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Finding employees who show up on time, are trustworthy, and provide a great customer experience was a challenge before COVID, but now it's even tougher. For many, the demand for workers significantly outweighs the supply. Accordingly, many business owners and employees alike are using a wide variety of approaches, like job posting sites and solutions, to fill the gap.
So how do you overcome the challenge and find the right talent or the right position for your business?
Below, we'll break down the hiring solutions that are out there today—from the newest players in the space to the tried-and-true options. Then, you can decide what services are best for your business needs, so you can get hiring or get hired and help your business succeed.
Finding the best option for you and your business depends on the type of role you are looking to fill. Historically, the process has been to post an open position, have people apply, and pick someone to fill the role (“Job Posting”). However, for certain short-term roles, there is now a new option providing companies with the ability to tap into the rapidly growing freelance labor pool of workers (often called “Gig Workers”).
Let's dig into the gig economy and some services that are helping business owners make it work for them.
Looking back on it now it seems so obvious. One of the most powerful things about online platforms is their ability to create incredible efficiencies by bringing lots of people together. This simple fact led to significant transformations in many industries. Some of the most recognizable examples are:
While in many cases these sources of income were secondary, many individuals found out they liked the freedom associated with working multiple jobs with a variety of employers.
Enter the latest round of innovation in hiring. Companies provide a marketplace for hourly employees where employees can pick up shifts from employers, gain access to benefits, and have their payroll payments directly deposited into a bank account or credit card they can use for purchases. After each “gig,” employees and employers are rated by each other, and this feedback system is used to continue to give gigs to the best employees with the best employers.
While many of these new gig applications started in specific industries like the restaurant industry, they’re starting to branch out and are now providing a wide range of opportunities for their members and the businesses they work with.
As innovators in the space, these services are not available for every type of business. And in some cases, their availability may be limited in your area. For the most part, they do a great job of outlining who they serve on their home pages.
Here's an overview of some of the latest and greatest brands in the hiring space. Be sure to check out their websites to learn more and to see if they could be the solution your small business needs to making hiring easier.
Juvo is a new, mobile app that helps small businesses find hourly, local workers inside their communities. If you're looking for hourly employers for your brick & mortar business, it would be worth giving Juvo a try.
Want to learn more from Juvo users or talk with the brand directly? Join the Juvo Community Group on Alignable.
Have you used Juvo before? If so, share your experience here.
Wonolo is one of the most comprehensive solutions available for businesses looking for frontline workers. The industries they cover include:
Wonolo charges employers a 45% commission.
You can find a listing of the communities they currently operate in here.
Have you used Wonolo? If so, please share your experiences here.
Wonolo Ratings & Reviews from Alignable members.
Bluecrew is an on-demand employment agency where employees work for Bluecrew and are deployed using their software application to fill roles in warehouse operations, logistics, hospitality, retail, customer support, and administrative services. They seem to be more focused on large scale employers vs. smaller companies.
You can find a listing of the communities they currently operate in here.
Have you used Bluecrew? If so, please share your experiences here.
Bluecrew Ratings & Reviews from Alignable members
Qwick is an on-demand staffing as a service platform that connects service industry professionals with food and beverage shifts in real-time. All employees go through an onboarding process that includes training and a skills assessment. After each shift, businesses are able to rate employees and create custom pools of workers to pull from for future opportunities.
They don’t publish the list of communities they serve on their website so you will need to inquire as to availability.
Have you used Qwick? If so please share your experiences here.
Qwick Ratings & Reviews from Alignable members.
Now that we've seen some of the new players in the hiring space, let's take a look at some of the tried-and-true job posting sites and how they came to be.
It likely started with a “Help Wanted” sign in the window and the Classifieds section of the local newspaper. Then, in the mid-1990s, sites like Monster.com (-44.5 NPS) and Craigslist (-46.7 NPS) were launched online. Basically, businesses posted their job listings to these online sites just like they would in a classified ad in a newspaper. Posting on one of these sites resulted in it showing up in search engine results when people were looking to apply for jobs.
Both offline and online versions still exist today, and they mostly cater to the individual willing to sort through the haystack in search of their next opportunity. They also exploded in number as newspapers and other forms of media incorporated online job listings to stay relevant as their media shifted online.
The willingness of potential employees to share information about themselves and their interests fueled a significant transformation in online hiring around the year 2000. LinkedIn (-3 NPS) led the way by convincing professionals to put their backgrounds, interests, and job history up onto their site.
No longer did employers have to wait for candidates to search and find their job posting. Now, they were able to use platforms like LinkedIn to reach out to qualified candidates directly. Facebook took a half hearted run at competing in this space, but it never made much of a dent.
The massive proliferation of online job posting sites that started in the 1990s continues today. In order to provide some simplicity to businesses posting jobs, a number of companies launched aggregation sites where these businesses could go to post their jobs and have them distributed across all of these other online properties.
This greatly simplified the process and launched businesses like Indeed (+13 NPS) and ZipRecruiter (-19.4) into the mix. These sites also collected applicant information as part of the application process and now can leverage their database on behalf of employers and employees alike to provide greater matching services. These services typically enable you to create a job posting for free, and then upsell you if you want to increase your candidate flow.
You can now post your job openings on Alignable. Each post is instantly shared with your network and others in the community to raise awareness and help you find great employees.
It works kind of like a network alert for your job openings.
Of course, for this to be effective, you will need to connect with all of the other Alignable members you know, so we know who to notify, and then post a job from the home page: Post a job here. If you want to expand your network, try uploading your contacts' email addresses to find existing members.
