Most of the innovation we have seen in HR technology has been aimed at professional and managerial employees.
Take recruitment: the typical recruitment application asks a candidate to sit down at a PC and submit a resume. For someone looking for a job as a short-order cook, janitor or cashier, submitting a resume is overkill and presents a barrier to quickly filling the job.
Furthermore, many hourly workers do not have ready access to a PC. That’s another barrier to what should be a simple recruitment task. The recruitment tools that seem perfect for hiring professionals are awkward and ineffective for hiring hourly workers.
It is natural to ask how we can adapt our existing recruitment software for hourly workers; however it is more interesting to see what people come up with when they start with a blank page.
Jobaline started with a blank page. Their recruiting system can work for candidates who have nothing more sophisticated than text messaging. It is also a bilingual service, which would be a frill for recruiting professionals in the U.S., but is essential for hourly workers given how much of that workforce is Hispanic.
It feels obvious to design a platform for hiring hourly workers this way; but you wouldn’t get there starting from a platform designed for salaried employees. When we start paying attention to the hourly workforce, it is clear that many of our talent management systems and processes are not as effective as they could be.
An HR leader once told me that where the HR profession has gone wrong is that we see ourselves as being independent of any particular industry; e.g. by thinking that HR in manufacturing is the same as HR in financial services.
Maybe the lesson from Jobaline and hiring hourly worker via text messages is really part of a bigger message that HR needs to be more context specific and customize approaches to very particular situations.
