How to Improve Your Recruitment of Hourly Workers
Many retail stores and other small businesses depend on hourly workers for the day-to-day operations of the company. While there is certainly no shortage of people looking for work, you might be having trouble retaining employees or finding workers who were a good fit in the first place. Numerous employers resign themselves to taking what they can get, which often leads to a revolving door of employees with no one person staying for very long. This is not an efficient way to run a business, so you need to take a good, hard look at your recruitment of hourly workers to find ways to improve your recruitment and hiring strategies.
Examine How You Find New Employees
There are a vast number of ways to reach out to potential job candidates. There may be a certain way you look for new hires, and you need to see if there are any potential avenues you are overlooking. Maybe your business sticks to just having a ïHelp Wantedï sign in the front window or perhaps you only advertise in the local newspaper. While these are not necessarily bad ideas, you should look into other resources like an online career forum or through social media outlets for the recruitment of hourly workers. This will include crafting an easily findable job listing that contains useful, relevant keywords.
If you have never written an ad like this before, then you might want to have your workers read it over for you before you post it. They will be able to tell you if there are any responsibilities you have left off or if anything should be altered. You can also do a quick search for job openings similar to yours to see what other employers have put. Something else to consider when finding new workers is what kind of perks you can offer. While healthcare and retirement plans might not be in the cards for smaller businesses, you should see if you can afford to offer flexible scheduling or employee discounts. Making your company stand apart from the rest with special perks will help tremendously in the recruitment of hourly workers.
Plan Out Your Interviews
Once you have gotten a sizable crop of applications, you can get started on the interview process. There are various ways you can go about this, and different strategies will work better for different employers. For instance, you should consider starting off with a phone interview. This will allow you to acquire some basic information and see if you are interested in speaking to the candidate in-person.
Before you meet with applicants, you should prepare some questions to ask. These should be open-ended questions that give interviewees a chance to talk about themselves for a little bit. You should avoid asking questions that could be answered with a simple ïNoï or ïYes.ï
As you are going through the recruitment of hourly workers, you might have to schedule a dozen or more interviews in a single day. Give yourself some time to relax between each one so that you can reflect on the previous interview and jot down any information you want to remember. There may have been something a candidate said or did that interested you, and you need to remember it.
Preparing the New Hires
You might be hiring for an hourly position, but that does not mean you should neglect to check references. You still want to hire the best employee you can find, and you do not want to hire someone who has a shoddy work history. Something else that is easy to overlook is the training process. You need to make sure all your workers have the necessary tools to do their jobs adequately, so it can be exceptionally beneficial to test them in essential skills. While tests may cost you a little bit, the return on investment will be well worth it.
You might not be able to offer the same kind of salary or benefits as larger organizations, but with a little planning and foresight, you can still bring on great workers. By offering your employees a unique work experience along with opportunities for growth and advancement, you can have a great workforce that involves little turnover. You need to develop a solid strategy for the recruitment of hourly workers so that you are able to locate, analyze and train your new hires.
Growing your small business can be a challenge, but Mighty Recruiter has useful resources available to help you learn about great business strategies.