Step Up Your Recruiting Game
Step up your recruiting game – How social apps are changing the industry.
The world is moving to social hiring. This shift is inevitable, and we can either adapt or fall behind. This is especially true for some sectors, like retail and restaurants, which have infamously high turn over rates, 58% and 78.6% respectively*. If you stick to traditional hiring methods, you’ll likely hire the wrong people and waste both your time and money. But you’re well aware of this. We’re here to help.
Really!
Traditional online hiring methods and platforms usually focus on measurable and often specialized technical skills. The goal is often to find the applicant who possesses the technical profile your business needs, and if you have more than one capable applicant, company culture and fit can be taken into account. But really, you don’t hire your accountants for their personality (though a lot of accountants I’ve met have had wild personalities).
The traditional model doesn’t really work well for service and retail jobs – on one hand, the applicants have to jump through too many hoops – you end up hiring whoever has the patience, time or willingness to go through this archaic application process. These industries are people-facing, people-serving, people-centered positions. These hires serve as the front-line, they are the faces and personalities that interact with your clients. They also tend to be at least partly made up of younger applicants.
So then, how important is it to take a glimpse at their personality versus which high school they attended, or which hyperbolic traits and qualities they’ve chosen to pad their resume with? I spent years working in the service industry and can attest to how very human the actual working experience was – both in terms of tasks, obviously, we had to serve our clients and our work required constant communication with our patrons, but it was also people-heavy in terms of the experience among coworkers.
The reality of these industries is they are experiential first and foremost. In an office, you work, socialize, but mostly work – our interactions are professional. Conversely, in the service industry, work is a relationship – if you aren’t speaking to your clients, you’re interacting with the kitchen staff, other waiters, or your floor manager. The hours, the eclectic make-up of your colleagues, from artists to students to globe-trotters, “company culture” has always been a key aspect of the industry, long before the term’s coinage. So then, it’s important that your hires vibe with both your patrons, your staff and your business.
Again, these hires are your faces and hands. They are your brand ambassadors. They are who your clients think of when they think of your business. So how much sense does it make to use a formal hiring process that doesn’t take these crucial signals into account? How much time does it take to try and assess a personality from a series of stats and bullet points? How accurate is this process?
The truth is it isn’t. There are loads of talented, charismatic, competent potential workers who don’t have the skills or the interest to craft a winning CV.
Do you see our vision yet?
We’ve arrived at why we’ve built our platform. Capango aims to usher in a new era of social hiring, one that recognizes the simple truth that personality is everything. We get there by combining Power + Passion + Video.
First, the application process is streamlined. Forget resumés. We go straight to the point; a few industry-specific questions to gather essential data. Then, we have powers and passions, where 2 years of college is a power and gardening is a passion. Applicants can record short video introductions so you can get a quick sense of the person behind the screen. Finally, we have photos and direct video-chats a couple of clicks away when you’re ready for a meeting.
We’ve developed our platform to best represent our applicants; find out exactly who they are, what they’ve done and what they can do. Your applicants’ chances of getting hired don’t rest on their skills at writing an impressive CV. Most importantly, meeting them (through video chat) is just a button away.
You need 3 hires for a seasonal department at your store? The holidays are approaching and you need line cooks and waiters asap?
Good luck going through stacks of CVs to find your team – it’s going to cost time and money and lead to uncertain results. Capango is built exactly for these use cases; don’t gamble with your most important assets, the people who make up your business, get a sense of who they really are as soon as possible and hire the right person.
*https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t16.htm