As air travel rebounded post-pandemic, airport restaurant and retail chain company OTG Management faced a challenge: Recruiting enough workers to fill jobs available at one of the 11 airports in which it operates throughout North America.
Even as the labor market has cooled, job openings in the US labor and hospitality sector are still higher than most other industries, and as of July the turnover rate stood at 4.2%, nearly double the national average. In the background of this challenging hiring market, OTG is growing, recently expanding at the Denver International Airport, with plans to hire 100 additional workers. The company currently employs 4,500 workers, and makes about 350 job offers a month, mostly for hourly roles.
Over the last year, OTG has focused on automating its recruitment process in order to free up its HR professionals to spend more time speaking with job candidates, Kelly Licciardi, an SVP and partner with the firm, told HR Brew.
AI-enabled recruiting. OTG tapped into Dayforce’s AI-enabled recruiting features in order to speed up its recruiting process, Licciardi said during a conversation with Amy Cappellanti-Wolf, Dayforce’s CPO.
Dayforce, which launched a suite of AI-powered features last fall, uses the technology in its recruiting software to screen candidates based on their experience, skills, and location, as well as how they respond to employers’ specific screening questions. Features like chatbots and auto-triggered actions help surface the best candidates to the top of the recruiting pile so HR pros don’t have to do this themselves.
It can be hard to hire an adequate amount of HR staff to keep up with the volume of candidates OTG considers, Licciardi said. “And obviously there’s so much technology now that it’s like…why would we need more recruiters?” She specifically cited an AI-powered candidate grading tool and a candidate self-scheduling feature as two pieces of technology that helped OTG speed up its recruitment process. In recent years OTG has seen its time-to-hire reduce by 10% to 20%, part of a broader effort to develop more efficient onboarding and hiring practices following the pandemic, and Licciardi said close to 98% of its staff positions were filled when she spoke with HR Brew in late August.
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Fewer recruiters, more facetime. HR pros haven’t been immune to the labor market slowdown over the past few years, and recruiters have been particularly affected by layoffs. Google and Tesla recently cut recruiters from their payrolls, and HR Brew previously reported that some companies have leaned into technology to make up for their smaller people operations teams.
OTG hasn’t downsized its HR department as a result of its efforts to automate recruitment, but rather shifted the time recruiters spend on administrative tasks to more in-person conversations with candidates, Licciardi said.
“I think these things are giving them back time,” she said. OTG’s HR pros have a desire to get on the phone with candidates and have in-person conversations, and sorting through job applications can impede their ability to do that, or start to feel like a numbers game, she suggested. Recruitment, she added, is “all about building that relationship and getting to know that person.”