Building a system that regularly, reliably fills \hourly jobs can be a challenging puzzle to solve for companies with multiple locations, especially companies who are blending operating/cultural models after a merger.
The answers are there, if you’re willing to be transparent with data, start where you are, and elevate the problem as a business priority.
I managed a recruiting team tasked with improving 90-day attrition rates for low-skill (learn and grow jobs) across 43 locations in the US and Canada. These jobs represented half of the work the recruiting team did in any year, and were fundamental for the company: don't fill them = no product to sell.
Like many of the projects I worked on (for skilled jobs like CDL Drivers, or Director level hires for a global technology organization) we used a similar process:
Clear identification of the business challenge, impact and change goals. It's critical to make projects like these business initiatives, NOT simply recruiting programs. Executive sponsorship creates the conditions necessary to get the collaboration and focus to get the desired results. We were tasked with cutting an almost 30% 90-day attrition rate in half within a year, and to do that meant changes to ways of doing things embedded in the plants for years.
Clarity at the operational level. We went to plants, asked them to help us see why some hourly workers were productive and happy on the job long-term, why some quit, and why others were terminated. When we started to see patterns we had the data we needed to re-engineer the process to repeat the good results, and engineer out the negative ones.
This included developing critical new skills and tools:
- Recruitment advertising that focused on work content, ‘day-in-the-life’ and the career steps ahead for people who took the jobs. We changed from ‘job oriented’ advertising to ‘career oriented’ specifically to appeal to people whose hopes for work were aligned with those of our long-term hourly employees.
- Screening systems that eliminated those who brought attitudes, experiences or needs we couldn’t meet. We built these into recruiter screening tools, which also served as presentation documents to hiring managers and hiring guides for them - the data we captured in the process at every step along the way was used in each hire, and then aggregated to show where we were succeeding and where we were not.
- Attitude, approach and language. Instead of treating these like jobs where we could afford to make 'hiring mistakes' hourly job, we treated them like the critical jobs they were, where we wanted someone to invest 2-5 years and be promoted multiple times in their tenure. Like several other instances I can think of, elevating the criticality of these jobs was crucial to changing everything else.
- Continuous improvement loops: a short term one that helped us operationalize the new tools within the recruiting team and the hiring teams - before every hire for months, we looked at tool use and information capture to make sure we were using the system correctly. The we built a loop that looked at EVERY 90-day turnover from the time we implemented so we could understand how to improve the system even further.
- We hired team recruiters who would work the system the way it was designed, and purposefully removed those who would not. Many recruiters will tell you recruiting skills are transferable. I totally agree, but attitudes and willingness to work within a system are often not the same for recruiters who are competent at the mechanics of recruitment.
The results were dramatic! Within 6 months:
- Increased candidate pipeline quantities by as much as 220%, with a 60% average improvement for every hourly job posted. We started educating our market on what the jobs were about and what doing well could mean for them...jobs very few people had done before.
- Improved pipeline quality, allowing us to pre-sell candidates (even when we didn’t have an open job) and be very selective about the final hire. In essence, being clear about the job got more of the right people to apply, and fewer people who would not be happy doing the work.
- Improved time to fill, manager satisfaction and hires per recruiting team member, all a natural result of having MORE of the RIGHT candidates, and having an effective, simple system to evaluate applicants.
- Reduced 90-day attrition to just under 7% of all hires (and kept it there for years).
- Freed critical HR and operations time to focus on manager training, safety, quality and other critical business imperatives besides constantly hiring for hourly jobs.
This wasn't a simple challenge, and we bumped our heads a few times along the way. But recruiting using today’s technology means that data is almost always right at your fingertips. I believe most recruiting deficiencies are 6-8 months from being cured with the right approach:
- Find the right business problems (not HR problems…business problems).
- Connect them to TA process and tool changes.
- Get business leadership invested, the senior executives who are charged with doing more for less, who can manage the energies and outcomes with those TA most often interacts with.
- Get into the details again. Like a detective solving a crime, the answers are probably staring you in the face. ?
- Start working the problem! Don’t wait until the data is perfect, or until you can buy some fancy tech, or hire more recruiters. There's almost always something you can improve, and often one or two tweaks to the tools you're using will create most of the change you're looking for!
Appreciate any comments!!
