6 Strategies for Retail Recruiting
Nikolay Manolov
Sep 24, 2018 6:01:04 PM
With one of the highest staff turnover rates, the retail industry struggles with many challenges that result from high-volume recruiting. Retail giants are hiring candidates at consistently higher rates relative to other industries — within a short timeframe — making their struggles even more so a hindrance to hiring the right candidates.
However, hiring big doesn’t necessarily have to equal hiring inefficiently. There are steps your recruiting team can take to ensure that your hiring goals are met — while providing a streamlined hiring process.
Before we dive into the solutions, let’s discuss some of the current pain points of high-volume recruitment.
Challenges of high-volume retail recruiting
High turnover rates
The retail industry typically has 1.4 times the turnover rate of other industries, but this rate has increased even more during the pandemic. While a lot of factors contribute to high employee churn, the most common issues that drive away qualified candidates or repel current employees include poor onboarding, low pay, lack of growth potential, and failure to align with the employer’s vision and plan.
As soon as current employees leave, new employees are hired to replace them — perpetuating the never-ending cycle. This puts a burden on recruiting teams to constantly be on the lookout for potential candidates to hire, taking up a large amount of time and resources.
A potentially unmanageable talent pool
The retail industry is notorious for its large talent pool and high applicant count. While having a large source of applicants to review can be positive, it still takes a lot of work if recruiters are manually screening and interviewing candidates for each open position. This makes it extremely difficult to spend sufficient time with each candidate, resulting in a poor recruiting process and potential loss of qualified candidates.
Outdated recruiting strategies
An inefficient, outdated hiring strategy can really set your team back. Long job application processes, ineffective or misleading job descriptions, and inefficient communication can turn some of the best candidates away from applying to open roles. In modern-day recruiting, top talent expect top employers — and that means retailers have to leave outdated recruiting strategies at the door.
Turning Challenges Into Opportunities: How to Master High-Volume Retail Recruiting
Explore different avenues of sourcing
Whether you source candidates through social media, job postings, or referrals, there are other methods your team can explore to increase your chances of finding the best talent.
Text-to-Apply is a great way to put your employer brand out there and connect with passive candidates. It’s an SMS-based form of recruiting that allows you to create a unique number code or QR code that candidates can use to text in and express interest in a particular job. You can easily promote your code via social media, storefronts, billboards, or any other platform that prospects can easily access and see.
After candidates express interest via text, they can immediately opt to proceed onto screening and interview scheduling, tasks that can be done all via mobile using a chatbot. Since this is completely automated, you can reach out to hundreds or even thousands of candidates at once.
This is a great way to increase exposure and promote brand awareness among passive candidates, who may not be interested in actively searching for a job online. By putting yourself out there first, you’re creating more opportunities to meet and hire top talent.
Write attractive and accurate job ads
Job ads are the first thing candidates see during their job search, making them an impressionable component of your recruitment process. You also want to be straightforward while staying accurate; overwriting your job ads with filler words can come off as generic or phony. It’s also important to use inclusive language depending on what you’re hiring for.
Keep consistent communication
Regardless of what stage you’re at in the recruiting process, it’s essential to follow up with candidates and let them know where they stand. However, in high-volume recruiting, it can be especially hard with so many candidates to keep track of.
With such a large number of applicants to stay in touch with, it’s necessary to leverage technology to help your team with keeping consistent communication. Text Recruiting is popular in the recruiting industry due to its flexibility, convenience, and ability to help recruiters schedule campaigns and messages via SMS. Your team can craft personalized messages at any stage and send them out to hundreds or even thousands of candidates — all at once. This saves recruiters a ton of time while meeting the communication needs of both parties.
Take advantage of automation
Chatbot automation is a huge aid when it comes to high-volume retail recruiting. With the help of a virtual assistant, you can automate outreach, screening, interview scheduling, follow-ups, and onboarding. As you can imagine, this reduces the burden of time-consuming tasks that recruiters originally had to take on. Not only that, it provides a positive candidate experience by speeding up the entire recruitment process and maintaining constant communication with candidates.
Consider going all-digital
If you’re still hosting traditional in-person career fairs, consider going the all-digital route. Virtual Career Fairs are a great way to meet and connect with candidates from all locations and backgrounds — on any device. It’s great for high-volume recruiting as both recruiters and candidates have a designated platform to go through all the steps of the recruiting process in real-time.
The best part about it is that you don’t have to factor in travel, venue, and other miscellaneous costs that add up over time.
Find the most suitable recruiting software
To achieve efficient high-volume hiring, you need the right resources and tools. Finding the right recruiting software is extremely important in helping you streamline your talent acquisition strategy while providing a positive candidate experience.
Companies like XOR offer an all-inclusive recruiting communication platform that enables recruiters to connect with candidates via text, chatbots, virtual career fairs, and more. They integrate with various applicant tracking systems and also have reporting capabilities that help analyze your campaign results and metrics. To learn more about their recruiting solutions, schedule a demo here.
Takeaway
Mastering high-volume recruiting is definitely a feat to be proud of — but it takes more than just what traditional recruiting offers. To attract and hire top talent, you need more than that. Modern-day recruiting software can help your team achieve your hiring goals, faster. By adopting the right technology into your high-volume recruiting strategy, you’ll be equipped to hire at any number. See how XOR can help.
Tags: AI, Recruitment, Virtual Career Fair, Text Recruiting, High-volume recruiting