High Volume and Hourly Hiring in the Post-Pandemic World

For all the work-related changes wrought overnight at the onset of the Pandemic, beginning on that fateful day when we left our offices (mostly) for the last time, winding up our final Zoom free meetings and choking back a coda of crappy communal coffee (ugh), one still stands out as perhaps the most underrated- and maybe, the most profound.

Virtual work was always a thing, at least at companies enlightened enough to understand that lower capital costs, a global talent pool and (at the time) a hell of a competitive culture differentiator.
 

Similarly, Zoom instantly became a verb, but maybe only because magically, the need to Xerox anything ended more or less overnight, and also, because the virtual meeting market was already so entrenched even Microsoft had time to roll out a copycat catch-up play.

The most profound change instead came from us finally defining that thing that we all thought about but never really said. But somehow, in the middle of the discourse about the new virtual working order was this recurring theme of “essential” and “non essential” workers. And for the first time, many of us were forced to realize that the knowledge economy is essentially non-essential (ergo, this post).  

That the executive and professional positions we sourced and recruited for in the fierce competition for the finite pool of talent, no quotation marks needed, were not actually a business imperative but instead, someone dispensable to how business gets done, even when it’s anything but.

Essential workers, unlike, say, management consultants or content marketers, are the overwhelming majority of active workforce participants (before and after COVID), and are the foundation upon which the bottom line and the global economy are built. Without essential workers, fires would go unchecked, crimes unsolved and patients untreated.

Goods couldn’t move from warehouses to big rigs to your front door without them, nor could you go to a store instead. You could no longer buy groceries or go out to eat.

The list of essentials that essential workers provide us is essentially infinite, which is why, while we were trying sourdough starters, ordering DoorDash and reveling in an unending yet mandatory period of working exclusively in sweats, those essential workers were, you know, essentially working. Non-essential workers? Like we ever had a real job other than occupying our little niche of late-stage capitalism.

Non-essential workers, of course, bristled at the suggestion that the delivery guy, the bus driver or the gas station attendant were somehow more important, more essential, to the continuity of the economy than they were.

Early career professionals, inculcated with the idea that they were somehow a coveted and irreplaceable human capital commodity, were shocked when the realization finally hit that no one really needs a social media marketing coordinator or a talent sourcer when the end is nigh. They will, however, need mechanics, waiters and fulfillment specialists, at least until the moment of Rapture.

The fact is that workers have always been bifurcated into the essential and non essential, between those that do and those who “manage” or “consult” or “recruit” or whatever their title infers they really do, which is often really little.

And in TA, we have long had a bias against essential workers, who we see as disposable and interchangeable cogs, and those random, high-paying roles that require a lot of high-touch hiring and even more process complexity.

The roles that we spend the most time and resources on, as a rule, are the most non-essential - and the most critical of headcount (and majority of hires) are often seen as more process issues than real people imperatives. Anyone can recruit for positions whose only requirements are a pulse and the ability to lift 50 pounds, was (and is) seen as somehow less than, even though it’s never enough.

This divide, of course, is best understood by the more entrenched lexicon; essential workers are most commonly categorized as “hourly” or “high volume,” and hiring those workers remains relatively esoteric and marginal in the world of corporate TA, despite the lessons learned during the downturn.

Of course, some changes persist - namely, that after millions of hourly workers lost their jobs in the first few months of the pandemic while the majority of white-collar workers enjoyed government-subsidized job and income protections, in addition to the thrill of working in slippers, a profound reversal has taken place.

As almost any recruiter can tell you, the hiring landscape for the types of reqs that keep internal TA teams employed continue to lag in terms of recovery; layoffs of teams with thousands of highly paid, and once highly recruited workers dominate headlines, often directly above the more boring ones about historically low unemployment and unprecedented numbers of open jobs that remain infilled in their millions.

That’s because, as mixed as the TA outlook may be, the truth is that for high volume and hourly hiring, the demand has never been greater - and meeting that demand has never been more, well, essential.

That’s why I’m so excited about this month’s issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence. It’s all about the current state, and future direction, of high volume and hourly hiring - from unveiling the findings of our latest annual HR.com high volume state of the industry report to insights and analysis from some of the experts and leaders influencing how high volume hiring happens today - and shaping what the future of high volume recruitment looks like tomorrow, too.

The answer is, in short, that the future of recruiting and the future of high volume are the same. Because TA goes where the jobs are - and for the foreseeable future, those jobs, and ours, are on the front lines, not in the back office. Which is why this issue - both the magazine and the high concept - is so important.

You could even say they’re “essential.”

Happy hunting.