How to Recruit Deskless Workers With Recruiting AI

Does it ever seem like your recruiting team takes longer to fill positions than you’d like? It might be that you’re using the wrong strategy to recruit deskless workers. Adding recruiting AI to your recruiting strategy will help you to improve your time to hire when recruiting deskless workers.

I’ll cover:

1. The Definition of a Deskless Worker
2. The Top 8 Industries for Deskless Workers
3. Why You Should Use Recruiting AI to Recruit Deskless Workers
4. How to Increase Your Pipeline with Text to Apply and Mobile
5. Ways to Engage Your Deskless Workers with Recruiting AI

What is a deskless worker?

A deskless worker is anyone who does not sit behind a desk to perform their job. 80% of the global workforce consists of deskless workers. Common industries where deskless workers are employed in high volumes include transportation, manufacturing, and retail.

The Top 8 industries for deskless workers

There are a total of 2.7 billion deskless workers globally.

1. Agriculture 858 million
2. Retail 497 million
3. Manufacturing 427 million
4. Construction 265 million
5. Education 226 million
6. Transportation and logistics 189 million
7. Healthcare 148 million
8. Restaurants and hospitality 122 million

Recruiting AI can help you to engage and screen candidates for deskless roles in all of the top 8 industries I’ve shared above.

Why you should use recruiting AI to recruit deskless workers

A Fortune 500 company, in the restaurant and hospitality industry, used recruiting AI and increased their talent pipeline of deskless workers by 53%.

In addition to increasing their top of the funnel, the recruiting AI also improved their candidate quality. 78% of candidates in the pipeline were qualified.

Finally, the recruiting AI engaged the candidates in a human and natural way. This resulted in 90% of the candidates completing their screening conversations with the recruiting AI.

67% of candidates were scheduled for interviews.

Using recruiting AI to engage deskless workers will help you increase your talent pipeline, candidate quality, and improve your ability to hire or make placements more quickly. But you need to make 1 small modification to your recruiting strategy.

Increase your pipeline with text to apply and mobile

Using mobile-first technology is critical for deskless workers. Many of them do not have company emails or laptops. Because of this, deskless workers are 3x more likely to interact with mobile communications than web-based communications.

You should take this into account when thinking about your application process. Using a career site to acquire deskless workers is not enough. What you want to do instead is to use a technology solution called text to apply.

Text to apply is a shortcode phone number that you can place as a call to action in your recruitment marketing material or as a call to action anywhere you advertise open jobs today.

Instead of filling out a form on your website, which many deskless workers are unlikely to do, you can use text to apply to have them complete their job applications via text message.

Adding text to apply to your hiring process for deskless workers can increase your talent pipeline by as much as 53%.

Engage your deskless workers with recruiting AI

Next, use a recruiting AI to engage your deskless workforce. A recruiting AI will engage all of your text to apply candidates and collect their information.

The AI will be integrated with your ATS, so it’ll create candidate profiles for all of your inbound applicants and fill out relevant data automatically.

The recruiting AI will complete screening conversations with your deskless workers. Using a conversational AI over other forms of chatbots here, will ensure that 90% or more of your candidates complete their screening conversations.

Conversational AI is the most advanced type of recruiting AI or recruiting chatbot available today. Candidates often mistake conversational AI for a human recruiter. It can understand context, follow new threads, and acknowledge what’s being communicated to build trust with candidates.

Conversational AI can also support multiple languages across a wide range of geographies and job types. So if you’re a staffing company recruiting deskless workers across several industries and several regions around the world, conversational AI for staffing is your best choice for recruiting automation. It can be easily scaled and deployed to hundreds of sites.

Using conversational AI to engage and screen your inbound deskless candidates will reduce your time to interview by as much as 79%.

This article was originally published on the Mya Systems blog by Ameya Deshmukh.