Three ways retail organisations can use technology to engage and hire frontline workers

Automation of repetitive tasks

The high-volume recruiting retailers need means talent acquisition professionals often get bogged down in mundane, repetitive tasks. Take interview scheduling, for example. A recruiter might need to schedule ten candidates for an interview. It might take three calls to get through to each candidate before the interview is confirmed. Those thirty calls could take up a good chunk of that recruiter’s day.

Interview scheduling software can automate the entire process, allowing candidates to select a slot suitable to them and confirming the meeting via email, adding the event to both the candidate’s and recruiter’s calendar. A process that could take several days to finalise can now be confirmed within minutes of a candidate accepting an interview. 

“Recruiters are incredibly busy  - from posting jobs,to finding and scheduling candidates, - hey are under intense pressure. Automating tasks through technology gives them back time to focus on more strategic and high value activities,” says Leeds.

Conversational artificial intelligence

High-volume recruiting means hiring the same profile of candidate repeatedly. Automation and conversational artificial intelligence - such as smart chatbots - allows organisations to frame the same questions that need to be asked of each candidate, providing short answers that can move the applicant through the hiring funnel quickly. Someone who is successful  can immediatly schedule their interview to the next stage.

Again, this use of technology allows organisations to speed up the hiring process and removes strain from recruiters, allowing them to focus on more strategic, human-focused tasks.

It also improves a candidate’s experience, as they move quickly and frictionlessly through the recruitment process, says Leeds.

“Those not using this type of technology are missing out on candidates, as the market today is all about speed and user experience. Jobseekers today are used to a speedy, consumer-like experience. They use UberEats to deliver food, or Amazon to buy products. Everything is so quick and easy and they don’t have to engage with another person. It’s about instant gradification. If your job application is long and tedious, you’ll lose candidates to organizations that can move faster,” she warns.

Real-time analytics to drill down into specific challenges

The pace of growth in the retail sector means that hiring managers and recruiters need to be adept at making changes quickly and precisely. Real time analytics allows retail recruiters to drill down into specific issues affecting individual stores or job roles, before making targeted interventions.

This can be useful if an organisation is witnessing high attrition in a particular job role, or to investigate different candidate experiences between stores.

“Things move so fast in retail that you need deep analytics and data to understand what is happening in real-time in your recruiting business,” says Leeds.

“Real-time data allows you to look at specific hourly jobs like cashiers or even cashiers in a specific location. Why do you have a high attrition rate here? Do you need to update your job descriptions to accuratly describe the day to day enviornment and culture? Is compensation an issue? Maybe it’s the manager? Real-time insight can be very helpful understanding the nuances and making quick adjustments,” she adds.