Category: Talent Technology

[On-Demand] How to Build an Agile Workforce for Scale and Demand

Posted on by akessler

[On-Demand] How to Build an Agile Workforce for Scale and Demand

Employers today are dealing with more than just a tight talent market, increased turnover and rising wages; the world of work has permanently changed —and so have candidate expectations. The demand for total talent has become more dynamic, and employers are leveraging seasonal and project-based hiring to reduce the time to mobilise internal and external workforces.

Watch this on-demand webinar in partnership with HR Exchange Network to get a real-life case study on agile hiring solutions that combine candidate experience, talent acquisition technology and dynamic insights-led sourcing, which are aligned to future workforce plans.

Talent Consulting and Strategic Sourcing Support for Business Critical Roles

Posted on by edyson
Talent Consulting and Strategic Sourcing Support for Business Critical Roles

Talent Consulting and Strategic Sourcing Support for Business Critical Roles

PeopleScout helped this waste disposal company source, attract and hire drivers, administrative roles and technicians with RPO, recruitment marketing campaigns and compliance support.

16,000 annual hires targeted
957 offers made over two career day events
38 % improvement in key SLAs in just 30 days

A leading waste disposal and environmental services company faced significant challenges sourcing, attracting and hiring talent for vital full-time frontline roles including CDL drivers, technicians and administrative roles.

Scope and Scale

As a result of continuing skills shortages in high-demand roles, the client found it increasingly difficult to source talent with the required skills, credentials and experience to fill business-critical roles. The client required a full-cycle RPO solution to support its internal team in making 16,000 annual hires across North America. What’s more, the client sought a consultative partnership with ongoing strategic guidance and best practice implementation across the client’s talent sourcing program.

Situation

PeopleScout has partnered with the client for nearly 14 years supporting full-cycle, end-to-end roles and recently, the client required additional support for partial-cycle hiring. PeopleScout deployed a flexible RPO solution to source and deliver a continuous slate of qualified candidates into the client’s talent pipeline. PeopleScout also provides the client with recruitment marketing support, detailed talent market insights and expertise on program compliance.

Solution

  • PeopleScout’s team executes talent sourcing strategies, provides guidance on how to tap into talent channels and helps the client develop grassroots recruitment marketing campaigns to reach the right candidates.
  • PeopleScout developed a custom SLA dashboard and performance reporting via Affinix Analytics which highlights roles that aren’t getting as much traction and optimizes channel usage and ad spend accordingly.
  • With the additional scope, PeopleScout ramped up its team of 47 to 284, with specialized global support spanning India, Poland, UK and the U.S.
  • PeopleScout Talent Advisory team conducted a two-phased research project, including an exhaustive candidate persona framework based on interviews with the client’s current employees, for insight into their talent audience to develop highly targeted creative and messaging.
  • PeopleScout created a new employer branding and recruitment marketing strategy, and dedicated marketing experts from PeopleScout manage all the client’s social media accounts.

Results

  • PeopleScout’s team finds qualified candidates in niche skill sets despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting talent shortages.
  • PeopleScout’s full-cycle RPO solution targets an average of 16,000 annual hires for extremely difficult skill sets, improving business outcomes across the enterprise.
  • Implemented new channels including Indeed, Appcast, geofencing, social media and more which allow the team to instantly post jobs to multiple job boards at one time.
  • After just 30 days of launching the SLA dashboard, the client saw a 38% improvement in SLAs including the interview-to-offer ratio, candidate outreach timeframe and offer extension timeline.
  • PeopleScout helped with the planning and execution of two career day events with over 1,900 attendees and 957 offers made, resulting in two of the best career day events the client has ever had.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Waste disposal and environmental services company
  • INDUSTRY
    Utilities, Environmental Services
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory, Affinix
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    16,000
  • ABOUT THE CLIENT
    As a leading waste disposal company in North America, this organization has over 45,000 employees supporting over 20 million residences and businesses with their waste and recycling needs.
Let’s Connect

[On-Demand] Candidate Relationship Management: How to Get the Most out of Your CRM

Posted on by nfuqua

[On-Demand] Candidate Relationship Management: How to Get the Most out of Your CRM

Candidate relationship management tools are a critical component of any recruitment process, but very few employers actually use the software to its full potential. Could your organization be doing more with your CRM?

When properly deployed, a CRM can help you attract and engage candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, source strong passive candidates and increase application rates. With so much power in one tool, talent acquisition teams that leverage the full suite of features will be more competitive in a difficult talent market.

So how can you tap into the power of your CRM? Join PeopleScout Senior Product Manager Brittany Taylor for the newest Talking Talent webinar, Candidate Relationship Management: How to Get the Most out of Your CRM, available now on demand.

In this webinar, Brittany covers:

  • The full range of CRM capabilities

  • How your CRM can supercharge your diversity initiatives

  • Proven strategies for decreasing candidate fall-out in the application process

  • Simple methods to fill the top of your recruitment funnel

  • Real-life examples of how implementing these changes helped employers reach their talent acquisition goals

  • And more!

Destination 2030: A Roadmap for Talent Acquisition Leaders

Posted on by akessler

By Robert Peasnell, Deputy Managing Director, PeopleScout EMEA

It’s been a wild ride for talent acquisition leaders these last few years, as hiring slowed for most and then grew to record levels. As global economies still remain tumultuous, the one constant we can expect is change. 

With this in mind, PeopleScout undertook a piece of research, evaluating global workforce trends and looking to the future to see how these trends might impact the way we work. The result is our new white paper, Destination 2030.

Here are our top 10 predictions for what work and recruiting will look like in 2030 and tips that talent acquisition leaders can put into practice now to prepare for the future.

Buckle up and join us as we travel to the world of work in 2030.

1. Our Working Models Will Be as Diverse as We Are

Organizations and their employees will decide between them how, when and where people will work. The ways we define work will grow (think hybrid, part-hybrid or even nomadic…), and there’ll be no such thing as a 9-to-5 job.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

With the growth of remote work, talent pools have become more globally dispersed. TA leaders who embrace global workforce planning in their talent acquisition strategy—taking a location-flexible approach—will give themselves a better chance at winning top talent. So, instead of looking for 20 FTEs in France, you could look for 20 French speakers anywhere in the world—vastly expanding your available talent pool.

TA leaders can augment their recruitment capabilities and reach by investing in recruitment process outsourcing (RPO). RPO partners offer single- and multi-country solutions that can help expand your geographic scope to target remote workers. Plus, RPO offers a consistent yet flexible process that can be nuanced to accommodate various cultures and candidate expectations.   

2. We Won’t Work, We’ll Contribute

Will the term “work” even exist? Perhaps not. We will be measured by our contribution and the value we bring to the organization. By 2030, success will be determined by meaningful output, not hours spent at a desk.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

A recent study revealed that 93% of workers want a flexible schedule. Organizations that rethink working patters and adapt to the desires of their target candidate audience will gain a significant leg up when it comes to competing for talent going forward. This will require significant workforce planning on the part of a TA leader to ensure your organization can maximize productivity while also keeping employees engaged and motivated.

3. Reskilling Will Take on New Importance

The pace of change means reskilling will be the norm. No matter how much expertise you have in one field, you could find yourself changing direction and developing a new skillset in a totally different field.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

Going by the last 20 years, it seems inevitable that many of the jobs we’ll need in 2030 simply don’t exist yet. So, TA leaders can’t put off workforce planning as some far-off solution to future issues. It’s imperative you plan today for the talent you’ll need for the future—either through recruitment or through an internal training and mobility program.

Organizations who invest in reskilling and upskilling as a strategic initiative will boost their resilience for whatever future business environments have in store. Plus, it will have a positive impact on retention as companies that excel at internal mobility can retain employees nearly twice as long as companies that struggle with it.

4. Retirement Age Will Become Just a Number

Some of us will work hard and live frugally, so we can retire in our 40s. Most of us will work beyond the standard retirement age, taking on new roles, developing new skills and easing out of work slowly.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

By 2030, all Baby Boomers will have reached 65, the typical retirement age threshold in many countries. Keeping older workers in the workplace will become a priority for organizations as talent pools shrink and skills gaps widen. This also means addressing any age-based discrimination that may be hidden in your recruitment processes. Amongst job seekers over 45, 53% believe age is one of the biggest barriers to finding a new job. Eliminating bias in the recruitment process will ensure your organization can access this valuable talent pool and the experience they can provide.

Additionally, employers will need to adjust contracts as few in this generation will want to continue working in a typical full-time capacity. Making certain concessions and ensuring your DE&I program also supports generational diversity will ensure older workers can continue to contribute and will help soften the effects of impending mass retirement of Boomers. 

5. The Greatest Skill Will Be Learning

As new technologies emerge and old ones become obsolete, our work will demand different approaches and expertise. This constant evolution means we’ll be learning new skills. Things will change so fast that the future discussion will go beyond reskilling and upskilling to “learning to learn.”

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

Evaluate your assessment process to ensure it aligns with the outcomes you need from your roles—now and into the future. Judging candidates based on characteristics that help them succeed in your unique environment—rather than just on skills or experience—will help you unlock the potential of your new employees. Putting assessment activities in place that test for soft skills, like adaptability, will help create a culture of learning.

6. AI and Automation Will Create Jobs, Not Eliminate Them

Technology, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), will tackle mundane, highly complex and time-consuming work, freeing humans to focus on emotion-driven innovations. This will create a suite of new roles as well as cross-functional teams and agile working patterns.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

Talent acquisition and HR leaders can experience the benefits of AI too! Talent technology platforms offer multiple opportunities to introduce more automation into your recruitment processes, allowing your recruiters and hiring managers to focus on developing better connections with candidates, bringing your process to life.

With AI sourcing, recruiters can let the tech do the mundane work of searching for qualified talent and focus on engaging candidates, offering guidance and positioning your organization as an attractive place to work. Automation can be leveraged throughout the candidate journey to supplement interactions from your team, including text interviews, interview scheduling, sharing content, handling basic candidate queries and more.

7. Inclusion Will Be Everywhere

The fact that hiring for potential and the need to reskill are the key criteria any organization looks for in 2030 pretty much eradicates unconscious bias. Organizations that to cling to outdated modes of attraction run the risk of missing out on valuable talent.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

Hopefully, by now, everyone understands the importance of diversity and inclusion, if for no other reason than the economic benefits. It’s time for companies to really step up when it comes to diversity, equality and inclusion, especially because underrepresented groups are more likely to say that an employer’s diversity efforts make a difference in whether they decide to apply.  

While responsibility for diversity, equity and inclusion is shared across an organization, talent acquisition leaders have a significant influence. Use that impact to help the business assess the maturity of its DE&I program. By pinpointing your current state and plotting out the roadmap to your desired state, your organization can make strides in building a more diverse workforce.

8. Personalization Will Drive the Need for Connection

Organizations will inspire unity, belonging and a collegiate spirit on one hand, balanced with hyper-personalization on the other. While candidates and employees have a desire to be connected, they still want to be treated as an individual.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

Modern candidates expect digital experiences, but also want the human touch from recruiters. So, how can you achieve personalization at scale?

Leveraging talent technology can be a great way to attain this. This could be through a CRM tool that lets you notify individuals in your talent pools about positions that are a fit for their skills and goals, or an ATS that gives candidates a personlized portal where they can track the status of their application. Technology can help you combine personalization with the power of automation so you can show you recognize each candidate as a person, not just a CV. 

9. Say Goodbye to Work Permits

Workers will become global citizens, working from anywhere for organizations based anywhere. In a single, 10-person start-up, all 10 people could work from completely different places.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

One of the main benefits of RPO is ensuring their clients remain compliant in all the countries in which they’re operating. Most global RPO providers have offshore delivery centers that hold the necessary legal entities and licenses to hire in your chosen countries, so you don’t have to go through the effort or expense.

If you’re looking to expand your recruitment footprint, outsourcing may be an option to explore. Check out our ebook, Building a Business Case for RPO, to learn how to create buy-in and secure budget.

10. The Future is Bright

With Millennials at the helm, we can look forward to ethical and empathetic leadership and a holistic approach to wellbeing. Consumers and shareholders alike will put pressure on businesses to look after the planet as well as society—a welcome shift indeed.

How talent acquisition leaders can prepare:

By 2030, Millennials will make up the biggest generation in the global workforce, representing a massive 40% of all workers. As a whole, they are much more motivated by the difference they can make in the world than they are by how much money they can earn. So, it’s important that employer’s keep in mind that whilst success and status are definitely still in the mix, it’s the cultural fit, values and purpose that matter most for this generation.

Now is the time to assess your employer brand and EVP. Do they reflect your values and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts? Including these strategies as a visible part of your candidate attraction efforts will ensure you are seen as an employer of choice amongst the generation that will lead your business forward.

I’m sure you’re already thinking about budgets for 2023, and I hope you’ll consider some of these opportunities for investment. To learn more about how we came to the predictions and see our research, check out our Destination 2030 white paper.

Destination 2030: 10 Predictions for What’s Next in the World of Work 

Posted on by akessler

Destination 2030:

10 Predictions for What’s Next in the World of Work

The last few years have been tumultuous for talent acquisition leaders, and it doesn’t look as if the pace of change is going to let up. Are you looking for ways to future-proof your workforce and create a resilient talent strategy?

Buckle up and join us as we travel to the world of work in 2030! Our ebook, Destination 2030, explores the latest research and global workforce trends and how they might impact the way we work.

In this ebook, we explore:

  • Demographic changes in the workplace and how to engage each generation
  • The changing role of technology in candidate and employee engagement
  • Our top 10 predictions for what’s next in world of work

Talking Talent: RPO in a Shifting Economy

Posted on by nfuqua

It has been more than two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in that time, we’ve seen an economy and a job market that have changed in unprecedented ways. Talent leaders have dealt with lean teams, developed new, virtual processes for interviewing candidates and worked through the challenges of hiring through the Great Rehire and Great Resignation. Now, they’re staring down an entirely new economic reality.

In this episode of Talking Talent, Rick Betori shares his insights on the current economic landscape and how talent leaders can stay ahead. Rick also shares how RPO, recruitment process outsourcing, can create the biggest opportunities for talent leaders as they prepare for 2023.

The U.S. economy has officially regained all of the jobs lost at the start of the pandemic, putting an end to the Great Rehire. The pace of hiring has started to slow; however, current monthly job gains remain at historically high levels. The labor force participation rate has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, and there are currently 4.8 million more open jobs than there are unemployed Americans. On top of that, inflation remains high, and the Federal Reserve continues to raise rates to keep the economy healthy.

It’s a complicated landscape. How should talent leaders respond? Many have leaned on RPO recruitment companies to get through hiring spikes and implement new technology. But what is the value of an RPO partnership during more steady state hiring? How can talent leaders pull in more workers who have yet to return to the job market? What is the role of talent technology in today’s market, and how can you ensure a strong employer brand?

Joining this episode to discuss these issues is Rick Betori, PeopleScout’s President.* Rick has been with TrueBlue since 2011 and has more than 25 years of proven experience driving organizational change and growth.

*At the time of this recording, Rick’s title was PeopleScout Managing Director, the Americas.

Strategies for Overcoming High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

Competition for talent is steep, with high demand from contact centers, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs. Organizations across sectors are struggling to stand out in today’s competitive talent landscape, but for those talent leaders trying to meet their high-volume recruitment goals it feels like an impossible mission with soaring attrition rates, labor shortages and record job vacancies.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the top challenges you’re probably experiencing with high-volume recruitment and offer some ideas to address them.

What is High-Volume Recruitment?

High-volume recruitment involves sourcing, screening, interviewing and hiring large numbers of applicants for similar openings or job types. It requires a tricky balance of keeping substantial quantities of job applicants moving through the recruitment process at speed. Plus, throughout the year it requires talent acquisition teams to scale up quickly to meet seasonal demand, like for holiday shopping periods or during peak travel times.

ebook

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Get the Ebook

The High-Volume Hiring Landscape

COVID-19 was a mixed bag for high-volume recruitment. Retail and logistics workers were less severely impacted by furloughs and layoffs due to the “front line” status of grocery stores and the growth in online shopping. However, other industries, including the travel and hospitality sectors, were hit hard as lockdown came into force. 

The following trends are shaping the high-volume recruitment landscape:

  • Increased Competition:
    Job openings have grown by a third since 2019, yet job seekers per opening have fallen by half. Plus, hourly employees who were let go during the pandemic may feel resentful of their former employers and may have moved on to other roles in other sectors.
  • Recruiters are Rare:
    As of April 2021, recruiter job postings on LinkedIn surpassed pre-pandemic levels. There’s a record number of roles to be filled and not enough recruiters to tackle the work, creating a series of knock-on effects for organizations.
  • Attrition is Skyrocketing:
    A massive 41% of the global workforce is considering quitting their jobs and only 20% report feeling engaged at work. In a recent survey, 55% of hiring managers cited retention and turnover as the number-one issue impacting their ability to hire—and their company’s ability to thrive.
  • Candidate Expectations Have Changed:
    Modern candidates have modern expectations which are more aligned with today’s consumer experience. They want digital-first experiences—on their mobile phone—and fast responses. In fact, they expect acknowledgement of their application immediately upon submission, first contact from a recruiter within 24 hours and regular updates on the hiring process in a timely manner.

High-Volume Recruitment Challenges and Solutions

In this challenging landscape, how can employers stand out from the competition and attract a large number of candidates quickly without sacrificing quality?

We’ll tackle three of the top challenges below and offer strategies you can use to get ahead.

Challenge: Ghosting and Candidate Drop Off are Rampant

“Ghosting”—not showing up with no reason given and often no communication from the candidate—is on the rise at the interview, assessment and even onboarding stages. According to an Indeed survey on ghosting in the workplace, 22% of candidates say they have accepted a job offer but didn’t show up for the first day of work.

Many organizations are not prepared to support the current pace of hiring. Candidates are much less tolerant of long recruitment processes and pauses in communication from employers, so organizations who can move the fastest are more likely to have their offers accepted. Plus, those doing high-volume recruitment are seeing an increase in candidates dropping out of the funnel even in the application phase. If applying for a position is too complicated or too long, candidates won’t complete it. Online applications with 45 or more questions have an abandonment rate of nearly 90%.

Solution:

An RPO partner can help you evaluate your recruitment processes and identify opportunities for efficiency. They may suggest steps you could eliminate or combine and introduce tactics to help reduce the time between steps to help you keep pace with candidate expectations and reduce ghosting. They can also take over time-consuming steps like reference verification and background checks, leaving your team to focus on moving candidates through he funnel faster.

RPO providers also have access to the latest talent acquisition technology which can automate parts of your process. Leveraging CRM technology enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), your RPO partner can nurture candidates through automated recruitment emails and even SMS messages. Texting is also a great way to screen candidates and automate interview scheduling, eliminating manual steps and accelerating your hiring timeline. By automating some of your candidate communications, you keep candidate engaged and reduce funnel drop off without increasing the workload for your recruiters and hiring managers.

Challenge: Desperation to Fill Vacancies Results in Reduced Quality-of-Hire

Increased attrition from the Great Resignation is leading to productivity loss. Many businesses have been forced to close stores due to lack of staff or because they don’t have enough staff to assist customers in a timely manner—in-store, in-branch or in the call center. The customer experience suffers which results in decreased sales and revenue loss, leading to some talent acquisition teams and hiring managers making bad hires out of desperation to fill vacancies.

With tight competition, time-to-offer has become a competitive differentiator. Often hiring managers may skip some interview or assessments steps in order to speed up their processes and keep talent in the funnel, leading them to compromise on quality-of-hire. Candidate without the right skills can also impact your customer experience.

Solution:

Challenge your assumptions or your hiring managers’ assumptions about the type of skills and background that are really needed for your roles. This will help you understand what experience is necessary for talent to have coming into the role and what can be learned on the job. We did this for one of our high-volume RPO clients that was struggling to hire for customer service roles. By interviewing their most successful customer-facing employees, we helped the brand realise that past customer service experience was not a predictor of future success, but rather employees stressed the amount of problem solving they had to do in their daily tasks. Not only did this expand their pool of talent, but it also helped to increase the quality of their hires and reduce attrition.

To support this, you should also rethink your candidate assessment so that it evaluates not just hard skills, like the ability to use a point-of-sale system, but also soft skills like empathy, attitude and work ethic, which are increasingly important for high-volume hiring. At PeopleScout, we’ve developed our whole person assessment model specifically for high-volume hiring. Through this we’ve helped many organizations create an assessment process that can identify and excite great candidates without extending their recruitment timeline.

Challenge: Leaning on Hiring Managers to Recruit is Leading to Burnout

With recruiters in short supply, hiring managers are picking up the slack in order to fill their vacancies. Unstructured, ineffective hiring processes and weak employer brands are putting the burden of attracting candidates and creating positive candidate experiences squarely on the hiring manager. The pressure only increases as they miss business targets due to lack of staff. In fact, 84% of hiring managers say they have hit or have come close to burnout because of hiring for their organization.

Solution:

A high-volume RPO solution helps augment your resources by acting as an extension of your in-house team. An RPO provider can handle everything at scale from sourcing and pipelining, screening, interviews, assessments, reference checks, offer management and more—whatever you need to free up your in-house recruiters and hiring managers to focus on more high-value tasks. Plus, RPO partners have particular focus on keeping hiring managers informed—whether it be ensuring they’re prepared for interviews or delivering feedback from candidates afterwards.

One of the biggest value-adds that RPO brings is experience with the latest talent technology innovations. An RPO partner can help you assess talent acquisition software to address all aspects of your recruiting process, from sourcing talent to creating a more efficient candidate experience. Your provider can show you how emerging technologies like AI, machine learning and predictive analytics can boost your speed and hire quality. Your hiring managers will love not having to spend so much time on administrative tasks.

Conclusion

The current talent market can’t be conquered with your old talent acquisition strategies. A high-volume RPO solution offers a range of approaches to help organizations attract, process and hire a large number of candidates. Whether you need to revamp your employer brand or to augment your in-house recruitment team, an RPO partner can help crank up your high-volume recruitment program.

[On-Demand] Boosting Candidate Engagement with a Comprehensive Talent Strategy

Posted on by nfuqua

[On-Demand] Boosting Candidate Engagement with a Comprehensive Talent Strategy

The current hiring environment remains a challenge for employers—in the U.S., there are currently 4.3 million more open jobs than there are job seekers. Not only are employers struggling to find enough qualified candidates, keeping them engaged proves even more critical amid rising trends like candidate ghosting and recruitment process drop-out as well as the continued Great Resignation.

To cope, many organizations have added more gig workers, but the market for contingent workers suffers the same challenges. If talent leaders aren’t leveraging a unified strategy for recruiting both full-time employees and gig workers, gaps in their workforce will persist.

So, how can you engage these different types of candidates? Join PeopleScout Global Vice President of Implementation Mark Fita for the newest Talking Talent webinar, Boosting Candidate Engagement with a Comprehensive Talent Strategy, available now on-demand.

In this webinar, Mark will cover:

  • Today’s candidate recruitment process landscape

  • Best practices for optimizing your recruiting process

  • How to expand your employer brand to gig workers

  • The importance of using the right technology to engage candidates

  • And more!

Merivale: High-Volume Recruitment for a Winning Hospitality Brand

Posted on by akessler
Merivale: High-Volume Recruitment for a Winning Hospitality Brand

Merivale: High-Volume Recruitment for a Winning Hospitality Brand

Merivale, Australia’s most innovative hospitality brand, turned to PeopleScout for a high-volume recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) solution, powered by Affinix, our talent acquisition suite.

800 hospitality roles filled in just six weeks
3,000 total hires made leveraging a data-driven approach
3.36 days time-to-offer achieved on average

Situation

In late 2021, Merivale was formally awarded the contract to manage the hospitality venues in the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) and the Sydney Football Stadium (SFS). This opportunity represented a new approach to dining at Sydney’s major sporting venues, moving away from the traditional fast food stadium experience toward more refined dining that will enhance the stadium experience.

However, the Sydney hospitality market was facing a crisis. After two years of border closures, the hospitality workforce was decimated. Plus, the uncertainty around the lifting of lockdown restrictions meant that Merivale received confirmation of their appointment to the stadium contract with only six weeks to prepare before the Ashes test would be held at the SCG.

Merivale came to PeopleScout with a challenge—to source over 800 roles in one of the tightest talent markets in a generation.

Challenge accepted!

Solution

PeopleScout needed to act fast. We quickly mobilised Affinix™, our proprietary talent acquisition suite, to capture expressions of interest from potential applicants. We built an online application form and campaign page that would educate applicants on the opportunities at Merivale, and through the dynamic application form, automatically categorized candidates into Merivale’s role streams of:

  • Bar staff
  • Wait staff
  • Cashiers

PeopleScout knew that speed was essential due both to our short timeframe and the highly mobile nature of hospitality candidates—we had to act fast! PeopleScout implemented a tech-powered talent acquisition solution through which eligible applicants were immediately invited to complete a video interview following their application. If applicants had not completed the video interview within 24 hours of submitting their application, our Center of Excellence team followed up to conduct a live phone interview. The PeopleScout Center of Excellence vetted all video interviews and phone screens, and successful candidates were handed over to Merivale for offer and onboarding.

Evolution

The PeopleScout team worked tirelessly in the lead-up to the New Year’s Ashes test, and we were able to fill the 800 roles for the Merivale stadium launch—in just six weeks.

Following the success of the first phase of the hospitality launch, Merivale engaged PeopleScout to source the talent they required to support the hospitality venues across both the SCG and SFS for the remainder of the year. Merivale needed a total talent pool of 3,000 skilled hospitality workers including those with fine dining experience, like chefs and front of house staff and retail personnel.

Following the Ashes pilot, Merivale had a better understanding of the candidate profiles they needed, so PeopleScout worked closely with the Merivale team to profile nine job categories across three job families. Candidate responses were screened using AI-powered tools in Affinix to dynamically filter them into qualified roles.

PeopleScout leveraged Affinix to build real-time analytics dashboards which helped us build the insight gained through the first round of recruiting into the decision-making process. In Affinix, we tracked candidate sources and engagement levels and fed this insight back to the Merivale marketing team so they could direct their activities to the channel which yielded the greatest results. Leveraging the CRM tool in Affinix, we also encouraged referrals from current Merivale staff and alumni.

PeopleScout maintained the same high-touch approach and fast turnaround for video and phone screening. We collaborated closely with the Merivale team to assess our results completing, spot audits throughout the process to ensure the team maintains high-quality hires and achieves the best possible outcome.

Results

PeopleScout was able to generate so much trust from Merivale that they gave our team permission to make direct offers to candidates without validation from the Merivale team.

In an extremely challenging talent market, PeopleScout achieved a time-to-offer of just 3.36 days and a time to fill of 5.5 days. PeopleScout is on track to source the volume of candidates Merivale needs, and with the SFS launching in late 2022, this requirement continues to grow.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Merivale
  • INDUSTRY
    Hospitality
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Affinix
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    3,000+
  • ABOUT MERIVALE
    Merivale is a pioneer within the Australian hospitality industry. With over 70 brands and venues, it is synonymous with delivering unique and memorable experiences.
Let’s Connect

Seasonal Hiring: How RPO can Help You Better Source and Hire Seasonal Workers 

Posted on by edyson

Hiring seasonal workers is essential for employers in need of extra talent during the holiday season. If your organization depends on seasonal hiring to augment your workforce, it is vital to efficiently source, recruit, and onboard your seasonal hires to ensure you are staffed during the holidays.

Without a well-designed seasonal hiring program in place, employers risk going understaffed for the holidays, or for other times of the year when a business reaches a peak. In this article, we will walk through how an RPO provider can help you hire talent for the holidays and equip you with tips on building a seasonal hiring pipeline.

What is a Seasonal Worker?

hiring seasonal workers

A seasonal worker or employee is a worker who works for a short period to meet seasonal peaks in demand for an employer. This might coincide with weather seasons or with holiday seasons.

Employers that use seasonal hires typically need assistance at the same time each year, for example as lifeguards or lawn care workers in the summer or ski instructors or snowplow drivers in the winter. When hiring seasonal workers, you can hire them on a part-time or full-time basis depending on your needs.

ebook

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Get the Ebook

What are the Benefits of Hiring Seasonal Workers?

If your organization experiences seasonal peaks in demand, hiring seasonal workers can be a good solution for staffing issues. Here are some of the benefits:

Extra Hands When You Need Them: When a business reaches its peak season, seasonal workers provide you that extra help fast when you need it, without the expense and time of hiring full-time staff.

Assist Full-Time Staff: Your seasonal employees can help alleviate the load carried by your full-time employees. This can improve morale for your permanent workforce because they have the support they need during peak times.

Low Risk: When you hire a permanent employee, you don’t always know if they’ll be a good fit for the job. Seasonal employees are only hired for a short period. If they aren’t a good fit, you have only made a minimal investment.

Potential full-time employee: On the other hand, if you hire a seasonal employee who works out well, you might be able to offer them a permanent position when one becomes available. It’s a trial run that works as a recruiting method for permanent positions.

Better Seasonal Hiring Begins with Crafting Better Job Descriptions

seasonal hiring

Writing job descriptions for seasonal positions is different from temporary, full- and part-time roles. It is important that your job descriptions accurately reflect the nature of your open positions, so candidates know ahead of time if they should apply.

For example, many seasonal roles are in a warehouse and logistics setting and may require candidates to work in a more physically demanding environment. Major retailers and logistics companies are in serious need of seasonal logistics workers with Walmart looking to fill 20,000 logistics roles while UPS, Kohl’s and Target are in need of 100,000 seasonal warehouse hires each.

To better understand the nature of the seasonal jobs for which you are writing job descriptions consider spending time shadowing workers in the relevant seasonal positions. What’s more, COVID-19 has made many employers became more familiar with video interviewing, however, the idea of leveraging videos to enhance your employment marketing and employer branding is sometimes overlooked.  

Job descriptions can be bolstered with video. A seasonal job posting could include a short video of a hiring manager describing the job and what they are looking for in a seasonal hire. Your video can even include examples of workers performing the most common tasks required to give candidates an accurate idea of the work involved.

How RPO Can Help

RPO providers can help employers conceive of and create a talent attraction strategy that considers both the needs of employers and seasonal hires through a data-driven approach to talent advisory and recruitment marketing making you a seasonal employer of choice.

Sourcing Seasonal Hires

Recruiting seasonal employees begins with mining a verdant source of seasonal workers. Employers should look for candidates such as students and other demographic looking for short-term employment opportunities. For example, recruiting recent graduates who are taking time to figure out what they want to do long-term is one way of sourcing seasonal talent. Often, these candidates prefer the temporary nature of seasonal work compared to a longer-term commitment.

Moreover, hiring candidates with a seasonal work mindset can help you keep them around for the full season or even retain them for next year.

When sourcing seasonal workers, look to hire people who want seasonal work including

  • Retired workers
  • Workers looking for extra work during the holidays
  • Stay-at-home parents who want to work while their kids are in school
  • Students who are on holiday break

How RPO Can Help

Many RPO providers have talent pools and networks they can tap into to source the right candidates for seasonal positions. RPOs also have experience building talent pipelines from the ground up and can assist employers in creating a sustainable seasonal hiring program that delivers year-in-year-out.

RPO partners also offer technology expertise to help you track, measure and optimize your seasonal hiring campaign by showing which channels and recruitment marketing messages are yielding the best candidates. They can help you with recruitment analytics so you can see your recruitment funnel at all your sites in a centralize dashboard.

Managing High-Volume While Hiring Seasonal Workers

seasonal hires

Many employers in need of seasonal hires require a large volume of talent to keep up with peak demand. High-volume hiring at its heart is a problem of scale which requires optimizing your time and recruiting spend. Recruitment automation can help you reduce the manual workload on your recruiting team and hiring managers while keeping your visibility on all of the candidates progressing through different stages of the interview process. Automating certain steps, such as screening and triggering assessments, allows recruiters to focus their time on higher-value, strategic work.

How RPO Can Help

An HR outsourcing solution such as RPO provides employers the ability to scale up seamlessly as seasonal hiring demands shift. With an internal talent acquisition team, it may be difficult to scale up hiring quickly enough to handle a higher number of hires and then scale back down when hiring volumes shrink.  What’s more, recruitment technology platforms such as PeopleScout’s Affinix can help you automate your recruitment program and create great high-volume hiring efficiency.

Never Neglect Your End of-Season Plans

How you end a relationship with seasonal hires can help with next season’s hiring. Here are a few things to keep in mind at the end of the season:

  • Availability: Ask outgoing seasonal employees if they would be interested in returning next season. Some workers design their needs and lifestyle around managing seasonal and temporary jobs, and they may be looking for another opportunity next year.
  • Exit interviews: To learn from successes and drawbacks, hold exit interviews with seasonal employees, regardless of how long they worked with you. Having informative feedback can help streamline next year’s efforts.
  • Permanent talent: Tempting as it may be, you likely won’t have the means or the resources to bring every seasonal employee on full-time. However, keep an eye on exceptional workers whose mix of soft skills and talent would be excellent fit as vacancies come open during other parts of the year.

How RPO Can Help

An RPO provider can help organize your offboarding efforts at the end of the season by assisting in exit interviews, managing your seasonal worker database as well as hiring top performers to permanent positions. An RPO provider’s ability to scale down engagements quickly means the process can be seamlessly executed so that you can resume business as usual.

Are You in Need of a Seasonal Hiring Partner?

seasonal worker

When it comes to maintaining your seasonal operations and providing excellent customer service during your peak months, hiring seasonal employees can help keep your business moving.

Whether you are in need of seasonal recruiting or a permanent talent solution, employers in our new world of work face rising recruitment challenges. An outsourced recruitment solution like PeopleScout’s high-volume RPO and Total Workforce Solutions can help you stay connected with talent and provide hiring resources that will add immediate value to your talent programs.