The commitment and stress of a job search has not changed much for a generation. But here's what is different: the mechanics of how candidates search and apply for open positions. In an era of easy access to information and unprecedented personal computing power, word travels fast. While consistent reviews with praise like "Best company I have worked for in my 10-year career" can boost the company brand among the talent pool, claims of "Management gangs up on you" are a liability. Organizations today have to be mindful of buzz good and bad — not only among their customer base, but throughout the talent pool.
Among contemporary job seekers, patience with the application process is limited. CareerBuilder and SilkRoad recently teamed up to survey more than 1000 job seekers and found that job candidates now bring a set of expectations to the process.
People looking for jobs, they concluded, "are accustomed to the environment they experience as consumers online, where everything is at their fingertips with a digital, mobile-friendly and engaging process."
Meanwhile, job and recruiting website Glassdoor, in an analysis of hiring trends for 2019, reported on the growing role of data analytics. "The new paradigm for the job search uses big data and machine learning to cut through the clutter of online job postings and candidates," their experts wrote. With data about specific desired skills, characteristics of successful candidates, and more, applicants can customize their job listings — and employers now have a more nimble approach with a curated pool of candidates.
For hiring personnel tasked with recruiting a high volume of hourly workers, this may seem like a ship that's sailing without them. High turnover rates dig into the bottom line. Yet many employers of hourly workers exacerbate their own problems with a "butts in seats" mentality. Their priority is often just to have someone working in the open role regardless of how good that worker is or how quickly they quit. This mentality creates a death spiral for hourly employers.
At the same time, many hourly employers rely largely on outdated methods to bring in staff. Restaurants still have "Now Hiring" signs on their windows. Applicants find and apply for positions via databases that are little more than digital classified ads. The result is often a workforce that has a de facto "gig" status. Restaurant Insider notes an eyebrow-raising statistic: 42% of front-of-house employees leave within the first three months. Longevity doesn't improve much for higher-paid personnel: 43% of managers leave within a year.
Gaining insight into these workers before they're brought onto the payroll is likely to slow down this chronic rotation in and out of the company. Pre-hire assessments are not rare — Aberdeen Group reported in 2014 that 57% of companies were using such assessments. But they may be seen as too time-intensive or costly for employers looking to fill lower-wage roles. Not only that, but the job-seeking pool is now well-informed about a company's reputation and unlikely to react positively to news of scrolling through screen after screen for a cumbersome assessment. Job candidates are accustomed to a fast-paced, interactive experience online.
Many pre-hire assessments have a similar look and feel. They require applicants to tolerate extensive reading, for example, or consider multiple features of the same information. Some require interpreting head-scratcher hypothetical scenarios: what does this all have to do with the job anyway? Applicants for hourly positions may quit the process or begin to find reasons, even before the first day of work, to dislike management.
Traitify offers a new approach. With an image-based, enjoyable and quick assessment, Traitify can produce insights about an individual's relevant characteristics and help determine if a candidate may be a good match for the demands of a typical workday. Easy to complete in an industry-leading 90 seconds, the Traitify assessment also produces results that are accessible. Those results can be offered to candidates, even those who are not hired. This promotes a valuable reputation among job seekers. Traitify offers employers the opportunity to have their cake and eat it too — recognizing the realities of the modern quick-clicking job search, yet still gaining important candidate insights and a store of data about applicants.
