Only 9 percent of executives surveyed in December 2011 from larger U.S. companies – companies with revenues greater than $750 million and workforces made up of more than 1,500 employees – said political uncertainty will discourage them from adding personnel in 2012.

“With due respect to our dear politicians, this one issue [of jobs stagnation] is probably bigger than them…the actions businesses (and the global economy as a whole) take are going to take precedence over anything decided in November,” writes Lance Haun, TLNT contributing editor and community director for ERE.net, a sister website to TLNT.com.

So what do the executives surveyed think will be the greatest obstacle to increased hiring? Economic uncertainty, said 61 percent. The next highest percentage – 24 percent – said lack of demand for products or services. Here’s the thing: this you can control. Your ability to make successful hires has a direct tie to an increased demand for your products and services.

A Michigan State University study revealed that online sourcing and assessments increase the likelihood of a successful hire by 75 percent. So while 56 percent of executives surveyed said their greatest challenge in workforce planning is recruiting/hiring the right people, those results could be zero. There are affordable and easy-to-use hiring systems featuring online sourcing and assessments, such as Snagajob’s, which is designed for use in hourly workforce-intensive industries, that are proven to help companies make successful hires.

These companies are able to:

• Increase productivity: Posting jobs on Snagajob.com, for example, gives companies access to millions of registered members plus many more visitors. Employers are likely to see an immediate increase in the number and quality of applications, giving them a better shot at hiring people who will work productively and stick with the job. Just how confident were the executives surveyed that they have enough employees with the skills and talents needed for strong performance in meeting customer needs? Only 26 percent were “very confident.” Fifty-six percent said they were “somewhat confident,” but face challenges recruiting enough qualified candidates.
• Make service quality improvements: Snagajob is the only hiring solutions provider offering hourly position-specific assessments to determine which applicants have ideal character traits. It’s important that employers administer the right kind of assessments as part of the online application process. Companies that are able to hire right-fit employees are likely to see an improvement in the bottom line from service improvements that are directly tied to profitability. Not only that, but by recruiting high-quality candidates and making successful hires – hiring people who drive revenue increases – those companies are able to lower costly turnover and control labor, shrinkage and overtime costs.
• Get employees working productively as soon as possible: Yoh’s survey asked executives how long it would take their organizations to recruit and train employees if the economy rebounded to pre-recession levels. Sixty-two percent reported that it would take three to nine months to find and train enough qualified employees to meet pre-recession customer demand. With a hiring system, such as Snagajob’s, in place, companies can build a pipeline of qualified applicants to shorten their ramp-up time significantly. Plus when online sourcing and assessments are coupled with an online training module, such as Snagajob’s soon-to-be-released Training Manager, they’re able to ramp up even more rapidly.

“The disconnect becomes clear through the survey’s findings. Businesses have been slow to apply truly proactive employment strategies, and without a change in direction, they will feel the consequences of this reckless approach,” Yoh’s president Lori Schultz says.

By getting a hiring system, such as Snagajob’s, in place this election year, you’ll begin increasing demand for your products or services through your ability to find high-quality people, make successful hires and get your new employees up to speed as quickly as possible. Your company will be poised and ready to capitalize as the economy rebounds. This election year you’ll win.

The convention gives us the chance to talk one-on-one with hourly employers to hear what hiring challenges and opportunities they are facing, while at the same time offering solutions that can help make their hourly hiring process more efficient and effective.

After four days and too many exciting conversations to count, we noticed that hourly employers were echoing similar questions and challenges. For the benefit of those not able to attend the convention, check out the top three points of discussion at the Snagajob booth.

I’m having a hard time finding applicants with the right skill set. How can I find better applicants?

The solution to this hiring challenge is twofold. First, look at your sourcing method and determine if it’s reaching your target audience. If you have hourly positions to fill, you need to talk directly to hourly job seekers. Posting your jobs on a niche job site focused on hourly positions removes the step of reconciling job seeker expectations with your opportunities and increases the probability that you’ll attract candidates who will fit your open positions.

Second, you may need to shift the way you define “right skill set.” If skill set means only relevant job experience, you may miss out on some of the best-fit employees. If you re-frame skill set to mean possessing characteristics that fit your business, and you evaluate applicants against those characteristics needed for success, you’ll discover that hiring on aptitude over experience will help you build a stronger workforce and may open the door to applicants you previously thought unqualified.

I use Craigslist already. Why do I need another recruiting tool?

Craigslist’s wide reach is enticing when you want to get your job opportunities in front of as many job seekers as possible. But, you may end up sifting through hundreds, maybe thousands, of applicants. And with Craigslist’s unfocused nature, the odds are you’ll receive applications from job seekers with qualifications across the board.

This doesn’t mean that Craigslist can’t help your recruitment efforts. You can use Craigslist to promote your opportunities, but point job seekers back to postings on a niche job site with an online application process that features behavioral assessments. This allows you to capitalize on Craigslist’s strong following, while funneling applicants through an assessment that will present you with only the most qualified applicants.

You can have your Craigslist cake and eat it too.

Why is partnering with an hourly-focused employer solutions vendor important?

If your car broke down, you wouldn’t go to a baker for the repairs, right? In the same way, if you need to fill hourly positions, it just makes good sense to work with a partner that specializes in hourly hiring.

Hourly jobs are different from salaried in more ways than how employees are paid. When filling hourly positions, employers are facing a difference set of challenges than employers targeting salaried employees. And job seekers looking for hourly positions comprise a different demographic and are looking for different employment benefits. Working with a partner that knows the hourly space inside and out, and who has taken that knowledge and developed hiring solutions tailored to the needs of hourly employers makes the budget you’ve set aside for your hiring needs a smarter, more focused spend.

Thank you, IFA, for hosting another great conference. We’re already looking forward to networking with, learning from and sharing insights with franchisors and franchisees across the hourly space next year!

You can’t blame hiring managers for changing their approach. Online recruiting is more cost effective – a study conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that the average cost per hire when recruiting online was $377 compared to $3,295 when using a major metro newspaper. Plus, online recruiting is a strategy that results in a better quality applicant – a Direct Employers Association Recruiting Trends survey found that job seekers who apply through niche job boards are eight times the quality of hires made through newspaper ads.

But the benefits of online recruiting don’t stop at sourcing. Businesses are taking notice of the benefits that an integrated, online hiring process – one that spans the lifecycle of the hire from when job seekers apply to when new hires begin working a shift – can provide.

Think of it this way: the quickest distance between two points is a straight line, right? An integrated, online hiring process can take people straight from applying and evaluating, to interviewing and screening, to hiring and onboarding, and finally to training and development. The alternative is a manual hiring process full of detours, extra time and the potential for errors.

By going with the straight-line approach – implementing a full talent management suite – you’ll be able to source applicants online, funnel them into a hiring dashboard to give you line-of-sight into which applicants warrant the most consideration, plan interviews, and view background check and tax credit screening results – all online. Once you’ve hired the best applicant, you can use that same hiring software to auto-populate onboarding paperwork to save time and reduce errors and export all new hires into a training module that will help you hone them into a productive and profitable hourly workforce.

A talent management suite is particularly useful for hiring managers in franchise or large corporate enterprise businesses who hire employees across locations. Not only will the sheer volume of applicants make a paper hiring process unwieldy, but if you rely on regional or general managers to execute your process, you could also end up with inconsistencies in evaluation methods, interview approaches and hiring methods. Not to mention uncertainties over the proper completion and storing of critical onboarding paperwork.

As online recruiting strategies continue to garner attention in the HR field, don’t forget that sourcing applicants is just the first leg of a complex and challenging journey. Learning what technology can do for your hiring process and fully embracing it will give you a straight shot at having a productive (and more profitable) hourly workforce. Save the detours for your next road trip.

In response, the founder and CEO of SoloHealth, Bart Foster, published what he anticipates to be the “Top Ten Trends for Healthcare & Wellness in 2012.” Technology plays a role in every trend listed.

We think Foster left an important trend off of his list: hiring better people faster for hourly healthcare and wellness jobs. And technology plays a role in that, for sure.

Time for hiring technology

Just think what it would mean if all healthcare and wellness companies – hospitals, home care agencies, physical therapy clinics, therapeutic massage chains, etc. – begin to employ only the people who will provide high-quality care. It would mean their profitability along with the qualitative output of our healthcare system would improve.

But doing so is a hard thing to try to do the old fashioned way.

Foster cites research showing 80 percent of U.S. Internet users claim to have used the web to search for health-related information and answers. Guess what else a lot of them are doing – using the web to search on Snagajob and other job sites for health-related hourly jobs and using Snagajob to apply online for many of them. They’re online because it’s a far easier and better experience.

So first, without technology, it’s hard to find the people who will provide high-quality care. If your healthcare and wellness company is recruiting the old-school way, you’re not getting the attention of the best people available. The job seekers who are online are computer savvy, motivated and resourceful. You need to be online too in order to attract this type of job seeker.

The job search and recruitment process is technology enabled, and so is the hiring process. Healthcare hiring solutions, such as Snagajob’s, are available to healthcare and wellness companies. Those using hiring technology have a way to identify and hire people who will provide high-quality care. And they’re making some serious strides that could be emulated easily. Hiring technology is easy to use, cost effective and proven.

How so?

• Hiring technology like Snagajob’s is easy to use because it takes the hiring process online, virtually eliminating paperwork, and takes the guesswork out of evaluating applicants, which lets the right people in. Filter questions and a behavioral assessment are built into the online application process, so applicants are identified as possessing or not possessing desirable attitude and character traits in addition to the qualification and skills the actual application is structured to reveal.
• Hiring technology is cost effective because it allows you to find people who are right for their positions, and people who are right for their positions tend to enjoy the job, provide exceptional service, work productively, be more reliable and stick with it. You’ll save on labor costs and gain new business because of positive word of mouth. Not to mention, you’ll save on the high cost of turnover.
• Hiring technology is proven because already thousands of healthcare and wellness companies are using it to improve the quality of their hires, save time and increase their profitability. Providers like Snagajob have designed their products and services around the unique hiring needs of these companies. New users can hit the ground running. They’re able to identify quality hires and get better people started quickly.

Foster signs off his 2012 trends article with, “2012 Will Be a Major Breakthrough Year for Healthcare: Call me optimistic, but…we’ll look back on 2012 as the year we made incredible strides towards a healthier, more economical and efficient American healthcare system.”

Hiring solutions designed to help healthcare and wellness companies fill open hourly positions with better people faster will be just part of the picture, but a fundamental one. Consumers of healthcare services will begin to feel the difference in quality, and employers will begin to see the difference in profitability. And the effect on the American healthcare system will build throughout the year – one new Snagajob customer at a time.

Analysts are split on the future of gas prices, with some forecasting spikes to $4 or $5 this spring and others suggesting that supply will be increased to keep prices at a reasonable level (even if that level is higher than last year).

In a year of rising hard costs, such as state minimum wage and commodity increases, employers are nervous about what an increase in gas prices could mean for their bottom lines. Higher gas prices impact the cost of doing business, but with transportation sitting as the second highest household expense (behind housing) economists say that for every 10-cent increase at the pump, consumers cut other spending by $9 billion to compensate.

So what are businesses to do?

Steven Covey’s time management quadrant tells us to focus on what is urgent and important. Following that same logic, employers should focus on what is in the “controllable and important” quadrant. Gas prices, labor costs and commodity prices are important to your bottom line but are largely out of your control. Your approach to building an hourly workforce that will deliver a better customer experience is yours to dictate, and it’s more important than you may know.

Consider these stats:

• According to American Express, 70 percent of Americans are willing to spend 13 percent more with businesses that provide excellent customer service.
• According to Harris Interactive, 86 percent of people say they’ve stopped doing business with a company after just one bad customer service experience.

Hourly employees make or break the service experience, and the service experience is a determinant to sales and repeat business. With improvements in your hourly hiring process, you can build a strong workforce that will provide better customer service, be more productive and drive bottom line results that will put your business in a better position to deal with any increase in hard costs.

• Speak to your target audience directly by posting jobs on an hourly job site. By posting where hourly job seekers go to look for jobs, you’ll maximize your sourcing spend and skip the step of reconciling job seeker desires with your job opportunities.
• Use employment marketing techniques to drive traffic to your job posting, but incorporate filter questions to screen for “must-have” qualifications and build behavioral assessments into your application process to determine which applicants match your business’s core characteristics. Only spend time evaluating applicants poised for success.
• Integrate your online sourcing and hiring approaches to efficiently evaluate and screen applicants. And outline a consistent interview process to hire a dependable workforce for one location or for 50.
• Screen qualified applicants for tax credit eligibility before you hire. If all other hiring qualifications are equal, why not let the deciding factor be which candidate will also bring you thousands in tax credits?
• Once you’ve hired your top notch workforce, auto-populate onboarding paperwork to speed up the complex process and get your customer-service focused staff on the front line faster.

No one knows what gas prices will be next month, this spring or next year. But everyone agrees that hard costs are going up and focusing your energy on trying to control these outside factors won’t have a big impact on your bottom line. Improving your hourly hiring process is within your control and could be the single most important step you take to protect your business against rising costs.

“How to hire like Warren Buffett”

This article by Tom Searcy gives some great advice and ideas about what to look for in your next winning employee, along with some great questions to ask to make sure you get what you are looking for. The three main components of a top employee, regardless of the job are:

• Intelligence
• Energy
• Integrity

“To get job, teen was early and nice”

This article, from the Houston Chronicle, goes to the other extreme. In the article, a teenager, Maria Lara, talks about what she called her first real job. The article offers a lot of insight about the hiring process through the applicant’s lenses. A few of the things that I learned or had reinforced were:

• Sometimes all it takes to get a job is to be on time, look good and have a nice smile. These qualities are all important, but are they enough to warrant a hire?
• Most applicants who have not done a lot of interviewing will be nervous. Don’t hold it against them. It’s your job to help them relax.
• Even though she called this her first real job, Maria Lara had been babysitting for a long time and knew the value of hard work. Applicants without workplace experience can still offer desired skills and qualifications.
• The manager told the applicant what she was looking for in an employee before the interview. This is a common hiring mistake that sets the manager up to hire the best applicant not the best employee.

“A new Stanford grad on food stamps”

This article focused on unemployed college students and the impact that majors can have on the ability to find a job. Since I look at everything from an employer’s perspective – instead of an employee or college student looking for a job – I feel like I have just discovered a gold mine of information.  A few of the key points that I took away from this article include:

• Even though unemployment for college graduates is less than the general population, there is a large educated workforce available if you are willing to look at what you really need.
• If you’re not hiring for a specific skill, such as accounting or engineering, and can take the time to train someone who has the ability to learn, you could uncover a star employee.
• If you plan to hire unemployed college graduates, you will need to change your message and/or where you advertise your jobs to attract them. Architectural graduates may not see themselves as managers.

Yes, brand recognition is a piece of the hiring puzzle, along with casting a wide net, that helps to increase application flow. But when you need to hire hundreds, maybe thousands, of hourly employees for your corporate enterprise business, sheer volume can make your task a tough one. It’s not so easy to be hiring for a big company.

That is, unless you’re able to turn around and identify the best candidates in an exceptionally efficient manner. So how do you hire smart and fast when you have a lot of positions to fill?

• Start by going to your target audience. You can use any number of sourcing options available, but if you’re not speaking to the people who want your jobs, your efforts won’t translate well. Increase efficiency by posting your jobs in the place where members of your target audience focus their job search. Increasingly, that place is a niche job site. Niche job sites provide a large pool of highly targeted candidates who are looking for a specific type of job.
• Leverage your brand. Your business grew to where it is today because your brand is recognizable and trusted. Use that brand to help attract top talent. Employment marketing functions in the same way as product marketing. Advertising on your niche job site, utilizing email campaigns or becoming a featured employer will draw attention to your brand and increase traffic to your job postings.
• Filter first to reduce overload. If you post on a niche job site and use employment marketing to drive traffic to your posts, you will see an increase in applicant flow. You can try to look through every application that comes your way, but you may end up falling into an exhausted slump at your desk. Incorporate filter questions to weed out applicants who don’t possess your “must-have” qualifications, and build behavioral assessments into your application process to determine which applicants are poised for success. You’ll be left with a pool of candidates that you know will be a right fit.
• Keep the pipeline full.  You can take steps to reduce turnover – assessing applicants on behavioral characteristics, encouraging career development through training and keeping employees engaged – but you can’t completely eliminate turnover. The day will come when you need to make more hires, and when you do there’s no need to start from square one. If you post your jobs by location, you can post as many jobs as you want, allowing you to develop a hiring pipeline of qualified candidates who will be ready when you are.

Having to hire hundreds, or thousands, of employees could seem like you’re walking 10 miles, uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow. But with the right approach, that uphill climb could begin to level off, and you could find yourself coasting to the bottom of the hill, success in hand.

Most of the time, and especially during the busy season, retailers are so strapped for help that most anyone with the right availability will do. According to studies, employees determine 90 percent of a company’s profitability, so cutting back on the number of sub-par employees you hire is the discount to be making.

Sale prices don’t spur customer loyalty as much as fantastic service experiences do. Being known for stellar customer service and having a staff that makes customers feel welcome is sure to get more people into your stores and will get them spending, telling their friends and colleagues about you, and coming back again.

Snagajob’s job posting service comes standard with filter questions and behavioral assessments that identify who among your applicants is expected to be nice and helpful. Right after candidates apply online through Snagajob, you’ll know who you should pursue and who you should avoid, which is important considering:

• In companies identified as best-in-class, 87 percent of employees were rated “meets” or “exceeds” expectations in their last performance review;
• Each high-performing employee can drive an additional $16,000 in annual sales; and
• Employees who are assessed for cognitive ability, skill and knowledge of the position prior to employment are 51 percent less likely to make mistakes leading to shrinkage.

But this is not a post about the importance of assessments.

As important as assessments are, it’s just as important to have a hiring system like Snagajob’s that allows you to hire better people faster and get them trained, scheduled and in front of customers as soon as possible. That’s because:

• When you have caring, helpful employees and you’ve build a stellar reputation for service, working for your store has a certain prestige associated with it, making your positions more desirable. Great people want to work for you because you hire only great people. Around and around it will go. For that kind of cyclical motion to spin great people into your business, it’s going to take a hiring system like Snagajob’s that gives you the ability to hire the most desirable applicants quickly, and, in effect, create pent-up demand. Learn more
• When you’re able to get your nice, helpful new hires up to speed faster, you can expect less turnover. If you leave them wondering what they’re supposed to be doing or if they feel like they’re stuck in a rut, they’re going to start looking for a new job. Help your new employees achieve their best by offering, posting and tracking certifications through the hiring system, and they’ll be encouraged to move up the ladder and supported while they do so. The more effectively you’re able to train, the less the threat that other retailers will hire great people away from you. Learn more
• When you’re able to communicate with your employees by text or email – or any way that’s most convenient for you and your staff – scheduling becomes a lot less of a thorny problem. Should unexpected scheduling issues arise, a resolution process will get the schedule on track and your employees freed up to handle what life has thrown at them. For you it means no more running around fighting scheduling fires. And because desirable candidates often have numerous retail jobs to choose from, if you’re known for scheduling flexibility, you’ll be the employer of choice. Learn more

When you start to cut back on the number of sub-par employees you hire, slashing prices to bring people into your store is a tactic that begins to feel very old school. As does discounting the importance of having only nice and helpful people working for you.

About half (and in some cases more) of the total number of people employed by companies that provide facilities management services are hourly workers. Their job performance has a direct bearing on how people use and feel in these communal spaces — and whether their employers are able to keep the customers they have and land new business.

For companies that provide facilities management services for their customers, a lot is riding on the quality of the hourly workforce. Here is what companies in this industry can do to conduct the hourly hiring process effectively and bring in the right people to everyone’s benefit:

Don’t just rely solely on referrals. Snagajob customers often tell us that referrals aren’t nearly as helpful as incorporating behavioral assessments into the hourly hiring process. What happened recently to a Snagajob customer is fairly representative of what happens when referrals are taken at face value. An employee recommended a friend, and the friend applied through Snagajob, taking a behavioral assessment as part of the process. The general manager had the referral’s assessment result on hand, which indicated that the person wouldn’t perform well in the position. The hiring manager at the location hired the friend based entirely on the referral without giving any weight to the assessment result. The person ended up performing in line with the assessment result, and the company was left with the cost of turnover, an open position to back fill and resentment of a top-notch employee. An assessed candidate is a much less risky new hire.

Join the crowd of quality job seekers. Once you have behavioral assessments informing your hiring decisions, you need to be drawing from the best candidate pool you can (i.e. sourcing effectively). Otherwise you’ll be assessing a bunch of job seekers and in the end not finding many, if any, to be suitable. Consider assessments as the way to separate the great candidates from the good for the best results. The great candidates tend to be smart about their job search. They search niche job sites such as Snagajob.com to pinpoint the positions that would offer them the best working environment and earning potential relative to their experience and skills. Job seekers applying through niche job boards have been found to be higher in quality than those on general job boards and much higher in quality than those who rely on newspaper ads to find work. Begin assessing and, at the same time, attracting the attention of great candidates by posting your job openings on niche job boards where smart job seekers focus their search.

Move toward consistency. Once you begin assessing a group of higher quality job seekers, your hiring decisions become more informed and less likely to lead to frustration among your referral-happy employees.  But make sure you’re using the same tactical hiring process consistently across the organization. If your facilities management services earn a reputation for being hit or miss, so too will be your ability to stay profitable and competitive. If across the board you’re filling open hourly positions with quality people and earning a reputation for being the best in the business, you’ll not only be able to grow, but you’ll also earn the designation of being the employer of choice. You’ll see demand for your jobs among the people you’d love to have working for you will grow. The cycle of providing better services because you have better people to perform them because they’re better suited for their positions takes the place of the frustrating cycle once associated with the hourly hiring process: referrals leading to turnover leading to referrals.

Where people are able to gather comfortably and enjoy each other’s company, it’s likely that behind the scenes there’s a facilities management services company with an effective hourly hiring process in place. There is really no better way for these companies to please a crowd than to have a way to find the best people available to fill open hourly positions.

Regardless of your opinion of the movie – I happen to love it – “Groundhog Day” offers an interesting lesson: if you just change your perspective, something you’ve been struggling with can be solved.

If the revolving door of turnover has you feeling like you’re stuck in your own personal “Groundhog Day”, changing your perspective on hiring can help.

The fact that a revolving door is used as an analogy for turnover means you aren’t alone if you’re facing high turnover rates. Particularly in the hourly industry, which faces turnover rates well over 100 percent, employers struggle with how to keep employees on the job longer.

If you view hourly hiring as a way to just fill open positions, then you need to change your perspective. Hourly employees have more customer interaction than any other employee group, so viewing each hourly employee as a strategic hire can make a world of difference in your turnover rate – not to mention your bottom line.

To change your perspective on hourly hiring you have to start at the beginning. The way you source applicants can make or break your hiring results. Start by going directly to the audience you hope to hire. By posting jobs on a niche job site targeted to hourly job seekers your open positions will be in front of a group of active job seekers looking for the types of jobs you have to offer.

Once the applications start rolling in, look beyond experience to determine the best-fit employee. It may be counterintuitive, but research shows that aptitude and character fit are better determinates of a successful hire than experience. By including a behavioral assessment in your application process, you can evaluate applicants against the core characteristics essential to success in your business. When you can hire employees who are a good fit for the position and your type of business, you’ll find that they’re more engaged in their work. And the more engaged your employees are in their work, the less likely they are to leave.

After building your highly engaged hourly workforce, you can keep them engaged by empowering your employees to make decisions that will provide better customer service, recognizing those employees who go above and beyond, and offering training opportunities to help your workforce grow and learn new skills.

If turnover has you feeling like you’re living the same hiring results over and over again, you need a change in perspective to stop the cycle. Speaking to your target audience and looking to fit first and experience second can help put a stopper in turnover’s revolving door and help you wake up to Feb. 3.