I’ve been working in the talent acquisition industry for over 20 years, and this is the strangest hiring market I’ve ever seen. These days, I hear recurring themes from just about everyone who is in recruiting and looking for talent:
- “Where are all the job seekers?”
- “My jobs are being looked at, but no one is applying.”
- “How will I ever get my roles filled?”
- “My go-to ways to advertise my jobs just don’t seem to be working anymore.”
We read about the Great Resignation and myriad reasons why so many jobs aren’t getting applicants. There are many opinions on why this is – boomers taking early retirement, hourly workers want more money and benefits, the pandemic provided people time to reassess how they want to work ….
At Appcast, our goal is to use award-winning programmatic technology, plus some of the smartest data geeks around, in order to help companies find talent – even in today’s hiring market. Some of our largest clients are in the retail industry. Even though they too are witnessing the challenge of finding enough applicants, I want to share an example where technology, and a team effort, have helped fill talent pipelines for many of their open positions.
The client is a large beverage and food retailer that needed help with front-line staff. Traditionally, each location would put a help wanted sign in their window and would be able to fill their client-facing roles on a regular basis. Not this year. When we started talks, we started with a few regional locations across the country, and expanded markets every few weeks. On one of our regular check-in calls, we found that certain markets performed better than others, with smaller markets harder to attract applicants.
We asked if they were open to trying a few additional job titles, along with their current ones, to see if we could capture a new set of job seekers. As they were amenable, we explored what made them stand out from other beverage and food companies. Their suite of benefits is very strong, and we set out to add a few benefits to their job titles. We used “signing bonus,” “paid college tuition,” and “flexible hours and schedules” in their standard job description. Our technology gave us the agility to do this overnight, as well as visibility into how many applies came from the original job titles and how many came from the new ones (A/B testing).
In the first four months after going live, our job title expansions provided more than 60% of all their applicants! With a total number of applies around 17,000, that meant that over 10,000 of these applicants came from our job expansion capability. Talent leadership at the company has been very pleased with initial results, and we are in the process of expanding our relationship with the company.
Most companies don’t have the ability in their applicant tracking systems to change job descriptions on the fly and test whether other titles can attract a wider audience. But the technology is out there, and companies like Appcast have the ability and experience to help.
