HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
The Complete Guide to Hourly Hiring with Sean Behr, Fountain
Frontline worker recruitment demands fundamentally different approaches than traditional corporate hiring – a distinction Sean Behr, CEO of Fountain, expertly unpacks in this illuminating episode of the HRchat Show. As companies adapt to the latest hiring challenges, understanding these crucial differences could mean the difference between struggling with high turnover and building a stable, engaged hourly workforce.
The scale alone creates an entirely different paradigm. "When you're hiring a corporate office employee, you're generally hiring very few of them," Sean explains. "When you're hiring in the frontline, you write the job description and then you have to find a thousand of those people." This volume requires specialized technologies and strategies that traditional applicant tracking systems simply weren't designed to handle.
Communication preferences represent another critical divergence. While corporate candidates respond to emails and maintain LinkedIn profiles, frontline workers primarily use mobile devices and text messaging. The challenge for employers? Creating a hiring process that meets these candidates where they are – on their phones, often during non-traditional hours, sometimes speaking different languages. As Sean notes, "The ability for a frontline worker to use their phone to apply for a job is great... The flip side, though, is it's so easy that you're only one click away from someone else's job application."
The conversation explores innovative solutions throughout the hourly worker lifecycle – from AI-powered on-demand interviews that accommodate late-night scheduling to paperless I-9 processing that transforms first-day experiences from paperwork drudgery to meaningful orientation. Particularly intriguing is Fountain's new Shift product, addressing the reality that schedule compatibility often determines whether a frontline worker stays or leaves, regardless of how much they enjoy the job itself.
For HR leaders feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of system overhauls, Sean offers practical advice: identify one critical area of your hiring process most in need of transformation, then seek specialized solutions for that specific pain point. This focused approach allows for meaningful improvement without the paralyzing prospect of replacing everything at once.
Ready to change up your approach to hourly worker recruitment? Subscribe to the HRchat Show for more insights, and visit HRG
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is a very happy Bill Bannum, your host today. Why are you happy, bill? Well, it's because I've got my friend back on the show his third appearance we were just talking about, and that is Mr Sean Baer, ceo of Fountain, and he's back on the show to shed some light on strategies and technologies driving the recruitment of hourly workers in 2025. We're going to talk about time and attendance, we're going to talk about I-9s and a whole bunch more. Mr Baer, how are you doing? Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3:Bill, it's always great to be here Third time, but you know I'm going for I want to be number one on the leaderboard, so I'll have to come back again real soon and move myself up again. But it's always fun to talk to you and I love, obviously. I love talking about frontline workers and you're one of the experts to talk with about it, so thanks for having me having me Thank you, and a third time's a charm.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's get into it. You've said that most applicant tracking systems Sean, aren't built for hourly workers. What makes hiring or hiring hourly workers so fundamentally different from traditional hiring, and how does Fountain address some of those differences?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, it is the thing, you know. It's so different. It's such a fundamental difference when you're hiring a frontline worker versus a you know, maybe somebody in your, in your headquarters or your corporate office. When you're hiring a corporate office employee, you're generally hiring very few of them, relatively, and when you put together a job requisition and a job description, you generally write that job description and you hire a single worker to fill that role. When you're hiring in the frontline, you write the job description and then you have to find a thousand of those people. You're not looking for one perfect person, you're looking for a thousand great people who can do the job really well. So the tactics and the technologies that work when you're doing a one-to-one hiring versus a one-to-one thousand hiring, they just don't work. Corporate hiring is just a. It's a really important function, by the way, and I want to make sure our listeners know I'm. You know we hire lots of corporate workers at Fountain. It is such a critically important activity, but it is fundamentally different than hiring a frontline worker where you're hiring thousands of them and you know just little.
Speaker 3:Things are very different. For instance, corporate workers generally have a CV or resume and you probably can look them up on LinkedIn before you even interview them. Most frontline workers they don't have a CV and they certainly don't have a LinkedIn profile, so you can't kind of go on the internet and find out, hey, where did they work before? You can't do that with a frontline worker. Second thing is, like most corporate workers, most corporate workers, you send them an email and they will write back with a very well-crafted email back to you.
Speaker 3:Frontline workers good luck. Most of them are using text messaging. In fact, when most corporate workers apply for their job, they sit down at their laptop and they type up their cover letter and their CV and they polish up their LinkedIn. The frontline worker pulls up their phone and does a search and says I'm looking for a job near me in a restaurant, and so the tactics and the technologies just are very, very different. And obviously at Fountain we're fully focused on that frontline worker, both in hiring them but obviously managing and retaining that work over time.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at HRGazettecom. And now back to the show. Hr Gazette Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show. So what works best, then, in terms of engaging those potential candidates, is that WhatsApp? Is that text message? Is that calling?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you've got to meet this worker where they are. So, you know, one thing is to always pull up the job description on a mobile device. That's the way that the worker is going to see it. That's meeting them where they are. Pull up the job description and the application in the language of the country you're hiring. So pull it up in French if you're recruiting in France, or pull it up in German if you're recruiting in Germany. See what it looks like. And then you know most of these workers. You know, send them a WhatsApp message. Okay, that's meeting them where they are. That's how you're going to get them, how you're going to engage with them.
Speaker 3:You know I've said this before, I say it internally a lot. You know, the ability for a frontline worker to use their phone to apply for a job is great. It opens up opportunities, which is our mission, opens up opportunities for the worker. They can access new opportunities. The flip side, though, is it's so easy that you're only one click away from someone else's job application, and so you know, knowing that, if your process seems a little challenging, a little hard, a little inconvenient, that worker, all they have to do is click a couple of buttons on their phone and they're now applying for a competitive job and so knowing where they are meeting, where they are using WhatsApp, using SMS messaging, being cognizant of the language and the location and the device, and making sure you have a technology partner that can support you in delivering meeting where you are to those frontline workers.
Speaker 2:And how young and trendy do we need to get with this stuff? So, for example, I've spoken to people before who say TikTok works pretty well for certain candidate attraction. Do you guys venture into those sorts of social medias?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. We have a product that's designed to go after those passive job seekers. Obviously, any good applicant tracking system will connect you to the big job boards and that's a critically important source of candidates. But increasingly, you do need to go find candidates who are not on the big job boards, and that might be TikTok, you know. That might be Instagram, that might be Facebook, you know any of those places where you can find the candidates you're looking for that maybe aren't particularly on a big job board today, and that's super important.
Speaker 3:The more specialized the role. So what do I mean by that? If it's a, you know, a relatively simple you don't need any special license. You don't need any special qualifications to do the job. You know, probably have lots of applicants for that job, but there are lots of roles where you need a specific license, and maybe it's in a rural area of the US and you need a specific license or a specific kind of experience. Maybe it's an automotive technician that needs a certain certification. Those people may or may not be actively searching for a job right now, but if you can reach them on a TikTok platform or, you know, instagram I don't want to play favorites among all the different channels, but sometimes reaching those passive job seekers on those new channels can be a really great way to find those specialized candidates for those specialized roles.
Speaker 2:Now, before we hit record today, you were sharing that the fountain i9 center uh is growing great guns yeah yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a great, great product.
Speaker 3:Um, you know, look, we all know that filling out government paperwork is. Maybe there are some people who love it, but most of us hate it. Most of us hate it. It's a pain, it's complicated, it's difficult to do. You know, what we've done with our product is to make filling out that government paperwork as fun as possible or as easy as possible, and what I think we're seeing is workers are able to complete that in an error-free way like they've never done before.
Speaker 3:And what's even really powerful about it is they're actually showing up for work and they are, instead of spending the first couple of hours of their first day doing paperwork, they're actually spending the first couple of hours of their career at this new company, learning about the history of the company, learning about the role, learning about the responsibilities, learning on the job, training versus what typically happens, which is hey, welcome to the first day of work.
Speaker 3:Go over there into the break room and spend the next couple of hours filling out these forms, and then we'll start to tell you about how great of a company we are. If you can flip that, you welcome them in and they start to learn about their job. They start to learn about their team, they start to learn about the company from the first minute. It's just a much better experience, not only for the company because they get more productivity, but frankly, it's a better experience for the worker. Nobody wants to go sit in a break room and do paperwork for a couple of hours. That's no one's job. Maybe there is somebody who thinks that's fun, but most of us don't think that's a great way to start. So yeah, that product's been a huge hit and it's delivering great results for our customer.
Speaker 2:Very good. Something else you shared because you guys have got so many features these days. Something else you shared before we hit record today is you've got a new time and attendance product and in fact, by the time this goes live, it's going to be out there so we can talk all about it in this interview right now. It's called Shift. Can you share some more information around Shift?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, fountain Shift. Look, we're a multi-product company. We believe in supporting our customers from job board to departure date and helping them meet these frontline workers wherever they are in their life cycle of work. So maybe it's helping them on the job boards and maybe it's helping them get. So maybe it's helping them on the job boards and maybe it's helping them get hired and maybe it's helping them fill out their government paperwork.
Speaker 3:But we obviously know, for this frontline worker, shift and shift availability is a really critical aspect of a frontline worker's journey. You could argue maybe the most important one. I may love the company. I may love the people on the one. I may love the company. I may love the people on the team. I may love the job. If it doesn't work with my schedule, you know, I may love it. It's just not going to work for me If this job requires me to work nights and instead I go to school. That's just not going to work for me.
Speaker 3:And so we know how important shifts are to this frontline worker and the product we've built is basically the world's most flexible shift management product out there. It's also an incredible experience for the frontline worker. Obviously, we build everything with that frontline worker in mind, and so we meet them where they are. And then, lastly, I would say, is it adds to productivity for customers. You know it makes customers more efficient, more effective and more productive.
Speaker 3:From a flexibility standpoint, we support multi-location. So maybe one day you're working at store A and the next day you're going to work at store B, right, maybe you want to be able to work different shifts with different pay rates. We have the world's most flexible shift management technology product and, again, it's really powerful when you hire the worker and then you know what their dream schedule is during the hiring process. If you can use AI and put that into your shift management technology, you can start to really deliver schedules that work for workers. That's at the heart of what we're trying to do. Ultimately, we think that that product, along with our hiring product and our I9 product and our Communicate product, are designed to help customers not only hire the best talent for them, but increasingly and importantly, manage and retain those workers over time. So if I can retain those workers longer and keep them inside my company, meet them where they are and engage with them, the business results for me are going to be incredible.
Speaker 2:So last September, I was walking the floor of HR Tech Conference. This pod is two or three, depending on the month in the world, based on downloads and engagement in the category of HR Tech. And yeah, I've never been before because I'm not a huge fan of Vegas, frankly, although I like Arizona. That's nice. I'll drive around there afterwards. Anyway, I'm going somewhere with this. It seemed like every single stand at HR Tech was AI-powered. This AI-fueled that you guys have some actually reliable AI technology behind what you do, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you now differentiate yourselves, how do you stand out in a market, in a crowded market, when everybody professes that what they do is agentic? This AI powered that.
Speaker 3:By the way, it is the buzzword of the uh of the year. It was the buzzword of last year. I think it's still the buzzword of this year. Everything has to be AI and um. I think the core question is um, experimenting with AI technology is super interesting from a technology perspective.
Speaker 3:As an an entrepreneur and a technology entrepreneur at heart, there's some incredible technology behind the scenes. The question is can you actually deliver business outcomes using AI? Because if it's all it is is, hey, this product is now agentic AI, that's really great. The question that we always ask at Fountain is so what? No, so what, like? What's the business outcome? What does it do for the worker? What does it do for the hiring manager? What does it do for the head of HR? Right, and so we bring that to heart AI technology at its core. We believe fundamentally that, despite the fact that everyone talks about AI, there will be some companies within the HR tech landscape that really unlock the power of AI to deliver those business outcomes, and we want to be one of those companies. But we don't throw AI in as sort of like the cherry on top of the sundae, because then you sort of get like, yeah, it's AI, okay, great, but can you actually use AI to really impact a company's operations, their business, their hiring process? And that's where you get real power.
Speaker 3:And we have an AI interviewer today. That's an incredible product and it does an incredible job of doing initial phone screens for our customers. And what's amazing is it meets workers where they are. Workers are actually able to interview with our AI agent according to their schedule, not when a recruiter can talk to them. It's for the first time ever. It's like on-demand interviewing for the frontline worker. And we see workers interviewing at 11 pm at night, not because that's when they're applying for the job, it's when they got off their last job. It's when they got off their last job, it's when they got off their shift and that's when it worked for them to engage and do the interview. And what's even great about it? If we see workers, sometimes we'll start the ai interview and then say something like hey, I've got to go. And what happens? They come back an hour later or two hours later and our technology is aware and says hey, bill, welcome back, let's pick up where we left off, which is just incredible and incredible convenience for the frontline worker.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can never do that. I'd spend about 10 minutes recapping before we got back into it. I've only got four more minutes with you because I know you've got a hard stop here.
Speaker 2:So just a few more questions for you. So so far, we have spoken about the sourcing process, we've spoken about the talent acquisition process. We haven't really got into retention yet, so let's just talk about that briefly. Um, retention is, of course, a top concern for hr leaders managing hourly teams. What are some best practices, sean or or features within Fountain that support better engagement and retention?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so obviously we think that one doing a really great job on hiring and onboarding leads to better retention. So that's kind of step one. That's table stakes. Do a great job of hiring, hire the right kind of talent, put them in the right kind of job and make sure they're ready to work on day one. They're going to more likely to stick with you long-term.
Speaker 3:But that's not enough, right? Finding a way to engage with this population of workers is really challenging. Again, I mentioned they don't. They don't reply to emails, right, and so you emailing them, you might as well just save your energy. They're not going to read that email. Ok, you know, putting up a poster in the break room, that's not. That's just going to get ignored.
Speaker 3:If a worker's on their break, you know where they're looking. Where they're looking Right here, by the way, where most of us are looking when we're riding the bus or the subway or the train or the you know sitting in the back of a car or a taxi, we're looking on a phone. It's the way to engage with that worker. You want to deliver a message, deliver it to that worker's phone. Now you need a system that can do that and can reach that worker via WhatsApp can reach that worker in the language in which they converse in. You need a technology that does that. Fountain Communicate is one of those technologies that does that.
Speaker 3:Second thing is you want to know how they're doing, and in the corporate world you could send a survey once every six months and get good results. In the frontline worker world, surveying people every six months is way too low. What you need to do is find out how was that workers first day, how was that workers first week and that workers first month? And then what's great about that is you can compare location A to location B. You can say wow.
Speaker 3:Everyone that works at location A says the first day was chaos. Everyone that starts at location B says the first day was amazing. What is location B doing that brings a welcoming sense and a calmness to day one? Let's copy that and bring it over to location A. Let's find out do people who, after the first week, they feel like they're doing great? Do those people stick around for 90 days, 180 days, 365 days? If we find that out, then we know that that first week is really critical time to drive long term retention, and that's the kind of thing our products do Things like Fountain Pulse and Fountain Communicator in that space.
Speaker 2:Oh man, I've got so many more questions for you, but we are almost out of time here, so I'm going to come back, bill for sure.
Speaker 2:You are coming back. I'm going to do your job for you right now. If you want to connect with Sean, look for Sean Bear with an H on LinkedIn. Go to fountaincom. It's that easy to learn more about the product. And that gives me one more minute, sean, to ask you one more question, so I'm going to challenge you to answer in 60 seconds or less. What advice do you have to HR leaders who are hesitant to overhaul their legacy systems at the moment, but they know that they need to improve their frontline hiring experience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. I will try to do it in 60 seconds, I hope. The thing that I would try to do is to come up with what is one or two areas of our lifecycle cycle that are that are in need of the most transformation. So I would not try to try to bite the whole pizza pie at once. I'd pick an area like hey, for us it would really be great if we could focus on this one slice of the pie, which is I don't know job offer to day one that week before that worker starts. That's where we want to really dial in, and then what I would try to do is go out and meet with some great technology vendors, maybe go to an HR tech or a conference, but with a laser like focus on that one part of the experience.
Speaker 3:Anybody you engage with, just say how can you help me improve this part of my process? I don't want to talk about anything else. And anybody you engage with, just say how can you help me improve this part of my process. I don't want to talk about anything else. And if you can't, give me your card and I'll, or let's connect on LinkedIn I'll keep you in mind. So for me, it would be focused deeply on one area and then go meet the leading companies in that space. How's that? 60?
Speaker 2:seconds. I'd say it's about 60 seconds. I think I've used all the time that you have with me for today, so that just leaves me to say for today, but we'll get you back on again soon. Sean bear, thank you very much for being my guest. Absolutely, bill. Great to be here and listeners as always.
Speaker 1:Until next time, happy working thanks for listening to the hr chat show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
