Job openings are declining as the U.S. economy cools, but the overall number remains near historic highs. The labor market remains very tight, and talent continues to have significant leverage.
This means it’s still incredibly important for businesses large and small to leverage technology to recruit smarter. And employers are doing just that in five specialized industries.
Better candidates, faster onboarding, fewer bad hires — all with less effort.
At first glance, the nursing and rail yard industries have virtually nothing in common, but medical staffing firms and railroads are both leaning into a new way of finding, hiring, and onboarding new employees.
Here’s how they’re doing it.
1. Nursing
The most significant way that technology is impacting the nursing industry is through travel nurse recruitment using staffing agencies, which allow nurses themselves to use tech to find their next gig. Nurses and employers can include vital information in postings, including the length of job, pay, and location.
One company empowering both nurses and employers is Advantis Medical Staffing. The company uses both technology and communication to help make connections through transparency on pay and job duties, among other factors.
Advantis Medical Staffing CEO Dan Pollock says, “The best healthcare staffing agencies are using a combination of great technology with an exceptional human experience to provide an incredible service to the clinician and healthcare facility. Ultimately, through technology, companies are helping to connect clinicians more efficiently to the job they desire and healthcare systems can then provide much-needed care to their communities.”
Recruitment tech has been proven to be well received by nurses looking for new positions. A recent study shows that 57% of nurses report that they are comfortable using technology to search for travel nursing jobs on their own, but they prefer to work with a recruiter as well. This integration of tech into the interpersonal experience of hiring is promising for the future of recruiting.
2. Data Analytics
When Boeing realized it had difficulty filling IT specialist and data analyst roles, their HR team combined existing recruiting technology solutions with new approaches.
Using multiple touchpoints, Boeing focused on making candidates feel seen, heard, and wanted. This included a candidate care team that used technology — like a mobile-friendly application platform, videoconferencing software, and email-based relationship management software — to support high-potential candidates through the recruiting and interviewing journey.
Boeing senior director of global talent operations Dan Wilkinson says, “We are engaging with this candidate through a crescendo of interest that ends with them landing at Boeing rather than a slow-drip process. We’re focusing more on the candidate experience and differentiating ourselves through our culture, our priorities and our products.”
3. Rail Yard Operations
The Netherlands’ national railway system has long been a model of efficiency. In the past two decades, though, it began to buckle under the strain of network demand far beyond what its designers envisioned. This was a classic ‘good problem to have,’ but it still demanded innovative workforce solutions.
One set of solutions involved doing less with more — automating traffic control processes and streamlining rail yard operations to reduce demand on the system’s limited human capital.
Another set involved designing and building a more resilient, capable workforce through technology-driven recruiting and people management. Due to intense safety regulations, on par with those for the airline industry, HR used technology to develop rigorous psychological screening and fit-testing protocols to ensure that only the best-suited candidates made it through the initial hiring stages.
To reduce the labor market risk that could result from a smaller pool of suitable candidates, they simultaneously leveraged collaborative technology to break out core functions for each job. This allowed them to design more approachable roles that a wider number of candidates could fill with proper screening and training. Finally, they doubled down on the use of machine learning and big data analytics to improve the system’s efficiency and on-time performance without adding capacity.
The result: The system significantly increased the quality and resiliency of its workforce without significantly adding to its headcount — all the while ensuring the trains continued to run on time.
Reimagining Recruiting
The labor market might be cooling, but employee replacement costs remain sky-high. And with inflation raging, they likely won’t come down anytime soon, even if the unemployment rate ticks up.
So employers that leverage technology to streamline their recruiting aren’t simply maxing quick fixes to a process notorious for causing headaches. They’re increasing the chances that they’ll hire rock stars every time and reducing the frequency and cost of bad hires. Less turnover has other benefits, too, especially in specialized industries where new team members take months to train up.
Your company can realize those benefits too, no matter what industry you’re in. But first, you have to commit to reimagine recruiting.
