Hi there, friends! Starbucks’s Howard Schultz is set to testify today before a Senate committee on the company’s workplace and labor practices. We predict the tea will be venti-sized.
In today’s edition:
Hire for forever
Staffing tech
🛒 Retail robots
—Adam DeRose, Aman Kidwai, Maeve Allsup
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The White House via Giphy
Hiring decisions can be a lot like the choice between heading to the supermarket every time you need a cucumber or putting on those gardening gloves and growing some yourself. Want a greener thumb? We’ve got you.
Hiring the right person for the job is critical, but it’s just as important to keep your eyes peeled for candidates that are both a good fit for the open position and right for the company and its long-term goals (i.e., your artisanal pickle business).
“Our job is not to present candidates to managers. Our job is to present qualified candidates that will be a good fit for the company to the managers,” said Shireen El-Maissi, people relations and talent acquisition (TA) manager at Blueboard, a rewards and recognition tech platform.
El-Maissi said her transition from external recruiting to internal TA has helped shape her approach to looking for candidates that will be a good fit for the company and its future. James Lafferty made the same transition from an external “recruitment consultant” to leading a TA team in-house at software company Epicor. The VP of global TA said knowing the good, the bad, and the ugly about the business helps him make better calls about the coupling between candidate and opening.
Be a company connoisseur. Know the business and its goals and “what types of people assets we need to help the company reach those goals,” El-Maissi said. She recommends getting as clear a picture as possible of what’s happening at the company. This includes details about products and services, what changes might be coming, and what future growth might look like.
Knowledge about the business is also important in building relationships with candidates, El-Maissi told HR Brew. Many candidates prefer to connect directly with the hiring manager, “but then I start dropping knowledge, because I know the business, and then they get engaged,” she said.
Keep reading.—AD
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Did you know 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before they apply for the gig? The vibe of your biz is crucial to securing top-notch talent, yet so many companies put employer branding on the back burner.
Teamtailor is here to change that. Used by over 7,000 businesses and 100,000+ recruiters worldwide, their employer branding tools and recruitment applicant tracking system can boost your reputation and help you attract the best candidates on the market.
Wanna dive into the deets? Check out Teamtailor’s new guide: In the Head of 400 Candidates. You’ll find all kinds of informational gold, like:
- how to nail employer branding
- what applicants want when job searching
- key trends throughout the candidate journey
Make your brand’s rep sparkle.
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Galeanu Mihai/Getty Images
As every Spider-Man movie taught us, “with great power comes great responsibility.” This is increasingly true for staffing firms, who are now empowered by technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their services.
Recruiting and staffing firms can become power users of expanding HR and workplace tech and use it to their advantage, despite the rising perception that technology could render the staffing firm obsolete, as industry analyst Josh Bersin has suggested.
At the company’s earnings call on March 8, Gary Burnison, CEO of staffing firm Korn Ferry, claimed that although the industry is watching costs right now, the company’s growth in the medium- to long-term depended on its tech platform. “And that is a set of IP that is anchored around developing technologies using our developmental library of competencies,” Burnison said.
Tech-enabled hiring. A recent study saw a 30% increase in automation on the “buyer side” for candidate-facing activities, such as interviewing and messaging for clients, and 55% on the “worker side” for payroll, documentation, and benefits.
This is a new era for recruiting and staffing firms. They’re equipped to do more with less, and with that automated help, they have an imperative to be more strategic partners to clients and the job-seekers in their ecosystem. The American Staffing Association groups the technology opportunities under five categories of a firm’s operation: sourcing candidates, engaging them, selecting them, hiring them, and growing the business.
Keep reading.—AK
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Covariant
Technology has been reshaping the retail industry’s supply chain for centuries, back to 18th century economist Adam Smith’s espousal of division of labor, and continuing with Henry Ford’s moving assembly line.
Today, that technology is artificial intelligence.
“If you take any element of the retail supply chain, there’s going to be an application of AI to it,” said Roy Bahat, who leads Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture fund. “It’s a team, between technology and people, and it always has been, but technology used to develop slowly enough that we didn’t really think about it that way.”
In fundamentally shifting the relationship between technology and human workers, the rapid implementation of AI-powered automation is raising important questions about how jobs in design studios, factories, warehouses, shipping centers, and elsewhere in the industry will change. And combined with an e-commerce boom, a supply chain still recovering from the pandemic, and an increasingly tight labor market, this technology is transforming the way retail work works.
Retail’s big picture. Researchers estimate that the robotic automation market will be worth as much as $146 billion in the next decade. Much of that demand is coming from the retail sector, explained Peter Chen, co-founder and CEO of AI robotics company Covariant.
There haven’t been many core mechanical advances in the last few decades, so automation of the types of tasks that require human hands (like picking and packing) reached the limits of the available technology, Chen said.
“Whatever [problems] can be solved with operations plus hardware plus software, they’re solved,” he added. “That’s where AI comes in, to fill in the blanks.”
Keep reading in Retail Brew.—MA
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Today’s top HR reads.
Stat: 49.7% of knowledge workers chose mental well-being as their top priority over physical well-being, career advancement, and relationships and friends. (Oyster)
Quote: “There are some companies that do walk the talk, and it’s very interesting what distinguishes them from the rest, but I would say that the norm—at least in corporate America—is for official corporate value statements to be basically empty words.”—Charlie Sull, MIT researcher, on the mismatch between corporate DE&I commitments and company culture (HR Dive)
Read: ChatGPT will likely have a huge impact on the labor market, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania and ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which looked at exposure risks that the tech poses for jobs across industries. (the Wall Street Journal)
Let’s talk about health equity: Here’s what people really think about the state of healthcare today. Download the report from LetsGetChecked to learn more about the satisfaction trends, challenges, and unmet needs of the US healthcare system.*
*This is sponsored advertising content.
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Dollar General has been deemed a “severe violator” by the US Department of Labor for its more than 100 citations since 2017.
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Meta is planning to lower bonus payouts and roll out more frequent employee performance reviews.
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Disney began its three-phase layoff process, eliminating its first 7,000 jobs.
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Chipotle will pay $240,000 to former employees following a complaint the company closed its Augusta, Maine, store in retaliation for workers filing a petition for a union election.
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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:
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