On April 9, 2020, the U.S. Labor Department announced that 15 million workers had lost their jobs in the last three weeks – that’s nearly 1 in every 10 workers. Previously, the U.S .economy had approximately 200,000 workers filing for unemployment weekly. Overnight, that shot up to 3.3 million and then the following week 6.6 million, and 6.8 million last week. In Massachusetts, for example, 468,639 people have filed for unemployment in the last three weeks (147K, then 181K and another 139K filing last week). For comparison, there were less than 20,000 claims for the entire month of February. The states aren’t ready to handle this surge; in Massachusetts, they are staffed for 4,000 weekly claims so they are wholly understaffed to manage a spike of more than 20x in a month.
What does this have to do with finding warehouse workers and delivery drivers?
When you are facing a hiring surge and you don’t have the advantage of capturing the news cycles, like the top brands, how can you compete to win? On Wednesday, in our most recent webinar, Chris Forman (CEO of Appcast) and I spoke about just this. While there is a lot of good data in the mix, here are the three things you should do:
- Bid high, bid smart.
You can only do this if you are equipped with the data you need to be able to hear through the noise of the market and know what it’s going to take to get candidates to apply for your job.
In the last few weeks, overall, CPC (cost per click) bids are up, but so are apply rates (the number of people clicking on a job to get one to complete your application). What does that mean? It means you have to pay a whole heck of a lot more for each click, but it takes less clicks to get a candidate you can call.
Bidding up makes sense – but how much is always the challenge. And what is true today is out of date tomorrow – the amount of data you need to be able to consume and adjust to, daily, requires help – automated help. Make sure to reach out to your partners frequently to find out what the market is supporting today.
- Go mobile first.
This is a mobile-first group, they are engaging with jobs and applying to them via a mobile device over 80% of the time – and that increased in the last few weeks by another 10%. You cannot win the race for candidates if your application process is clunky, long or unoptimized.
- Be timely with your titles.
All of those folks that are applying for unemployment but not able to get through the process fast enough to feed their families this week need jobs, now. Adding key terms to your tile such as “Hiring Now”. “Temporary Hire”, “Full-time”, and “Immediate Start” are driving increased clicks and application rates. The impact on your hiring is that you will get more clicks and more applications immediately. If you are looking for drivers, “Touch-Free Freight” is another driver of increased candidate engagement.
Just adding “Temporary Hire,” for example, will increase your clicks by 83% and the application rate by 224%. Tapping into your market needs will help you stand out against competing firms.
If you’d like to check out the full on-demand webinar where we discussed COVID-19’s impact on recruiting for warehouse and delivery roles, it is available here.
Thank you for all you are doing and good luck!
