. The rise of niche job posting sites is proof that effective recruiting is more about attracting the right people to the right industry rather than just stockpiling tons of resumes. This adds a step to resume collection that somewhat refines the applicant pool, but still, more work is needed to get to a candidate. Today, the top performing retailers are improving their recruitment processes by adding behavioural assessments to better assess whether an applicant is the right fit for their company culture. They realize that technology provides the opportunity to organize and streamline much of the recruiting process to generate more qualified new hires while requiring less of a hiring manager’s time. However, technology can only refine applicants up to a point where human interaction must intervene in the form of phone and in-person interviews.
Due to the endless demands of retail, store managers never have enough time to properly process candidates from applicants. Not only can it be difficult to attract attention to your recruitment efforts, but it is often difficult to find time to sit down and sift through resumes. Somehow they schedule some interviews, but the daily demands of a manager prolong that step. By the time they have interviewed enough candidates to make a decision, the best candidates have already accepted positions elsewhere. In reality, most hires made at the store level are hasty decisions because the manager could not find the time to properly assess, screen, vet, and ultimately process applicants into candidates.
Outsource to Save Time and Cost
The simple answer is to get help. The most successful retailers today understand the value of outsourcing their recruitment programs to save time, money, and ultimately hire the best possible candidates. Once only thought of as relevant for senior roles, retailers today are off-loading the time-consuming work of processing applicants into qualified candidates to Outsourced Recruiting providers.
Mindfield is an experienced Outsourced Recruiting Solutions provider that has innovated recruiting hourly employees by combining targeted job postings, behavioural assessments, data analysis, and recruiting technology to create a process that refines the giant pile of applicants down to quality candidates. The process starts with defining What a desired candidate is? Mindfield works in tandem with a customer’s Hiring Manager(s) to develop a Qualified Candidate Profile (QCP), which defines the best-fit candidate for that customer’s company. Beyond the skills and experience listed on a resume, the QCP also takes into account the types of behaviours that candidates must possess to truly stand out and excel within the organization. The result is a profile of a desired candidate that can both excel in performance and is also a cultural fit for your existing workforce.
Once a QCP is established, Mindfield broadcasts the job posting using a multi-pronged candidate sourcing strategy. Most recruiters have access to job posting sites and maybe 1 or 2 resume databases. The problem is that while posting a position is quick, searching and cold calling through a resume database is time-consuming, which takes time away from the most important task for a hiring manager and that is interviewing applicants! Mindfield offers an experienced recruitment team that sources talent using a combination of job boards, resume databases, search engines, social media and physical advertising to attract the active job seeker.
The application process itself is a critical step where Mindfield further refines the applicant pool down to Qualified Candidates. In addition to submitting a resume and cover letter, applicants must complete a behavioral assessment called Mindfield’s Like-minds Predictor (LMP). The score an applicant receives on the LMP must meet or exceed the requirements of the position they are applying for.
Finally, it is only after a series of interviews by our recruitment team that applicants become Qualified Candidates. Mindfield then presents these candidates to the Hiring Manager for a final interview and they make a hire.
But what about the applicants that don’t make it to the final step? Mindfield knows that while one applicant may not be the best fit for one customer, they might actually turn out to be a good fit with another customer. That’s why Mindfield maintains a growing talent database of over 2 million Canadians to source strong applicants and quickly meet our customers’ needs.
In today’s fast-paced recruiting environment, it is no longer enough to simply post on a job board or build a full-cycle recruitment process to fill hourly positions. High turnover and seasonal demands fluctuate too much to justify huge capital investments in recruiting, which has led to the growth of Outsourced Recruitment Solutions providers. And in the field of recruiting for hourly positions, no one is better equipped than Mindfield to help you separate qualified candidates from a stack of applicants.
About Mindfield
Mindfield is a Recruitment Outsourcing solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine a recruitment team, 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.