Being a recruiter in the post-COVID economy is tough, but even more so if you are working in the service sector. Let’s consider a few statistics:
- Many of the fastest-growing industries post-pandemic are in the service sector – the World Economic Forum, for example, reported that leisure and hospitality added 128,000 jobs in January 2023 alone, which was far and away the most of any other industry.
- However, now more than ever, the prospective talent pool is smaller than ever. The US Chamber of Commerce reported in early 2023 that while there were about 10 million open jobs across all industries, there were only 5 million unemployed people to fill them.
- Both of these trends have left more power in the hands of talent, and they are leveraging that power by finding new jobs. That same US Chamber of Commerce report showed that quit rates across various service sector industries, such as leisure and hospitality, food service, and retail, all had quit rates that far outpace the national average.
Recruiters have long led the way in developing new methods for sourcing candidates for their roles, and technology has also helped fill a number of critical gaps over the years. However, there are some emerging trends that teams can take advantage of to help them keep up with the talent needs of their organization.
Increase Your Reach
In a world where we are constantly competing for attention, recruiters need to find new and innovative ways to speak to prospective talent. Traditional recruiting channels, such as job boards and career fairs, are still great channels for sourcing talent, but it’s also where all of your competitors are posting their jobs, making it more difficult to cut through the noise. Additionally, many recruiters in the service sector are often looking for younger profiles, mainly Millenials and Gen Z, who don’t frequent these legacy channels as much.
For both of these reasons, recruiters need to think outside the box and leverage new channels to stay top-of-mind with prospective talent. One avenue many teams can explore is increasing their investment in social media. Entry-level talent is more online than ever before. Pew Research recently surveyed members of Gen Z, and 45% of them reported that they are online “almost constantly.” While many organizations use social media for brand marketing initiatives, there is a lot of untapped potential in strategically using it to advertise for open roles. Recruiters should be exploring ways to build and optimize their social media approach to broaden their reach and increase the chances of capturing applications.
TIP: Learn more about how you can utilize social media to increase your reach in our recent blog post.
Streamline Your Application Process
Once you have interest from prospective talent, the worst thing you could do is throw more roadblocks in front of them to get them to accept an offer. According to a Talent Board report, candidates are more likely to drop out of the hiring process as it lengthens. The report found that 53% of candidates withdrew from a hiring process that took too long. Just as you promote things like culture and career growth opportunities, recruiters should promote a seamless application and interview experience.
In order to create the best application and interview process, it’s critical that recruiters understand the ideal persona for their various roles, and create workflows that meet them where they are. For example, many entry-level roles in the service sector are best suited for Gen Z or millennial personas. Since these younger generations spend more time on their phones, recruiters who want to effectively engage with these candidates should have a mobile-optimized application flow.
Intelligently Nurture ALL Talent
Recruiters are at their happiest when they are connecting talent with roles that they enjoy and thrive in. This is because they are skilled at understanding a person’s skills, and matching it with the needs of the organization. To help amplify those efforts, recruiting teams should be looking for ways to surface the skills of their talent and continually leverage that knowledge. The best talent acquisition teams understand this implicitly, and they are constantly looking for ways to tap into all of their sources to match the best skills profiles with their open roles.
Recruiting teams need to constantly be documenting skills profiles, and finding intelligent ways to nurture key talent, even if they aren’t the right fit at the moment. This effectively creates a database for the team to tap into whenever a new role opens up, rather than having to start from scratch and source new profiles. And remember that this applies not only to external talent, but also to internal team members who might be looking for a new challenge, career advancement, or roles more suited to their skill set. Talent marketplaces are gaining in popularity as a solution to help manage this database of skills, but no matter what the solution set looks like recruiters should be looking for ways to assess and document talent profiles so that they can proactively access the best talent pool for their role.
Conclusion
Service sector talent acquisition is facing unprecedented challenges in sourcing talent volume without sacrificing quality. In order to meet this moment, recruiters should be looking for ways to augment their efforts. From increasing their reach across more sourcing channels (including social media) to accelerating application and hiring processes, and gathering more skills data for effective nurturing, even small investments in each of these areas can help create a larger funnel to evaluate, identify, and ultimately hire the best talent for their open roles. And in the end, everyone wins. Recruiters feel the fulfillment from matching talent to jobs that they love, talent is happy to secure a job where they can showcase and develop their skills, and the business enjoys increased productivity and reduced turnover.
Levee is built for the scale and speed required to attract, hire, and retain service sector talent. Powered by conversational AI, our platform makes it easier for recruiters to expand their reach to source more talent, implement automation to collect the insights they need to more effectively identify the best fit for their roles, and accelerate the hiring process by providing a seamless experience for candidates. We have helped our clients drastically decrease their time-to-hire, reduce turnover, and improve diverse hiring outcomes, all while improving the efficiency of their business.
To learn more about what Levee can do for your team, schedule a consultation with one of our solution specialists.
