How to reduce time-to-hire metrics in an industry which already moves at break-neck speed compared to white-collar recruitment?
Blue-collar companies and workers don’t wait around. Production lines can’t stop, supply chains can’t slow down because the physician economy relies on constant motion. Even if the rest of the team does carry on, they need to pull overtime, the quality drops, and often, customer deadlines need to be moved further.
In such scenarios, when you want to reduce time to hire, it isn’t about jumping head-first into a vacancy in which the company is already stalling. Instead, you need to focus on proactive hiring. Read more to find out what we’re talking about.
How To Reduce Time To Hire: Understanding How Fast Hiring Works In Blue-Collar Recruitment
The problem with the speed in blue-collar isn’t necessarily about how fast you are able to find replacements and keep your metrics optimal. It’s more about whether they are a good fit. Let’s say that you deliver fifteen applicants to the end client, but none of them has the necessary licenses, experience, or language skills the company needs. After ten days, the position is still empty.
When looking at all industries, replacing an employee can cost anywhere between 50% to 200% of their yearly salary. In blue-collar, this also means slowed down production, more overtime for teammates, and generally, just a strained work-life balance for everyone involved.
On top of that, as workers get more tired from the extra work, they are more likely to make mistakes, deliver low-quality work, and even worse, risk their own safety. In technical roles like welding or bus driving, an entire project may halt, or busy bus lines may temporarily stop.
The other huge problem with blue-collar hiring when you want to reduce time to hire is the fact that skilled candidates don’t wait around.
It’s not just about getting your optimized job posting on job boards and hoping for the best. Across Europe, there’s an increasingly alarming shortage of tradespeople, so chances are, skilled workers are already juggling several offers. No wonder high-demand experts won’t wait for slow hiring processes. And if you don’t reduce your time to hire, chances are, the candidate is already working somewhere else within a week.
How to Hire Fast For Technical Roles: Talent Pools
As we already mentioned when discussing the importance of building and maintaining talent pools, you need a proactive approach to hiring. Once the staffing agency, the end-client, or your own company passes down the vacancy to find a worker, chances are, you are already late.
That’s why you need organized lists, i.e., talent pools of tradespeople from specific industries to maintain contact with. Also this is why so many specialized recruiters have partnerships with trade schools. When you need to source for an urgent role, having an existing list is much faster than starting from zero.
Reduce Time To Hire With Pre-Screening
Most recruiters will tell you that the interview isn’t the bottleneck, but everything that follows. The screenings, skill testing, background checks, verifications, certifications. These are mandatory in blue-collar recruitment but often happen after the candidate gets hired.
If you are a freelancer or working with a staffing agency, make a point of flipping the script. Use pre-screening, meaning, check the candidates before they get to the employer. This way, the employer can review a candidate on one and have them on the job site in one or two days, without the need of the daunting checks.
Reduce Time To Hire And Save Money
When hiring a new candidate for a role is urgent, the math of the finances are pretty easy to figure out. If it’s the high season, an empty position can cost thousands of euros a week in reduced output, delayed revenue, and overtime. Using traditional hiring, these positions may take weeks or a month to fill. If you are proactive, you may be able to do it in days.
Reduce Time To Hire in Seasonal, High-Volume Recruitment
Most blue-collar industries (agriculture, logistics, manufacturing, food industry) regularly deal with situations where they receive more orders seasonally. When production speeds up, these companies need more helping hands, and need them fast.
High-volume hiring is when recruiters need to hire more staff quickly, often for one single role or a couple of them. In these cases, standard recruitment tools may not help increase the tempo, and hiring starts to lag behind production quotas. The workload falls on existing workers, who have an increasingly hard time meeting the growing demands.
The main problem is that the number of vacancies increase abruptly, your competitors are also hiring, you cannot keep up with the increased number of interviews (physically), and headcount requirements may just keep increasing as demand grows.
How to Hire Fast in High-Volume Recruitment?
The problem is that there are no “magic pills” for seasonal volume hiring. Recruiters can use technology to streamline their processes, but in the end, they need to employ a complete hiring strategy that can address the fast-paced scenario.
- Candidate Pools: Again, having an organized database of specialized workers is the single, most important thing you can have in your arsenal to speed things up.
- Clear Processes, Simplified Hiring Funnels: Design the hiring process to be as simple as it can. Application-screening-offer. This enables you to process a large number of people and minimize losses.
- Use Multiple Channels: Regional platforms, social media, referrals, internal databases, job boards are all great assets to tackle mass hiring.
- Automate: Use simple tools to speed up the busywork. Simple chatbots can help interested candidates get deeper inside your funnel without you having to engage with each of them individually.
5 Strategies on How to Reduce Time to Hire
1. The Define The Role’s Expectations
Writing a clear job description with the requirements conditions will typically attract qualified candidates, which means you will need to spend less time screening.
Also, communicate with hiring managers about your process so they can know what to expect. When both candidates and the employer knows your next move, the recruitment processes become more efficient and transparent. Talking with hiring managers early can be especially helpful, as they will be familiar with your evaluation methods and job requirements. This can reduce time-to-hire, because, as we said, most bottlenecks usually happen after the candidate has been proposed.
2. Advertise for The Right Candidate
Again, a well-written job ad is the best way to get quality candidates. That said, you need to address:
- Role requirements and responsibilities
- Key experience and competencies
- The Actual job description
- Details about the allowances and shift bonuses.
- Talk also about the reality of the job (cold environment, physical demanding roles, etc).
Be clear, concise, and honest. If the job offers accommodation, highlight whether the candidate can be alone or needs to share the room with others. Optimized job ads build trust and ensure that you actually get feedback from people who are ready to work rather than unqualified leads.
3. Use Tech To Your Advantage
Use AI-screening tools to speed up the work and assessment tools can help with pre-screening. These advanced pieces of software can also help you match the right candidates for the job, however, take things easy. AI can still make mistakes, models are prone to bias, and often, the best candidates may not have the best CVs.
So, rather than focusing on automating your entire process, concentrate on deploying chatbots that can help your candidates get from clicking on your vacancy (let’s say, on Instagram), to your dedicated WhatsApp group where you vet and screen your candidates. In later stages, AI can be used to schedule interviews, give reminders, and compile useful messages to keep candidates engaged.
4. Optimize Your Process: From Talent Pools To Interviews
We’ve already talked extensively about talent pools. It’s something that you build over time, and organizing your databases may take up a bit more of your energy and resources, but it’s all well worth it in the long run, when it shaves days or weeks off your hiring times. Maintaining a professional relationship with tradespeople can help you spot future opportunities, get more recruitment requests, and scale your business more efficiently.
Regarding interviewing, having several interview stages can dramatically increase candidate drop-off, and kill your time-to-hire metrics. That said, focus on reducing the number of interview rounds to the bare minimum, and leverage video calls with flexible scheduling to accelerate the process and eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth communication with candidates.
3. Leverage Existing Teams
If you can arrange it, engage current employees in the hiring process with referral programs. Don’t forget, they may also have their trusted networks and they can prove invaluable in specific situations, like high-demand technical hiring. Simply put, they know the best people in their trades and will likely find a strong fit for the role and company culture.
Referrals often translate into reduced time-to-hire and better retention rates, because the referred candidates tend to know more about the company and its culture. Make the most of the existing teams to speed up the recruitment process and find people who are more aligned with the company right off the bat.
Mastering Speed in Blue-Collar Recruitment
To reduce time to hire in blue-collar recruitment is not about trying to trim seconds off of administrative tasks. It’s about being proactive instead of reactive. Having a predictable pipeline can help you find the right people for both skilled and high-volume roles. Moving the pre-screening forward in the hiring process and eliminating bottlenecks can help you protect production quotas, eliminate costly downtime, and keep your teams performing at their peak.
Speed wins the best candidates, and efficiency secures the bottom line. And if you are interested to learn more about how Hire Abroad can help you speed up your hiring process, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.