If one thing that all industries have in common, irrespective of their nature, it’s their workforce that makes them what they are. People, being the most crucial part of any organization, make hiring the most crucial function across all industries. But hiring is no piece of cake, in fact, it’s as complicated as it is crucial. Recruiting people at all levels to build your organisation requires time, effort, resources and a whole lot of patience. Even though recruiting people in white-collar roles comes with its own set of challenges, it’s still not as demanding as the blue-collar hiring. But given the labor-dependant nature of our industries, hiring blue-collar staff is an equally essential function, if not critical.

While digital footprint and technology penetration help employers pick and hire white collar staff in a heartbeat, they struggle with challenges like a distributed workforce, geographical barriers, manual processes and lack of digital presence in sourcing the right candidates for the traditionally blue-collar jobs. However, like most problems, perhaps technology is the answer to this one too; and here’s why blue-collar employers should now be leveraging technology in this space while hiring.

Right fit at the right time and right place

It’s not too hard to spot a ‘vacancy for delivery staff’ or ‘drivers required’ sign anywhere in any metro city. Our recent report indicated that there are approximately more than 8 lakh vacancies in delivery role, six lakh for drivers and more than three lakhs for security guard role. There are around 50 crore people in various verticals of the semi-formal ecosystem in India, yet the industries often struggle to find the right candidate(s) for these very job roles. This indicates towards the massive gap that we are looking at to bridge with technology.

The current manual process not only consumes a lot of time and resources, but also doesn’t lead the employers to the right candidates in the right time frame despite doing it all. Lack of data, different location, lack of engagement – these are not only employer’s roadblocks, but also the challenges faced by prospective employees.

Taking a step back, if we are able to project demands (job roles in an area) and map them to supply (cities producing workforce) with the help of technology, it will cut down the cost and the turn-around-time massively for the employers.

Trained and skilled candidate means reduced attrition

The world around us is changing faster than ever and all the industries are going the extra mile to adapt themselves in order to deliver to the new-age customer expectations. While technology adoption continues to disrupt business models, organizations often don’t take into account their blue-collar workforce in this process. This is the workforce ensuring the last mile logistics, so they need to be skilled and trained to keep pace with the organization’s vision. We need to rethink trusting only physical classroom training to prepare the workforce for the job. Introducing digital training can lead to a much higher efficiency and give the employee way less reasons to switch jobs. This solves one of the biggest challenges of blue-collar employers--attrition--which ranges anywhere from 40 to 300 percent in blue-collar jobs.

Reaching smaller cities - narrow down and scale up

Thanks to smartphones and cheap data plans, we can all now count on technology to reach even the remote areas. This is the reason that the major organizations are now planning to look beyond the metropolises and target Tier-2 and 3 cities. The data from our recent report confirms that candidates consider factors like location and social network apart from salary to take a job and stay in it. So, technology adoption will help the employers with the last mile connectivity in their expansion.

Since the migration patterns over the years indicate that a majority of the workforce is located in smaller cities, demand aggregation with the help of data and analytics will bridge the gap between recruiters and candidates. Technology will not only help them narrow down their reach to the ground level but also bring the efficiency in results which will help them scale up. This also works in favor of the candidates – if they land a job in the radius of their hometown, it will bring stability for both the employee and the employer.

Maximum output with way less time and resources

Traditional recruiting process means having a lot of field recruiters across the cities taking up a lot of cost and effort on the part of employers without yielding the desired results. Technology aims at ironing out all the friction and bringing out much more cost-effective and impactful results. Digital processes enable employers to increase multiple touchpoints which are tech-enabled as opposed to just relying on physical sources.

Technology adoption helps the employers with supply visibility at the hyper-local level and makes the entire sourcing and hiring process frictionless. Everywhere around the world, humans count as the most important resource for organisations, it’s time we reimagined the hiring process and turned it around to keep pace with tech-savvy world we live in.

(Know more about changing TA landscape at the People Matters Talent Acquisition Conference 2019 on 29th May in Mumbai. Click here to register.)