3 Reasons Why Every Staffing Agency Needs A Mobile Strategy

The staffing industry is becoming more and more competitive as the years progress. Candidates are smart, and they understand that there are more open roles than there are candidates. This means that they have options. Options to turn down roles for reasons that may seem insignificant to an employer but are increasingly important from a candidate's perspective.

Companies are also becoming more and more impatient when it comes to acquiring their candidates. Many companies hope that staffing firms will provide them candidate options within the first couple days. However, time-to-fill is much longer. What if there was a way to have a pool of candidates at your fingertips every time you had an open role?

This is what having a well-developed app representing your staffing agency looks like. Candidates would create a profile, input their experience and other information, and then simply wait for a role they want to pop up. Once a role is available, they could receive a notification directly to their phone, an email, etc. You essentially have candidates on the other end of your app waiting for you to let them know that a role is available. This would decrease your time-to-fill significantly, increase client happiness, and establish you as an authority in the staffing industry.

In this article, we will take a deeper dive into three reasons why staffing agencies need to adopt a mobile strategy.

Attracting Candidates

Any marketer will tell you that in order to reach your target audience, you need to be wherever it is that they hang out online. This includes when you're posting open roles and looking to attract candidates. With over 70 percent of millennials and Gen Xr's using their phones when searching for jobs, having a platform where candidates can easily find you, look at your open roles, and apply for said roles, is low-hanging fruit that you should be prioritizing.

Candidates want to know that they're not wasting their time. When they apply for a role, they've looked at the job description, have researched the company, and done their due diligence to make sure it's the right career move for them. With the average fill rate of temporary staffing agencies being only 34 percent and an on demand staffing platform like Wonolo being 90 percent, candidates will wonder if it's worth their time applying for a role at your firm.

Having an app as part of your marketing strategy is a great way to attract candidates and show them why you are a leader in your industry.

Candidate Experience

The struggle to acquire top talent is top of mind for companies and industry leaders all over the world. It's this reason why many organizations choose to turn to recruiting companies or temporary staffing firms. They're unable to find the talent that they need, or they don’t have the time to dedicate to sifting through resumes and applications until they find the candidate that will fit the role they’re looking to fill.

Many of the crucial mistakes that companies make involve thinking that the hiring process is a one-way street. A lot of hiring managers will draw out the hiring process, implement long application forms, and over-complicate the overall process. This causes candidates to become discouraged and ultimately, unhappy. By having other options in the market, candidates have no problem abandoning one opportunity for another. In fact, 60 Percent of job seekers will abandon an online application if it’s too long or asking for too much information. Hiring managers think that by asking for more information upfront, they are lessening the amount of work they need to do during the interview process. While this may be true, by requiring a large amount of information from candidates who at this point, have no skin in the game, you are missing out on top candidates that are already bought into the opportunity you're advertising.

By having a standardized application process through an app, you can do a few things for your candidate experience:

1. Candidates create a profile one-time, and they simply check back in periodically to check for open roles. You can even send them notifications about these roles.
2. The app can host all of the information they need to apply for a role. This is essentially their resume within the app. There is no longer a need to attach or type out a brand new application for every role they want to apply for.
3. You're streamlining the process for not only yourself but the candidates as well. The candidate can open the app, click on a role, hit apply, and it's done. In mere seconds, the candidate has applied for the role.

We all know that word of mouth can be both the best and the worst form of advertising. If you do not have systems in place to nurture the experience of your candidates, chances are that someone is going to have a bad experience and then tell people that they know. This also goes for a positive experience through a well-developed application. By making it simple and fast to apply for roles, candidates will spread the word to others within their industry.

Shifting With Technology

As more and more companies look to outsource their staff or contract recruiting firms, more HR professionals are looking to implement scalable options that require less and less of their time. Gone are the days of seeing a job description and sending a resume to someone's direct email address. HR professionals are now implementing AI software to sort through their applicants for keywords within resumes, gamification to assess skills, and Physcometric Assesments to assess potential behaviors in the workplace. Ultimately, the more streamlined the hiring process can be, the better. That is where having an application for your temporary staffing agency comes into play!

Think of it this way. If you have an app for your staffing agency, that essentially works as your hub. This is where you put all of your roles, and you gather all of your candidates. This works in your favor because you no longer have to advertise every single role that you're looking to fill. Instead of figuring out a promotional plan for five different roles, you can plan an effective promo plan for your app that hosts all of your roles. You now have one item to advertise versus spreading your efforts over five items and getting very little results. You can now dedicate all of your efforts to promoting one item, your hub.

Like HR professionals, staffing agencies should be looking to ways to offset a bulk of the work that comes with attracting and hiring candidates. By automating the application process and making it easier on candidates, you are freeing up your own calendar while also increasing the number of applicants due to the ease of use.

Uberize Your Staffing Agency

If you're thinking that having an app for your staffing agency, that will allow you to create more positive experiences for all users, then we would suggest a company that we have chosen to partner with in an effort to help more staffing agencies experience growth within their businesses.

Time Saved is one of the GTA's fastest growing startups that build apps for staffing agencies to help them accelerate their growth, increase engagement, and create better experiences. Their apps connect workers and fill jobs faster and smarter than ever before.

At the end of the day, staffing agencies need to stay competitive when appealing to candidates, clients, etc. by having an app that users can log into and continue to receive notifications when roles are available, will decrease your time-to-hire significantly, increase