The Message and the Money

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Talent acquisition has always been, in aggregate, at least, something of an elitist profession. We concentrate an inordinate amount of time, energy and effort around a fractional number of hires, namely, experienced professionals who are often frequently well educated, well paid and with an often esoteric set of niche skills and functional expertise that are in short supply, and high demand. 

These are the so-called “purple squirrels” for whom we’ve created entire departments, and the commensurate technologies, dedicated solely to attracting, sourcing and developing the finite pool of qualified candidates, who meet the often onerous list of prerequisites and preferred qualifications our companies (often arbitrarily) require for the reqs on which we spend the overwhelming majority of our finite resources and attention.

High volume and hourly recruitment, on the other hand, tends to be overlooked or dismissed by many of the practitioners and pundits in the talent acquisition industry. The long-held assumption around high-volume hiring has been that it sits somewhere between a supply chain and a consumer marketing function, with the human capital required being treated more like widgets “butts in seats,” to use a favorite recruiting phrase. 

The relatively low skill, high turnover nature of these positions puts process over personalization, speed over quality, and standardization over innovation. Worst of all, it has led to widespread hourly hiring hubris, the misconception that anyone, essentially, can perform these jobs, and therefore, anyone can find and hire them. In short, it’s one people function where those people have long been seen as subservient to process standardization, and, when possible, automation.

Then, everything changed.

The pandemic shuttered industries like hospitality and retail, which are primarily reliant on hourly and seasonal workers, disrupting millions of lives and livelihoods; of course, it’s somewhat telling that in the height of the Covid-19 crisis, we divided workers not as “white collar” or “blue collar,” not as “exempt” or “non-exempt” or the traditional terminology used to delineate knowledge workers from front line talent. 

Instead, the workers we’ve long ignored became “essential,” and everyone else, particularly the same subset of workers that’s the focus for most corporate TA programs and budget, became “non-essential.” And it’s those essential workers who are now greatly responsible for the estimated 10 million or so open jobs in the U.S. alone that remain unfilled. 

It’s a perfect demographic storm of decreased workforce participation, full employment (staying well under 4% for the last 12 months) and increased consumer demand (not to mention confidence and spending) for the types of goods and services where high volume workers are, well, essential. Going on vacation. Going out to dinner. Buying new clothes.

All of these are reliant on high-volume workers - even e-commerce is dependent on warehouse workers and drivers as the backbone of their business model - and relatively few of these workers remain in these sectors (or rather, returned to them) after losing their jobs during the pandemic. 

This is not a drop in the bucket, or an industry outlier - in fact, fully 73 million American workers are hourly or high volume (and that’s not including freelance or gig workers), representing around 55.5% of all US workers across sectors or industries. These workers are not only high in demand, but companies are struggling to hire them fast enough (hence the service and supply chain slowdowns that have made news over the past few months) - even as a recession looms menacingly on the horizon. 

Contrast that to the tech sector, probably the central focus point and biggest industry in terms of TA spend over the past few years; while Silicon Valley software engineers were sort of the archetype of what competitive recruitment looked like, today, headlines are filled with stories of mass layoffs and hiring freezes throughout tech, even at more venerable brands like Meta or Uber (to say nothing of the Crypto apocalypse). 

Today’s biggest talent acquisition challenge is not recruiting a developer to a startup, nor even retaining highly skilled employees; rather, it is competing for the finite amount of frontline, essential workers that are required to ensure continued viability and growth at many of the best known brands and biggest companies in the world.

That’s why this issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence will explore some of the ways that companies are expanding their talent acquisition strategies to rethink, reinvent and revolutionize how high-volume hiring happens. We’ve assembled some of the leading experts and TA leaders in the world to provide insight and information into what companies need to do today to ensure that they’re ready to compete against - and overcome - the growing shortage of available hourly talent. 

It’s essentially essential reading about essential workers. Because when it comes to hourly hiring, time is always of the essence - which is why we’re excited you’re taking the time to check out this month’s issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence.
 

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