Hourly workers have always been the backbone of the U.S. economy and the importance of the work they do has only become heightened during this pandemic crisis. Employees who are paid an hourly wage for their services account for 82.3 million workers 16 years and older, representing well over half (58.1 percent) of all wage and salary workers in 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even if you’re hiring for multiple locations, are you building and engaging your local talent base at each?
Localizing your recruiting outreach is an increasingly crucial part of recruiting, especially in today’s mismatched market. Let’s walk through the importance of localized recruiting and share how you can use geotargeting and other strategies to attract more hourly candidates.
What Are Hourly Candidates Searching For?
The candidates seeking an entry-level or hourly position follow a different job search and decision-making process than candidates looking for a full-time salaried job. Hourly job seekers are aware that their skills translate across industries like retail & grocery and restaurant & hospitality and will more frequently search by location for jobs and not by job titles or industry.
For example, the keyword monthly volume (how often a word or phrase is searched in Google each month) is much higher for the top 10 searches for “jobs near me” than it is for “retail associate.” In fact, “jobs near me” has a monthly volume of over 1.5 million searches while searches for the job title “retail associate” returns fewer than half of that volume and results that include major retail brands. When targeting local candidates for retail store positions, it’s important to consider that your store locations are more important to hourly candidates than job title and you should be optimizing your postings for candidate search.
How to Localize Recruiting Outreach for Hourly Roles
When it comes to restaurant and retail recruitment, the same talent is available to all the stores that are located in the same area, which means that local candidates have a lot of options. Unless you find ways to actively build and engage a local talent base, you’ll miss out on the best of the best.
Use Geotargeting to Attract Hourly Candidates
Geographic recruitment outreach is a key component of being able to fill high-volume, entry-level hourly positions, particularly in retail, grocery, restaurant and hospitality sectors. Geotargeting identifies the real-world geographical location of a visitor to a website or app and presents content to them based on country, city, or neighborhood that is local to the store locations for which you are hiring. For example, geotargeting potential candidates involves advertising your job posting to people within 30 miles of a company location and can even be used to target multiple geographic areas based on which store locations are hiring, or for an in-person hiring event.
Direct Candidates to Apply for Multiple Locations
Your job posting or career site landing page should encourage candidates to apply to multiple stores. Yes, this sounds counterintuitive, but in my experience store managers or location recruiters don’t make a habit of sharing candidates across locations. During the application process, you can display all the available locations and ask candidates if they’d like to apply to more of them to increase their chances of being selected.
Related: Four Recruiting Bottlenecks to Avoid in Restaurant & Retail
Optimize Your Job Listings for Better Local Rankings
Because local job seekers perform hyper-local job searches as mentioned above, you must optimize your job listings to rank better for any keywords that hint at local retail job ad searches. In order to optimize your job posting for local outreach, the location (city and state) is more important than the job title and should therefore be included in the headline of your post. If hiring at multiple locations, each campaign can be segmented to target those specific locations.
How Can Talroo Help?
Investing in the right tools and technology can help give you the push you need to be successful in finding hourly candidates. Talroo’s API finds similarities between search queries and search locations and allows users to add optional location parameters to include regional searches if, for example, you want a broader geographic target that includes local colleges and universities. This can simplify the process for you and your team, as you can make changes to location parameters in real-time and redirect budget to different locations based on the number of hires you need to make.
