Help Wanted: Tools for Solving the Hourly-worker Shortage

BY Sheila Flynn | August 18, 2021

From highway billboards advertising jobs at McDonald’s to regional ads on movie theater screens trying to attract workers to Shutterfly, the push to recruit hourly employees has reached something of a zenith across the U.S. And there’s good reason for that.

As Covid vaccination rates increase and the U.S. economy recovers, fewer and fewer people are looking to start back up at their old jobs. Both surveys and anecdotal evidence indicate that many workers, including those paid hourly, are no longer satisfied to return to industries that proved particularly vulnerable during a pandemic, including the hospitality industry. Some workers have learned new skills, decided to switch careers, or simply searched for better and different opportunities.

That’s left a hole for many employers looking to fill hourly-wage positions, with employers facing a level of competition that hasn’t been seen for decades–or possibly ever. “I’ve been doing this for close to 40 years. I have never seen this type of market during last Q4 in my lifetime. We were able to meet the hiring demands, but we struggled with that,” said Peggy Anderson, head of talent acquisition at Shutterfly, during a recent From Day One webinar titled “Solving the Hourly-Worker Shortage Using Recruiting Tech and Data.”

Employers have responded with a range of tools, including the use of AI to place job ads and virtual job interviews on Zoom, but they also still rely on techniques that are “a little old-fashioned,” as Anderson put it. While the tech tools facilitate the search and vetting process, some managers remain loathe to onboard frontline or hourly employees without first getting to meet them in person.

“I really want to emphasize that speed is not everything,” said Kerry Royer, head of global talent acquisition for Verizon, adding that “it’s making sure you keep a human in the process, too, because there’s a lot of things you can do in your process to hire people in a week–let technology do it right for you all the way through–but we believe at Verizon that there should be a human in the process.”

Speaking on the hourly-worker shortage, top row from left: Kyle Leigh of Appcast and Peggy Anderson of Shutterfly. Bottow row, from left, Kerry Royer of Verizon, moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company and Marshela McDaniel of McDonald's (Image by From Day One)

At the same time, however, the current demand for hourly workers everywhere from fast-food chains to Amazon means that, to some extent, now it’s the employers who need to compete with each other, rather than the candidates. So even if employers aren’t making snap decisions about prospective hires, they need to be responsive. “Just responding to the applicant the same day is huge,” said Kyle Leigh of Appcast, which makes software for programmatic job advertising. “If you’re Applebees and you get a candidate for a line cook, that line cook needs a job yesterday, right? That person is not going to wait two to three days to hear back from you.” The candidate will go elsewhere, like Amazon. The immediacy is the “biggest challenge that our clients get,” Leigh added.

“It’s a competitive market,” confirmed Marshela McDaniel, a field people officer for McDonald’s. “If people are looking to apply, they’re not just looking at one location, they’re looking at multiple locations and trying to understand, Who’s going to get back to me? Which is going to give me the best opportunity to fit my needs as an employee?”

“We’ve been able to really reduce that time-to-hire process,” she added. “Right now, we’re roughly at about eight days. And we’re continuing to see improvements in those numbers. And so our goal is going to be to continue to create that experience where not only does the employee feel engaged in the process, but we’re really able to really set that great first impression in that hiring process.”

On top of finding candidates in the first place, many companies have added sweeteners to seal the deal: better pay, signing bonus incentives, more flexible hours, additional benefits, and a more curated overall image of their corporate culture. “A lot of our operators have joined into the sign-on bonus idea to try to help attract and bring in people quickly,” McDaniel said. “Many of our operators are looking at flexibility in regards to scheduling, understanding that we do serve a population that many people either go to school or they have a second job or maybe they’re supporting and serving their family.” She added: “Many of our operators have looked at various additional benefits, such as maybe free or discounted meals, free or discounted uniforms. Really, they’re trying to appeal to the community in which they serve.”

That involves casting an even more thoughtful eye on forums for advertising, wording of job postings, and general demographics when it comes to prospective workers, participants said. “When you look at restaurant and retail workers, about half of the population, historically, have been women,” Appcast’s Leigh said. “And that is exactly the population that left the workforce to take care of children, take care of elderly parents.”

“That said, there are keywords in job descriptions that you should be cognizant of, gender-coded keywords, male-coded keywords like ‘superior,’ like ‘decision,’ ‘confident,’ vs. female-coded words like ‘interpersonal,’ ‘cooperative,’ ‘warm,’” he said, pointing out that such phrases can dissuade and “turn off certain folks who’ve read those descriptions.”

Another consideration is focusing on a company’s employee-focused initiatives, which can make an employer more attractive. At Verizon, for example, the company’s hiring rate fell to essentially zero when the pandemic hit, but the telecom giant focused on redeploying retail and other workers to more immediate jobs within the corporation, rather than laying off or furloughing staff, Royer said. She continued: “We really doubled down on how we showed up during Covid. We had Covid sick leave where we paid them 100% of pay for up to eight weeks and 60% of pay for 16 weeks, really just showing how, in unstable times, we showed up.”

Now that hiring has picked up, Verizon’s Royer said, the company’s track record can help attract more quality candidates. Frontline workers, she said, are “often really interested in, what is my opportunity for moving up in the company? What are you going to do to develop me?” she said. “And so we really focus, in our messaging, on the importance of, ‘There is a career path here for you.’”

Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the Sunday Independent, and the Irish Daily Mail. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

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