Proactive Ways to Enhance Your Logistics Hiring and Recruitment Process

Is your logistics organization suffering because of a broken hiring and recruitment process?
Tired of losing candidates because they are going through too many rounds of onsite interviews?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, then it’s time to focus on optimizing your logistics hiring and recruiting process.
To stay on top of your logistics hiring demands in today’s market, it’s imperative that you focus on doing whatever it takes to remove any sort of bottlenecks that delay your ability to make quick and successful hiring decisions and can lead to poor candidate experience.
Here are a few ways you can streamline your logistics hiring process:

Execute a S.W.O.T. Analysis

A great place to get started is by breaking down every aspect of your current logistics hiring process. Administer a S.W.O.T. Analysis to better understand the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats within your hiring process. You’ll want to develop a cross-functional team for this effort consisting of key logistics hiring managers, HR business partners, and your supply chain and logistics recruiter. Here are some questions that you’ll want to review together:

• Who does what, when and how within our logistics organization as it relates to the end-to-end hiring process?
• Where do we have bottlenecks in the process that create a negative candidate experience and increases our time to fill metric?
• How do we kick off a new search opening? What information is captured regarding the opening and are we giving our logistics recruiter the pertinent details needed to effectively source the right logistics talent?
• How is the logistics organization performing against its hiring objectives and KPIs e.g. quality of hire, time to fill, offer to acceptance ratio, etc.?
• Is our interviewing process sufficient for quickly vetting candidates and maintaining a positive candidate experience?
• Is our approval process causing delays as it relates to approving new requisitions and job offers?
• Is our logistics recruiter alerted the moment we have a backfill or new requisition approved, or the last person in the organization to find out?

Identify Any Bottlenecks

Through 25+ years of experience in both corporate recruiting and agency recruiting, we’ve observed two areas where many employers tend to have bottlenecks. The first is with the requisition approval process. For some organizations, it can take several days or even weeks to approve a new position. This is due to requiring too many approval signatures from leadership. Thus by the time the requisition is approved, there’s added pressure on the logistics recruiter to get it filled quickly and the company suffers when the position is left vacant longer than necessary.
The second is making hiring decisions and approving job offers. Delays in extending job offers can lead to losing out on top candidates, as most candidates will likely have multiple interviews going on when they’re in job search mode. Maintaining a strong sense of urgency when it comes to hiring is critical for success.

Determine The Opportunities for Improvement

Once you’ve broken down the end-to-end logistics hiring process, the next step is to determine where you have opportunities for improvement and develop corrective action plans to close any performance gaps.
It may be beneficial to bring in a talent acquisition consultant or Lean expert that can help map out and optimize your logistic hiring process. You should also benchmark leading companies that are known for having great hiring practices and apply similar tactics to yours.

Optimize Key Hiring Forms/Documents

While it may require more work on the frontend, make sure you have a detailed “intake” process that captures the right information needed for the logistics role you’re filling. You’ll want to capture more than just the required and desired job requirements such as the key deliverables for the position, company culture, reporting, and organizational structure, challenges the role will contend with, opportunities for advancement and the like.
You’ll want to develop strong job descriptions that go beyond listing out your ideal job requirements and job responsibilities as well. Ensure that your job descriptions provide a solid overview of your company, pertinent details about the organization/operation that the position leads or reports into, explains how the candidate would benefit from joining your organization and provides other key information that helps to attract top logistics talent. This will also ensure you only bring aboard the right fit, both functionally and organizationally.

Improve the Interviewing Process

When it comes to the interviews themselves, many companies solely rely on HR to develop interview guides with questions that aren’t always applicable to every role in your logistics organization. Take a collaborative approach to help put together the right set of interview questions that enable you to properly vet candidates based on past performance against the most critical functional, technical, leadership and cultural fit criteria.
Strive to put the right balance of interviews in place that properly assesses candidates and enables quick hiring decisions. In the past, we worked with a large 3PL that had several director openings to fill, and they required candidates to go through up to EIGHT rounds of interviews. We ended up firing this client as every candidate that we put through the process became frustrated with the sheer number of interview rounds, and ended up opting out of consideration or accepting other job offers.

Train Your Employees to Master The Art of Interviewing

Due to the logistics talent gap and a tightening labor market, it’s imperative that your hiring managers and interviewers are well equipped to “sell” logistics candidates on joining your organization in addition to assessing them.
Consider putting together a training session for interviewers and new hires that join your organization on your hiring process so everyone communicates using the same message when it comes to how to sell your company to candidates exploring opportunities with your organization.