Want to know how to get the the best workers for your warehouse? In September 2021, there were 589,000 job openings in the freight transportation and storage business, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Despite the high demand, warehouse roles are one of the most difficult job categories to fill in the country.
There are several key reasons why warehouse work is so hard to fill. For one, the tremendous growth in consumer demand for online purchases has led to a labor shortage, necessitating employers to hire far more warehouse workers than there are presently available.
Another incentive is the stigma of storage work as a no-go career. The reputation has just gotten worse after the pandemic, during which people were seeking for flexibility at work and revealing stories of stressed warehouse employees who had gone insane.
This post will discuss a few of United Tires’ methods for attracting warehouse personnel during the epidemic and after, including some of their tactics.
Demonstrating appreciation for the role’s difficulty
Warehousing work, on the other hand, is often physically demanding, monotonous, and (on average) more hazardous than office-based occupations.
Because warehouse employees are vulnerable to injury, employers of these workers must deal immediately with the dangers of the job by how they recruit, manage, and compensate staff in such roles.
Here are some ideas for how to do it.
1. Make a salary that is commensurate with the responsibilities of the position.
The most basic method to compensate and appreciate the responsibilities of the position is to pay a competitive hourly rate to warehouse workers.
You put warehouse workers at risk by forcing them to work more than 40 hours a week, therefore the hourly rate needs to be high enough to ensure that they do not have to rely on overtime to meet their basic needs.
According to recent studies, the typical warehouse employee makes around $16 per hour. When you work a 40-hour week, this still puts warehouse workers well below the national average wage, so you may want to consider paying them more than $16 per hour.
We pay workers at United Tires warehouses $19 per hour, and we restrict our maximum weekly working hours to 45.
Although the urge to keep a minimal supply chain at a low cost may persuade you to run your warehouse as inexpensively as feasible, the wage you offer warehouse employees will have the most impact on how quickly you can get these sorts of people.
As a result, if you can’t locate warehouse personnel, the simplest approach to enhance your recruiting procedure is to reconsider pay rates.
2. Make sure that everyone on your team gets a chance to complete physical activities.
Managers must be sensitive to the physical requirements of their employees, particularly those in warehouses.
Workers in a warehouse must accomplish a variety of duties every week.
Many of these duties will be more physically taxing than mental operations such as physical inventory counts and data inputting, but they all require attention to detail and the ability to multitask.
Managers of large warehouses might want to consider spreading physically demanding work more evenly among team members.
Although each individual has their own attributes and weaknesses (and managers should have some leeway to utilize each employee’s talents), having one or two team members do all of the more physical labor is unethical for both the employee and the team.
If you’re a more seasoned logistics manager, keep track of which team members are doing what jobs on any given day to make sure that work is evenly spread.
3. Offers solutions to issues created by performing a physical job.
Employees who work in a physically demanding job for an extended amount of time are more likely to have certain physical ailments.
People who work in these professions should be able to obtain support and benefits that will help them avoid such ailments. If these issues do arise, employers in this sector should also make it simple for employees to get access to competent care.
Such benefits can include:
- increase in paid leave
- Physical therapy or occupational therapy sessions are free.
- Full health insurance is available.
- A free gym membership is provided.
Offering such perks can have the triple positive impact of lowering the amount of time your employees must take off due to illness or injury, boosting morale in your warehouse, and making warehouse tasks more appealing to applicants.
4. Make warehouse jobs as adaptable as feasible.
One of the primary reasons why warehouse occupations are considered undesirable is due to their lack of opportunities for employees to work remotely.
Since the epidemic, this area of the job has grown more visible.
Although many of the more hands-on operative tasks in warehouses will probably never be able to be done remotely, warehouse operations frequently need to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (particularly if you run an ecommerce business), allowing staff flexibility in their working hours.
Although flexible working does not guarantee the same degree of freedom as remote employment, it does provide some of the advantages that remote employees enjoy.
Warehouse managers may provide their workers with the following alternatives to give them more freedom in their working hours:
- Set rota priorities for parents of young children so they may be away from work in the early morning and/or early evenings.
- Limiting the maximum number of anti-social hours (evening and weekends) that a employee is required to work.
- Giving financial rewards to those who are eager to work late hours. Young people, in particular, are frequently willing to work regular evenings and weekends for a little extra money.
Managers in warehouses should set up a system that allows operators to easily exchange shifts with each other, which offers greater flexibility and can help to foster camaraderie.
5. Make your warehouse as “temp-friendly” as possible by eliminating all obstacles.
Warehouses are a great place to work, as there are frequently numerous entry-level employments available. Warehouse operative jobs are typically very preferred among short-term, flexible contract workers looking for somewhere to work.
Companies that hire warehouse workers should look to capitalize on the temporary employment market by making their job postings appealing to freelancers, and by making it as simple as possible for temp staff to get started in warehouse positions.
Marketing warehouse roles to temporary workers
Hiring managers should perform the following steps when marketing warehouse jobs to temp. staff:
- Place job advertising on as many specialized temporary-role employment platforms as possible.
- Include language in your job ad that specifies the position is open to temporary workers and a minimum amount of time an employee must devote to it for them to be qualified.
- If you’re dealing with a temp agency, ask about their recruiting processes for specialists.
- Make it clear in your job description that you’re only willing to settle for a certain amount per hour. Temporary workers are more likely to view their compensation as an hourly wage rather than a yearly salary, therefore present it to them as such.
Integrating temporary workers into your team
A firm’s ability to manage a constantly churning stream of temporary workers depends on having the appropriate onboarding and systemization in place.
If you don’t take the time to understand how long it takes people to learn new skills, and then temporary staff should only be given responsibility for activities that are suitable for the amount of time they’ll be employed at your firm.
If you employ temporary staff on a regular basis, it may be beneficial to allocate a separate team member with responsibility for onboarding and managing short-term hires.
Other warehouses in the area might also help to create a pool of dependable short-term employees that anyone may tap into when needed.
This raises the amount of available potential temp staff, as well as making a temporary position at your warehouse more appealing to individuals who might be referred to other warehouses for additional work in the future.
6. Provide your warehouse workers with job advancement opportunities.
If prospects believe that working in your warehouse will lead to chances for advancement, they are far more likely to select you over another company.
Managers who want to increase the diversity of their workforce might also use these connections to recruit Warehouse workers in a way that makes finding and hiring them much easier.
This creates a second win-win scenario for a business and its workers since employees will have more career advancement prospects, while the firm benefits from a quicker recruitment process and a readily available supply of knowledgeable applicants with an intimate understanding of ground-level issues.
Managers may exploit these roles to get from operations to management. Here are some methods that businesses may use to create this transition:
- Requiring that a certain proportion of job candidates be internally recruited.
- Setting up a mentorship program in which warehouse employees spend time directly with senior executives from the company.
- Allow warehouse employees to have “secondments” where they may spend a short time (anything from a few weeks to a month) working in different departments.
- Having a management structure in place for the workers (such as team leaders) that may be used to propel into managerial roles later on.
You should also be seeking to develop case studies out of people who have progressed up the corporate ladder from an operative job in your firm. These may be utilized to advertise warehouse operative opportunities in the future.
7. Make your employment ads as appealing as possible to potential workers.
When advertising warehouse jobs, be sure to address any concerns that prospective employees may have about working in such a position.
A decent job description that describes the responsibilities of a candidate in detail while also explaining how the position is superior than their competitors.
We’ve previously discussed some of the most common objections, including:
- Low pay
- Physically demanding and potentially dangerous work
- Repetitive tasks
- Lack of flexibility
- Limited career progression in the long run
Job advertisements must address the three main objections to promoting a service with unconventional prices:
- Include the position’s salary.
- Describe the job’s physical requirements and an estimate of how much time will be spent on physically demanding activities
- Please clarify any measures in place to safeguard employees’ health, safety, and well-being.
- Explain how sociable the hours are and what procedures are in place to reduce the amount of anti-social hours worked.
- Say how various policies can help an applicant achieve long-term career goals, bringing prominent examples from real life.
In a nutshell, a good job description informs a potential employee precisely what they will get into and why it is preferable to their competitors.
It is up to company policymakers to create a supportive and humane working environment that will be a good option for candidates.
Attracting candidates to warehouse positions needs a three-pronged strategy.
To entice skilled workers to your warehouse positions, you must genuinely make your warehouse a pleasant place to work.
Wages are high, employees get benefits that reflect the work they do, and executives give them career chances.
If you get these things correct, then hiring should take care of itself.
Take a look at our other articles like on shipment, or ecommerce. We have a lot of informational blogs that will hopefully help accomplish your goals.