Most staffing shortages occur because of three things: visibility, ease of application and onboarding. Here are three strategies to overcome these challenges.
1. Visibility
If you're not digitally advertising your job opening, you need to be. Don't assume that people are going directly to your website to find a job. Indeed and Ziprecruiter are popular job boards that most candidates use. You can even look into different softwares that allow you to syndicate to many different job boards. Visibility in digital advertising can be measured in a variety of ways. The easiest to measure is impressions. If you're not getting enough impressions, then look at the content of your posting. Make sure it is clear and concise. Another issue could be that you're not paying enough for the advertisements and placements. Aside from digital advertising, it stil serves well to get out in your community. Share that you’re hiring at the places your potential candidates may be.
2. Ease of Application
These days, most people are applying for jobs on their mobile phone, even teachers. Make sure your application is mobile optimized. What does that mean? That means that many files don’t need to be attached. Don’t put too much friction between you and the candidate. Test your application. Something we’ve seen with many of our clients is that the application process for a superintendent is the same as it is for a $16 per hour after school care worker. That's not gonna bode well for staffing. Segment your application process based on the needs of the role. If your after school care workers don't need a college degree, then don't make them put which college they went to. If the after school care workers don't need experience, don't make them list every professional experience. A major pet peeve of EVERYONE is when a candidate is asked to upload their resume and then asked to write out every part of their resume in a different form field. That's just poor technology. A resume parser is easily available. This software can read the resume and put it in a form that can be stored in a database.
3. Onboarding
You may need background checks for good reasons. You may also need reference checks and state clearances for good reasons. But when you merge all these factors together, this creates a challenging onboarding process for the type of role that you're recruiting. For example, an after school care worker in the state of Minnesota usually requires two background checks and two professional references. This is for a three hour, part-time, $16 to $20 per hour role. We see many candidates that drop out during this stage because they find something else. How do you overcome this? Guide the candidate through the process. We’ve found that the state email that requires a candidate to get a fingerprint usually goes to spam, so we call each candidate when they receive this email to tell them to check their spam folder. We also call candidates when we can’t get a hold of a reference. We do not give up when one part of the onboarding process doesn't work. We stay with the candidate and walk them through it.
We’ve found that about 90% of the challenges in staffing comes down to one of these three problems. Solving these will quickly lead to an increase in qualified candidates.