Let’s say you were an alien. You came to earth in your spaceship, the first person you met was me, and decided you want to be a recruiter just like me! So, I told you to go to some recruiting conferences and check out the profession and we would talk once you returned.
A month later we meet for Diet Dews, because that’s what earthlings do! And you have some reactions to what you’ve learned so far about recruiting. First, you would say, “So, is all recruiting tech recruiting!?!”
I would smile and give you that mentor smile and all-knowing head nod, a little chuckle because I would immediately recognize the problem! Recruiting conferences only talk about IT recruiting! Even though it’s about 5% or less of the total recruitment done on the planet!
The biggest recruitment problem we face on earth (okay, for sure in the U.S.!) is hourly recruitment, but we rarely talk about it. “Any moron can hire a minimum wage worker, Tim! It takes real recruiting skills to hire IT!”
Actually, it takes the exact same skill, but I digress…
In many parts of the U.S., currently, it’s exceptionally more difficult to hire hourly workers than IT/Tech workers. Why?
First, hourly workers aren’t as well known. They don’t post their profiles on LinkedIn, or their resume on Indeed, or have a profile on Github, or go to conferences, etc. For the most part, the internet footprint of an hourly worker is completely different than that of a professional, white-collar worker.
Thus, instead of looking a needle inside of a haystack, you’re looking for a needle inside of a needle stack!
Eventually, I’ll find the needle in a haystack. I might never find the needle in a needle stack or at least the needle – or needles – I want!
My friend, Madeline Larano, is wicked smart, overly nice, and runs the talent acquisition analyst firm, Aptitude Research, and she just released, “The Forgotten Workforce: New Research on the Hourly Candidate“. Go check it out, it’s awesome and full of great stuff for hourly recruiting:
- 62% of all hourly applicants never hear back on their application. (I have a nephew, who has some hickey’s in his background looking for an hourly job right now, and he’s lucky to hear back from 20%! So, I believe this!)
- Less than 30% of employers never give feedback to hourly workers during the recruiting process! (That is truly awful!)
All recruiting is difficult if you suck.
That you feel you don’t have to give feedback to someone because they make less money than someone else in your organization is very telling of your culture. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a CEO that would say, “Sure, it’s fine that we treat hourly candidates like crap! We only care about the salaried workers…” Never!
If you Google “Tim Sackett” you’ll find our Tim, and a truck driver chaplain. Our Tim is NOT the truck driver chaplain, although how awesome would that be if he was!? He is a prolific writer in the HR and TA space who just happens to also run an Engineering and IT contract staffing agency (HRU Technical Resources) out of Michigan. He also writes every day at his own blog, the Tim Sackett Project. Weirdly, he’s known as an expert in workplace hugging, which was kind of cool years ago, but now seems painfully creepy, but we still love him and he’s fairly harmless. Tim is also on the board of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), lifetime Michigan State Spartan fan, husband to a Hall of Fame wife, 3 sons, and his best friend Scout. He also wrote a book with SHRM called The Talent Fix, you can find it on Amazon.