How Signup Culture is Changing Hiring

You’re sitting at work and remember you’re out of something at home, like batteries or dog treats, so you click “buy now,” and an Amazon box appears on your front porch. For lunch, you’re craving tacos, and with a few taps on your phone, piping hot food shows up in 30 minutes. When it’s time to head home, you open the Uber app and five minutes later your ride arrives.

This is life as we know it: the expectation of instant gratification for any type of consumer transaction, also known as signup culture.

The idea of signup culture has been mastered by the Amazons, Grubhubs and Ubers of the world. And while there’s recently been a shift toward signup culture in the B2B space, the need for speed has never been more urgent than it is in today’s candidate-centric hiring marketplace.

Modern recruiters must now think and behave like marketers. Consider a Yello recruiting study, which found that over 50% of respondents from Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z expect it to take just 1-2 weeks from job interview to offer being extended, and more than 20% expect it to take less than 1 week.

We’re reviewing three different ways signup culture is changing hiring–and how your business can get in on the action. 

Digital marketplaces have changed e-commerce by allowing consumers to purchase products from sellers across industries and continents—all in one place. They’ve also transformed the way companies sell by making it easier to ramp up business and expand their customer base. And it’s paid off: $2.67 trillion was spent globally on the top 100 online marketplaces in 2020.

Talent marketplaces have the potential to make the same impact. They bring businesses, recruiters and candidates together in one place, requiring significantly less human capital to fill jobs.

Take the talent marketplace Upwork for example: The company creates a fast and transparent process for both “buyers” and workers by allowing candidates to sign up in minutes and find work, and letting organizations see top-quality candidates and message promising ones in the same amount of time.

Sign up culture isn’t just a trend—it’s the new normal—so by leveraging talent marketplaces, you’ll speed up your hiring process and create a better candidate experience. 

The average time to-hire across all industries is 3-4 weeks, according to another Yello study. If candidates can skip the line to get their morning coffee and book a vacation with a few clicks of a button, they’re not going to wait around for a month to get a job, especially in today’s job market. In fact, 89% of candidates say they drop off because of a long hiring process, and 60% of recruiters say they regularly lose candidates before they’re even able to schedule an interview.

Being slow to hire can also lead to lower worker quality. When the best candidates drop out of the race due to a slow process, they’re replaced by lower quality candidates. If hiring managers aren’t happy with the candidates put forth by their recruiters, it’ll make the hiring process drag on even longer.

This can be avoided by putting HR systems in place that help move hiring along at a fast pace. While that does require a bigger investment upfront, it’ll pay off in dividends by shortening time to hire and time to fill positions, as well as lengthening employee retention.  

Have you ever been in a position, either now or at some earlier point in your career, where you wished payday would come sooner so you could make that credit card payment or purchase something you’d had your eye on? Having the ability to get paid at a faster, more flexible pace would’ve made all the difference.

The idea of flexible pay, or even daily pay, has a lot of advantages for candidates, including the ability to spend money as quickly as they’ve earned it, and a way to manage finances to help make ends meet. While flexible pay may not seem realistic, in today’s competitive job market where staffing shortages abound, it’s becoming more of an expectation.

According to a survey from The Workforce Institute, 72% of employees want access to their pay on-demand, while only 6% actually have this access. If HR teams want to win over hard-to-find candidates, they could consider daily pay. That can be accomplished by building the right internal systems or by finding a partner who can cater to the segment of the employer’s workforce attracted to daily pay.

The idea of signup culture has many benefits, but one can argue that it’s transactional and takes the “human” out of human resources. Yet think of it this way: If you’re spending less time hiring, you’ll be able to invest more (face) time and resources toward your current employees, which is a win-win. By embracing sign up culture via talent marketplaces, next day hiring and daily pay, you’ll stay resilient no matter what hiring challenge comes your way.

For more on improving your hiring process, check out our resource The Rise of Signup Culture.