Creative Ways To Solve Your Labor Shortage

Let’s face it, attracting quality candidates in the current labor market is beyond challenging. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it will get better anytime soon. According to Forbes, “The economic data is fairly clear: employers are getting desperate for workers in the United States. By the end of April 2021, job openings rose to an unprecedented 9.3 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As the country reopened and more people got vaccinated against the coronavirus, many economists thought that people would quickly return to work. Things haven’t turned out that way, and many consumers have felt the effects.” In other words, if you’re struggling to find talent, you can’t take on more customers because you’re already stretched thin and, quite possibly, are having a hard time keeping up with the workload you already have. 

It’s time to start thinking about recruiting candidates the same way you think about recruiting customers—it starts with marketing.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Not to be confused with regular recruiting, “…the definition of recruitment marketing is the practice of using marketing strategies to promote the value of working for an employer in order to attract, engage, recruit, and retain talent,” according to the online community forum Rally. 

There are many ways you can make recruitment marketing work for you. For example, similar to digital marketing strategies (some of which you may already be practicing), you can increase your Internet presence to improve your chances that candidates will find you in their search results. Keep these recruitment marketing strategies in mind when you’re looking for the right person for the right job.

Social Media 

Showing off your organization and company culture through social media is a fun and easy way to attract new hires. You can post company events, employee spotlights, pretty much anything to give candidates a better understanding of your business. Encourage your employees to share as well. According to research, an employee advocate is two times more trusted than a CEO, while content shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels. 

Think social media is just for Facebook and Instagram? Think again. Even TikTok is getting in on the fun with the launch of TikTok For Business. You can find practically any industry on TikTok. From teachers to technicians, ask your employees how they use the app so you can get a better understanding of how to use it for recruiting purposes. You can easily pull up pest control, lawn, or pool to find examples. But it all starts with your website.

Facebook and YouTube Ads 

Just as you would use Facebook ads to target new customers, the same principles apply when you’re trying to recruit. Facebook ads enable you to find potential new employees that may not be familiar with your company. You can post your ads on both Facebook and Instagram and target a variety of users based on their job titles, the area they live in, their education level, and what they are interested in.

Better yet, video content is another great way to connect with candidates. You can make employee testimonial videos, videos about what you do and your company culture, or how you give back to the community. Just like with Facebook ads, YouTube advertising will let you target your videos to potential employees.

Website 

From customers to candidates, your website is the first impression you make. This is where job seekers will go to research your company. While you may have focused your efforts on appealing to potential customers, think about how you can do the same for recruiting candidates. Has it been optimized with a careers page, and can candidates easily find it? Are your benefits listed? What about including employee testimonials that relate to what a fun environment you have? Your website is a great platform to use to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Employee Reviews 

The importance of your brand and how reviews affect it no longer applies just to potential customers. With sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, job seekers want to know what your employees really think about working at your company. According to research from Glassdoor:

• 75% of active job seekers are likely to apply for a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand.

• 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation, even for a pay increase.

• 68% of Millennials indicated they visit an employer’s social media properties specifically to evaluate the employer’s brand.

• 54% of Gen-Xers indicated they visit an employer’s social media properties specifically to evaluate the employer’s brand.

• 48% of Boomers indicated they visit an employer’s social media properties specifically to evaluate the employer’s brand.

• 7 out 10 people surveyed indicated they had changed their opinion about a brand after seeing the company reply to a review.

Just as you would with customer reviews (good or bad), it’s important that you’re also engaging with your employees on these sites and responding as well.

Live Chat 

Sure, you engage with potential customers every day through your live chat, but what about doing the same with job seekers? Adding a live chat to your careers page lets you immediately answer any questions they may have about your job postings, contact information, or your benefits. You can also capture their information and snag them as you would a lead. Which brings us to our next topic. 

Email Marketing 

Now that you’ve gathered their information, what do you do with it? Well, you email them! Send them news about your company, any awards you’ve received, or a list of new opportunities they may be interested in. Emailing your talent pool regularly will ensure that it keeps your business at the forefront. 

As you’ve seen, recruitment marketing follows the same strategies you would use to market your business. Do you feel so underwater that you can’t imagine doing all this on your own? You don’t have to. All these ideas can be easily implemented when you choose FieldRoutes™ as your sales and marketing partner to help you with your recruitment needs.

Do More With Less Headcount

Until the labor shortage eases up, this is a crucial time to think about how you’re operating your business. For example, are there better ways to improve efficiencies? Running your field service business using a pen and paper or an outdated software solution is no longer going to cut it. It’s time to start thinking about how you can make things easier for the employees you do have. Helping them do their jobs more effectively and easing some of the most time-consuming tasks can keep them active and engaged. 

The last thing you want is for them to get frustrated and leave. It’s also a great way to entice the job candidates you’re after. People want to work for companies that invest in the best tools and resources to help them do their job. The benefits of investing in a Cloud-based, modern software solution are numerous. From billing and collections to automated communications, customer service to intelligent routing, field service software can help automate these processes so you can manage your business more effectively. As a bonus, making life easier for your team may also lead to better employee reviews like we discussed earlier.

Intelligent Routing 

Intelligent routing helps your business run more efficiently by reducing the number of hours it takes to plan your technicians’ routes manually. You can bulk schedule your customers or assign an area of customers to a preferred technician or region, then create pre-built routes that are efficiently optimized. With FieldRoutes, scheduling your technicians is as easy as drawing a circle around your customers who are due for service. It reduces windshield time, which reduces fuel consumption, and saves you money. 

Routing by Tech Skills 

When you need the right technician, with the right skill set, at the right location, we’ve got you covered. For services that require additional training, experience, or a license (such as termite inspections), our new Routing by Tech Skills feature lets you assign these special qualifications to your technicians. In conjunction with our Intelligent Routing tools, you are able to use this as an additional factor when you’re building your routes and assigning appointments for these types of services. If no technician is available, the appointment will be flagged. The scheduler can then decide to move the appointment to a different day, route, or technician or allow the service to remain with the original technician without that particular skill.

Billing and Collections 

Manual billing is a huge time killer, and the reality is, paper and postage aren’t cheap. When you optimize your collection processes and streamline your billing, you get fewer mistakes, faster processing, and more productive employees who no longer have to spend hours organizing and manually inputting details. Accepting payments online is convenient for customers and helps you get paid faster. A win-win any way you look at it. Additionally, setting your customers up on AutoPay ensures you never miss a payment. 

Dynamic Pricing 

Dynamic Pricing provides more flexibility in how pricing is calculated for your customers. Many home services are priced by square or linear feet. This automated pricing calculation can be set up at the Service Type level or when you’re pricing Add-ons such as termite or special lawn treatments. Invoices and service notifications will show the property size related to the service provided. 

FieldRoutesTM Payments 

Businesses in all industries are always on the lookout for ways to save time and money. Our fully integrated payments solution enables field service businesses to focus on driving down costs and eliminating manual processes by providing complete end-to-end software capabilities for managing your payments. With benefits such as transparent processing rates, easy online signup, and onboarding that takes less than an hour, you can start taking payments almost immediately. We’re compliant with the Payment Card Industry (PCI), and our live, dedicated U.S customer support team can assist with any questions.

Account Updater 

Keeping up with your customers’ most up-to-date payment information can be complex and time-consuming. Often, credit and debit cards get lost, stolen, or expire, leading to missed payments or high rates of authorization declines. The FieldRoutes Payments Account Updater feature addresses these challenges when payment credentials change by automatically updating credential-on-file information for merchants. Payments keep flowing without interruption and reduce the need to contact cardholders to obtain updated information.

Real-Time Reporting 

If you don’t know where you are, you’ll never know where you’re going. Your field service business is complex. Implementing effective reporting tools gives your employees reliable, up-to-the-minute information, which will allow them to make data-driven decisions and take a more proactive approach. A comprehensive dashboard lets you easily see where you’re succeeding and what areas need improvement.

Customer Satisfaction 

Ensuring your customers have a positive experience with your business creates loyalty and increases satisfaction, which reduces your churn. This can reduce unnecessary stress around the workplace and keep your sales team motivated. Every touchpoint counts, from the way they find your company (Google, blog, website), to the interactions they have with your technicians to how easy you make it for them to access their information and pay their bills. FieldRoutesTM software helps encourage online reviews and allows you to feature the best ones on your website. Additionally, these reviews help your search engine ranking, which gets you noticed online and helps increase your sales. 

Automated Communications 

Attracting new customers is only half the battle; the real challenge is retaining the customers you already have. Nothing crushes employee morale more than seeing valued, long-time customers they’ve served for years—or fought hard to win over—jump to a competitor. Automated communications go a long way in helping you retain those customers. For example, you can set a phone reminder to go out a week before the appointment, an email reminder to go out a couple of days before the appointment, or SMS text reminders to go out on the day of the appointment. After the service is complete, your customers can receive a follow-up email. 

In the end, it’s always a good idea to reassess your business from time to time—labor shortage or not. FieldRoutes offers a fully integrated, end-to-end business management and marketing solution to help you compete in this tight market. Give us a call, and let us show you how you can grow your business more efficiently.

Your Partner in Growth

We hope this guide has been helpful. Whether you’re looking to add efficiencies, make things easier for your employees, improve your customer experience, increase sales, or anything in between, FieldRoutes™ is committed to helping your business reach its full potential. 

The platform automates all aspects of field service operations for enterprise and small business customers that span office management, advanced route optimization, payment processing, digital sales, marketing, and customer acquisition solutions that accelerate growth, streamline operations, increase customer retention, and maximize revenue. Our operations and sales and marketing suites were built with your customers and employees in mind and can help you grow quickly, scale intelligently, and serve customers relentlessly.

Call for a Demo at 214.466.1765

Join the growing number of thriving businesses using FieldRoutes to acquire new customers, improve automation, and crush the competition.