The Ultimate Guide to Using Talent Pools
Picture this: You’re a seasonal business with a seasonal workforce.
One of your biggest challenges is retaining your favourite casual staff during the quiet periods, so they’re still around when you need them. Then if you find yourself short staffed, having to use temps can lead to you having no choice or control over staff quality, and constantly having to train first-time workers–all potentially jeopardising the customer experience.
“Alas, alack – what’s the solution?!”, we hear you ask.
Sidekicker’s Talent Pool feature has helped some businesses eliminate the challenges of seasonality and increase their repeat staff per shift by up to 60%.
How? Talent Pools works to do this in the following ways:
- After hiring any number of Sidekicks–whether it be 1 or 500–if you like them, you can save/add them to any number of private Talent Pools. You can organise these talent pools in any way that suits you–by location, role, hourly rate, retail outlet, etc.
- Once Sidekicks are in a Talent Pool, you can post shifts directly to them. This gives your favourite Sidekicks the ability to apply first to your request (if they’re unable to work, you can easily send the request to all Sidekicks).
- Whilst your casual staff may love working with you, they simply aren’t likely to stick around long if you can’t offer them enough hours during quiet periods. Having access to work with you as well as at all the other businesses hiring on Sidekicker, means they will not have to stop working with you in pursuit of more consistent hours.
- Hence, the Sidekicks in your Talent Pools become synonymous with your casual staff–working regularly for you like part of your ongoing team, without the risk of churning when you’re quiet, and without having to invest in bringing them onto your payroll.
To help you envisage how Talent Pools could help your business, here are 4 mini case studies of how our power clients use Talent Pools.
#1 Easily organise your Sidekicks & schedule high volume shifts – Spark Arena
Spark Arena is a multi purpose arena with a capacity of 12,000, and hires their entire workforce–from cooks and bartenders to gate scanners and supervisors–through Sidekicker. For every event, Spark needs to schedule 200+ staff across different outlets (e.g. Retail Bar 1, Customer Service Outlet 1, Food Stall 1), varying skillsets, experience, and seniority, as well as approve staff timesheets, and facilitate payment of the staff based on countless different hourly rates.
A potential headache that is greatly alleviated by the use of Talent Pools. Michael Swan, Catering & Hospitality Manager at Spark Arena, describing:
“I can post a request for staff–whether I need 5 or 200–at the click of a button, and select my Sidekicks based on experience and ratings, or if they’ve worked with us in the past, making hiring the right people simple.”
Having easily accessible Talent Pools allows Michael to ensure that the right people are at the right shifts in minutes – with no uncertainty regarding the staff’s capability to perform their allocated role.
Using Talent Pools has helped Spark Arena increase their repeat staff per shift from 60% to 95%, which has in turn had a huge impact on staff efficiency and performance e.g. queues have reduced from 10+ metres to just 1 metre!
#2 Hire every skillset you need in minutes, without any recruitment admin – Urban Foodies
Urban Foodies use Sidekicker to quickly scale-up during peak events season without having to have time-intensive and admin-heavy recruitment drives, for what are necessarily only short-term roles.
Urban Foodies wide range of offerings (catering, corporate events, function centre, and more) means they often need to hire a diverse range of staff for one or many concurrent events–such as chefs, event assistants, promo staff, baristas, cocktail mixers or general bartenders.
Talent Pools allows them to curate a flexible workforce of Sidekicks they’ve loved working with in the past, and hand-select them for the events they’d be best suited for. Georgie Vile, Director at Urban Foodies, stating:
“One of Sidekicker’s great features is their talent pool. If we’re out on a job and we find staff who we absolutely love, to have the ability to easily find them, and repost the shift just to them is fantastic. Being able to select staff and utilise them for the short time that we need them and not have to bring them on to our payroll is hugely beneficial. ”
#3 Maintain your company culture, even when you need temps – YouFoodz
One of Australia’s fastest growing startups, YouFoodz places immense importance on their team and company culture, citing it as being one of the most important factors of their continued growth.
However, businesses in such rapid growth are often challenged with resourcing–how do you scale your team quickly and cost effectively, whilst still maintaining quality and cultural constancy, and how do you stay agile given that things are changing every single day?
YouFoodz uses Sidekicker to quickly hire vetted customer service staff when busy or understaffed, using Talent Pools to easily rehire the ones that most align with their culture.
Meg Ellis, People & Culture Manager at YouFoodz describes:
“Culture is so incredibly important to us, so it’s invaluable to be able to rehire the Sidekicks that not only do a fantastic job supporting our customers, but also who fit seamlessly into our culture. Sidekicker really makes it possible for us to innovate and respond to change so quickly because we have a casual workforce–we’ve hired so many Sidekicks repeatedly using Talent Pools, that we’ve transitioned a lot of them into our full time team. Doing this allows us to really see potential employees in action, and observe how they fit into the team, before committing to all the costs and admin of employment.”
#4 Easily hire a temporary workforce across multiple cities
Have you been to Pinot Palooza, Game of Rhones or the Mould Cheese Festival? Revel is the mastermind behind these massive events, to name a few!
Revel uses Sidekicker to hire their frontline staff for all of their events across Australia and New Zealand–the face of their events, these staff are critical to Revel’s success.
Running large events sporadically throughout the year necessitates an external temp workforce, however finding, scheduling and paying staff, all while maintaining quality and performance standards, can be a massive task across multiple geographies.
Talent Pools enable Revel to easily rehire their best Sidekicks that they’ve worked with before whenever they come back to the city to host another event. Revel is able to organise their temporary workforce into different cities and skillset, whilst centralising all of their staffing into one online.
Claudia Martinez, Event Coordinator at Revel describes:
“Now we’ve been on the platform for a while we’ve built up a solid group of people who we love working with–they feel just like they’re ‘our people’.”
Given we use Sidekicker for all of our events we’ve built up a stockpile of Templates and Talent Pools which makes the whole process so simple and user friendly–what used to take us hours now literally takes less than 5 minutes.”
