In the temp staffing business, the more and faster you place good candidates at customer’s locations, the more money you make. The line between placing a candidate and not … is often veeeery narrow. Sometimes it’s a matter of making a call 1h earlier or calling that one promising candidate before the less promising ones. Most of temp positions are very similar – agro, production, logistics. In most cases the same people can do the same so many agencies with various offers will be calling the same people. How to solve that problem? What are few easy to implement steps that can increase the hiring rate?
Call Candidates Fast
It does not matter how good your offer is, it does not matter how stable the job is, if you do not call applicants fast, you will never hire them. As we mentioned in the intro part, if you do not call them fast, you will lose them. Up to a certain point, it’s a race game.
Average person applies for around 8-13 jobs in one particular week when looking for a temp job. People just want to get a decent job, start fast, and pack their luggage before taking bus/plane to a foreign country. In most cases its people from Poland or Romania going to the west. If we talk about a candidate that has basic English skills and has the basic common sense, this person will find a job very fast. Those people are in need and agencies will always find something for them.
If you call them after 48-72h, they will already receive some calls from other agencies and someone will sell them the job offer they have, which means money you spent on job offer is basically wasted. You might be able to get this candidate in 6-12 months when he leaves another job, but this person will apply again for multiple jobs so the race starts over. This is not a market that agencies love, but this is the reality we have to face.
You might have the best sourcing strategy, generate hundreds of candidates a day, but if you cannot call people within 12h (maximum 24h), you will lose most of these candidates.
We can summarize this paragraph in one sentence “Time is Money”
Pre-screen your candidates before you talk to them
This point has been discussed in another blogpost we made here.
Imagine a situation: You need to hire 20 candidates for a production job. At least 5 candidates must have a driving license, they all must speak B1 English and be able to start within 1 week.
This means that on the average you need to have around 200-300 candidates for the job assuming 8-12% hiring ratio. Calling 300 candidates is like 3 people work for 2 days. Assuming 20 eur/h compensation (inc. benefits, taxes etc.), its like 960 EUR in compensation only. 20 candidates will bring us more in profits, but still its a significant cost.
What if this element can be automated? What if each candidate was pre-screen automatically at the level of applying so recruiters know when someone can start their job, where they currently are and if they have required certificates?
Wouldn’t that speed up the recruitment process? Of course it would. Your agency should definitely consider pre-screening candidates. How to do it? There are multiple ways. Please find some examples:
- Re-design the website and update your application form
People are lazy these days and will make as little effort to achieve their goal as possible. Your application form cannot be long. It has to be short, but give you all you need to know about a candidate. If you hire for the most basic positions like agro, production, logistics, consider collecting just:
- Name
- E-mail address
- Phone number
- Info on when someone can start
- If someone has English/German/Dutch skills
- If someone is looking for a long term job or just for 2-3 months
- If someone has a driving license
You can add / remove questions as you wish.
If all your applicants answer these questions, recruiters will know which candidates to call in the first place so the number of placements will increase significantly. If candidate will be excited about a job and is sure that the job will be guaranteed, the candidate will send over all relevant docs very fast, but if you ask them to upload all docs at the level of application, many of them will just give up on application.
- Give up on job boards/Facebook groups where you cannot pre-screen candidates
This is one of the cheapest solutions to recruit people, but its one of the most time consuming. Whenever you will post a job offer, in many cases people you will be offended by many haters. People always complain, but the complain level is significantly higher on Facebook groups. Your recruiters will have to eventually either ignore hateful comments, delete/hide them or delete a posting. Even if many people will start just complaining, there will be less people interested in a job seeing other people complaining.
- Build a chatbot for your messenger
This solution might be helpful if you want to pre-screen candidates on messenger level. It might cost around 2000 – 3000 EUR to develop a bot (done by a good external agency) but if you hire for the basic jobs, it might not work well for you because people won’t follow the instructions. If done well, its a good solution for medium size agencies, but we do not believe that most of these agencies need a professional bot. A simple one build on messenger level (without external coding) will be sufficient for 80% of agencies.
- Build an AI powered call bot to call candidates to ask about the most basic things.
This is the most expensive point and should only be used by large companies that recruit thousands of people every year. The cost of development is around 5000 – 7000 + EUR and there is a cost of maintaining / upgrading the tool.
You can always reach out to us to discuss what would be the best solution for your agency.
Consider having a late shift
This is one of the most overlooked ideas in most agencies. Most of them operate 9:00 – 17:00 and we can clearly see that all over the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and other EU countries. If everyone does like that, why would you want to consider changing anything?
Based on our algorithms from live campaigns of our clients, around 45% of people apply between 16:00 – 21:00. Assuming you can call them within 20-30min from applying, don’t you think that would increase the placement ratio? Of course it would.
There might be even some employees that would prefer to start at 11 or 12 and finish later. It does not have to be the same employee all the time. People can rotate. Its just good
If you want to discuss the best solutions for your agency, please reach out to mateusz@marydconsulting.eu or just book a meeting: https://calendly.com/maryd-consulting/
