This story is a guest contribution from ClearCompany an integrator of data-driven best practices, expert-informed content, and tailored software tools to recruit, ramp, recognize, and retain employees.
Frontline workers hold jobs that are among the most important in our society—healthcare workers, first responders, truck drivers, grocery store clerks, and postal workers, just to name a few. Without the option to work remotely, they show up every day to keep the world running smoothly. Needless to say, that’s not an easy task.
Many essential services jobs are demanding, with high rates of burnout and turnover. Additionally, frontline workers who quit often leave their industry altogether. It’s clear there’s a critical need to support frontline employees, and one of the best ways HR can do that is by keeping teams fully staffed and productive. However, frontline workforce planning is more challenging than ever, thanks to today’s aggressive labor market. A strategic recruiting process can help organizations support both frontline workers and HR employees to help retain essential workers, fill vacancies fast, and anticipate future staffing needs.
What does it mean to recruit frontline workers strategically?
Strategic recruitment means proactively sourcing and hiring top talent in alignment with the business’s overarching strategy. This approach enables your team to plan which types of workers to hire and when, to build relationships with potential candidates, and to leverage workforce data when making hiring decisions.
A strategic recruiting plan also means your team is prepared for the inevitable (and often unexpected) terminations and resignations. These events are not uncommon, with 41% of frontline workers and 38% of frontline managers reporting that they switched jobs in the past year.
With a strategic recruitment plan, you can stop reactively hiring each time an employee leaves. Instead, you can leverage a pool of qualified candidates, an outreach strategy, and data on what your long-term and top-performing team members have in common. With this approach, you’ll be able to hire faster and feel confident in your decisions.
Strategic recruitment and frontline workforce planning
Frontline work spans a range of industries and is completed by businesses large and small. But in any industry, if these important public-facing roles sit vacant too long or understaffing persists, there’s a negative effect on productivity, growth, and profitability. Many HR teams engage in workforce planning to prepare for unplanned vacancies and planned growth while also mitigating the effects of understaffing and skills gaps on the bottom line.
So how does your recruitment strategy impact workforce planning? Strategic recruitment helps ensure that your company can attract and retain frontline workers with the right skills both now and in the future. Aligning these strategies helps cultivate a resilient, adaptable workforce that can withstand changing market conditions and drive sustainable business performance.
5 benefits of strategic recruiting for frontline workers
Strategic recruitment has many benefits for HR teams hiring frontline workers—and for frontline workers themselves. Some of these benefits include:
1. Creating a reliable stream of candidates
A critical aspect of strategic recruitment is building a strong frontline worker talent pool. Often when candidates aren’t hired, their information is discarded or archived, never to be searched again. But those candidates could be the perfect fit for another role down the line. With an applicant tracking system (ATS), you can sort candidates into pools based on their areas of expertise. Then, the key is keeping in touch. Regular email campaigns can help organizations to stay on candidates’ radars and encourage additional applications. With an AI-enhanced ATS, you can even surface past candidates whose skills and experience match your new open roles and get in touch with top talent faster than ever.
2. Accelerating the hiring processes
Working strategically in any area of the business helps keep processes running smoothly, and that includes recruiting. With a strong talent pool and an effective ATS, you can get jobs posted faster, reach a larger range of frontline worker candidates, get interviews scheduled in minutes rather than days, helping you to run an efficient interview process. Then, thanks to the recruitment data you’ve collected with your ATS, you can create structured blueprints for sourcing, nurturing, and hiring the best candidates for your business. With a data-backed strategy, you can make those hiring decisions confidently.
3. Strengthening your employer brand
Think about the last time you had a bad experience as a candidate. Maybe there was too little communication from the recruiter, the interview process dragged on, or the job turned out to be much different than the description. Whatever the case, a bad candidate experience leaves potential employees with a less-than-stellar impression of your company. However, by leveraging the automation and artificial intelligence built into your ATS, you can provide an excellent candidate experience and simplify recruiters' workflows. Frequent, timely communication and a fair structured interview process go a long way toward establishing a positive reputation for your organization among frontline workers.
4. Ensuring skills alignment
A recruiting strategy is essential for hiring frontline workers with the skills your company needs to grow and succeed. Your strategy helps you understand which skills employees have in abundance and which skills are lacking. With an ATS, you can automatically incorporate job requirements and the attributes of your top performers into your job descriptions and interview guides. From there, you can more easily determine whether you can upskill or reskill your current employees or if you need to hire to fill those skills gaps.
5. Reducing frontline worker turnover
According to SHRM, understaffing is the number one stressor for frontline managers and the second-largest stressor for frontline workers. It also significantly impacts productivity. Strategic recruitment means that you’re both ensuring your company remains fully staffed and that the people you hire are the right choice for the role. This means that employees are less likely to become overworked and burnt out due to understaffing, that new hires are less likely to quit and far more likely to become longtime employees, and that downtime decreases and productivity increases because of less turnover.
Redefining frontline worker potential through strategic recruiting
Your frontline worker recruiting strategy can help you unlock the full potential of your workforce, allowing your business to reach new heights. Build a positive employer brand, cultivate employee retention, and keep your teams fully staffed and supported with strategic recruiting.
