Blue-collar workers looking for jobs are full of pits.
After the Boy in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, XiaoPeng was once attracted by an online advertisement of "high salary recruitment" and went to Shenzhen, 2500 kilometers away, to work, only to find that the actual situation was completely different from the advertisement. Later, he listened to the intermediary and went to work in a factory in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, but was deceived again.
Hou Xiaopeng, who was worried about his work, accidentally brushed Liu Chao, who was recruiting workers on live broadcast, when brushing Kuaishou. After a live broadcast room connection, the two had a deeper understanding and trust, Liu Chao arranged for employees to take Over Hou Xiaopeng, arrange free accommodation, and then help him find a job after the Spring Festival.
Liu Chao has been doing live broadcasting for two years, focusing on blue-collar recruitment in Jiangsu and its surrounding areas, and has accumulated 624,000 fans. Before becoming a well-known blue-collar recruitment anchor, Liu Chao did offline clothing business, and after the epidemic began, he turned to live streaming with goods, but due to problems such as stockpiling and price, it did not improve for a long time.
In April 2020, Liu Chao accidentally got the opportunity to help a mask factory recruit workers through short videos, and finally more than 200 people joined the job. This experience prompted him to turn to the human resources industry, and after some exploration, he finally chose to recruit live.
Liu Chao told alphabet list (ID: wujicaijing) that its team has introduced more than 3,200 people to work in the factory in the past year, and there are many well-known technology companies such as AVIC Lithium Battery, Ningde Times, Ideal Automobile, And Niu Electric, and the applicants are mainly from the three eastern provinces, Henan, Hebei, Shandong, Shaanxi, Gansu, Yunnan, Guichuan and other labor export provinces.
By helping blue-collar workers find jobs, Liu Chao will earn about 2 million yuan in 2021.
At present, on the short video platform, blue-collar recruitment anchors like Liu Chao are gradually forming their own style and gradually accumulating a group of loyal fans.
For example, "Songge Positive Energy" is mainly aimed at migrant workers, is good at answering various job search and work problems of this group, and interacts with the audience by answering questions in the comment area and on-site lianmai, with a fan base of nearly 600,000.
"Allianz Bubble" is a rare female anchor in the circle, whose content strategy is very different from Liu Chao and others, mainly by shooting interesting short videos of factory scenes, attracting user attention and guiding to the registration and recruitment process, which is also loved by many users.
Although the forms of expression are different and the effects are uneven, the increasing activity of recruiting anchors reflects the strong demand for blue-collar job search on the short video platform, prompting the platform to speed up the action and provide better operational tools.
On January 26, the "Quick Recruitment" entrance was launched in some of the live broadcast rooms of Kuaishou, embedded in the lower right corner of the live broadcast room, and candidates do not need to fill in their resumes, just leave a phone number to register, and enterprises will contact them after review.
Kuaishou insiders revealed that kuaizhao has been brewing for half a year, during which it has experienced many user surveys and product iterations before polishing to the current state. "The platform is doing this to meet the needs of blue-collar users and hope to improve their job search experience."
First let the whole model run up and make the plate bigger, which is also the attitude of Liu Chao and other blue-collar recruitment anchors. "The most important thing at present is to be a 'clear stream in the labor industry' to help more people find jobs."
A
At present, the mainland labor force is about 600 million, of which about 430 million are blue-collar workers in the secondary and tertiary industries, mainly distributed in manufacturing, construction and service industries.
Compared with office white-collar workers, the blue-collar population base is larger, involving more families, and the work they do is also the cornerstone of the operation of the whole society. However, blue-collar workers are much more likely to "step on the pit" than college students and white-collar workers looking for jobs.
On the one hand, the frequency of job changes among blue-collar people is very high, and the just need and urgency of job hunting are more prominent, providing space for bad intermediaries to take advantage of opportunities to make profits; on the other hand, blue-collar workers often rely on acquaintances such as compatriots and friends to find jobs, and are prone to hoodwinking and loss in the case of information asymmetry.
Live recruitment happens to solve these pain points to a certain extent. It can improve the efficiency of communication, eliminate information barriers, and allow job seekers to more intuitively understand the working environment; while anchors are constrained by platforms and public supervision, which also adds to their credibility.
After Xiaopeng's experience, it shows the advantages of live broadcast recruitment. But that doesn't mean that the threshold for live recruitment is low; if you want to run through the mode and become the top player on the track, you still need patience and precipitation, as well as a little luck.
"When I first started contacting human resources, I had 1780,000 fans, and I still had a certain foundation. But at that time, there were up to twenty or thirty people in the live broadcast room, and no one watched. Liu Chao said.
It is difficult to get user attention during the cold start stage, which is a major problem for blue-collar recruitment anchors. They shoot a large number of short videos, hoping to increase the popularity of the live broadcast room by producing blockbusters.
In the nearly one year since he began to do live recruitment, Liu Chao and his team have traveled to Hebei, Shanxi, Guizhou, Henan and other places, arranging the daily life of workers into a script, shooting positive energy short videos to recruit workers, but the effect is mediocre. Until December 2020, there was finally a short video "exploded", with nearly 15 million plays, which drove the entire business, and the number of online people in the live broadcast room rose to five or six hundred.
Another blue-collar recruitment anchor, "Songge Positive Energy", has also experienced a long period of accumulation. He released his first short video in April 2020, released 842 works in less than two years, accumulated nearly 600,000 fans, increased the number of likes on a single video from one or two hundred to tens of thousands, and the number of views of a single live broadcast rose to tens of thousands.
How to persuade strangers on the other side of the screen to sign up is also a science. "The first thing is to be real, otherwise people won't choose you, and the turnover rate will be very low." Liu Chao said.
At the same time, the anchor must be very familiar with the blue-collar job market and be able to talk after the audience asks questions. This requires the anchor to have a wide understanding of the work content of different factories, including what to be responsible for, whether to stand up to work, whether to wear dust clothing, a few days off a week, etc.; but also to have insight into some characteristics of blue-collar groups, such as illiteracy, not knowing the English alphabet, being older, having tattoos, etc., and judging whether it will affect the application.
In particular, the anchor needs to be familiar with the salary ranges of different types of work to determine whether it can meet the expectations of the candidate. The time of salary payment, whether it is necessary to enter the job for physical examination, whether temporary workers or regular workers, whether there is room for promotion, whether it can solve the problem of couple accommodation, etc., are also the information that anchors need to accurately grasp.
"You must be professional, otherwise you will not do it well." Liu Chao said, "For example, if you see CNC (numerical control machine tools), if you can tell them a whole set of production processes, this is called professional." ”
B
Every year around the Spring Festival, there is an intensive period of departure for blue-collar workers. Under greater recruitment pressure, employing enterprises and labor companies have significantly increased their interest in live recruitment.
Human resources industry insiders said that many workers do not return to their original posts to resume work after settling wages and returning to their hometowns, resulting in no one available in the factory and a decline in production capacity. The epidemic in the past two years has exacerbated this trend. In this case, increasing recruitment efforts and filling the labor gap as soon as possible has become an important task for manufacturing enterprises.
Qindao Zhizao, located in Qingdao, Shandong Province, is a human resources service company that mainly transports labor to home appliance manufacturers such as Haier and Hisense, providing tens of thousands of jobs every year. In January this year, more than a dozen labor service companies such as Qindao Intelligent Manufacturing began to dock with Kuaishou to prepare for next year's recruitment needs in advance.
The above-mentioned people believe that traditional labor service companies are facing challenges and need to find more efficient channels to reach young people, while more intuitively showing factory work and life, and eliminating the concerns of young people entering the factory to work. Live broadcasts, short videos, etc. help to achieve this goal.
In addition, the low turnover rate of employees recruited through live broadcasting after entering the factory is also an important factor in attracting enterprises.
The high mobility of employees and the flashing in and out of new employees are long-term problems that plague the domestic manufacturing industry. According to a report previously released by 51job, the turnover rate of China's manufacturing industry in 2020 is as high as 17.8%, far exceeding that of all other industries.
There are many reasons why factories can't retain people, such as many industries have an off-peak season for orders, and the employer will take the initiative to adjust the number of personnel; blue-collar workers have no plans to buy houses and settle in the city due to their generally low incomes, and they only work outside to save a sum of money and return to their hometowns to develop, so it is difficult to form a dependence on a company.
However, the recruitment process is confused by false or exaggerated publicity, and after entering the job, it is found that the "goods are not on the right board", which has become an important factor in the departure of blue-collar workers.
In contrast, in order to improve the conversion effect of the live broadcast room, blue-collar recruitment anchors will show the working environment through real photos, live videos, etc., to create a sense of reality as much as possible, thereby building trust.
Short video platforms are also at work. According to informed sources, the anchor's opening of the recruitment live broadcast room must undergo a more stringent identity and qualification review, and it is also necessary to accept the real-time supervision of the platform administrator and the audience. If the anchor deliberately misleads the applicant, it is easy to be held responsible afterwards and cannot run away like an offline intermediary.
In addition, anchors are trying to provide additional benefits to retain as many workers as possible. For example, "make up the difference", if the salary offered by the factory is lower than the estimate of the live broadcast room, the anchor will pay for it out of his own pocket; and the resident representative helps the workers solve trivial problems such as water and electricity bills.
"The retention rate of the people we recruited for the factory reached 95% last month, which is already very high in the labor service industry, and the industry practice is excellent at 40 to 50%." Liu Chao said.
C
At present, the efficiency of domestic blue-collar recruitment is low, and workers and employers are looking forward to change. Live recruitment based on short video platforms has the opportunity to drive this process.
The mainland has more than 400 million blue-collar workers, but the recruitment method is relatively backward, and it is still the main way to recruit workers in the traditional offline. After the intermediary agency gets the entrustment of the factory, it goes through layers of subcontracting, and finally the rural grass-roots agent recruits people and transports them to the factory.
Obviously, this is a recruitment method with a complex structure and redundant links.
In the era when the Internet was not developed, through multi-layer agent recruitment, information and demand can be directly contacted by the migrant worker group, and its existence is reasonable; but with the popularity of the mobile Internet and the growth of a new generation of workers, blue-collar recruitment has gradually shifted the main position to online.
But whether it's a recruitment website or a job-seeking app that has emerged in recent years, their focus is on white-collar workers in the Internet field. This group has a higher average income, which can bring higher commission income to the platform; blue-collar workers are rarely the focus.
In addition, one of the prominent problems in the online recruitment of blue-collar workers is to relax the standards and exaggerate the salary in exchange for more job applicants to register and earn higher agency fees from the employer.
Some users revealed that domestic blue-collar recruitment mostly adopts the "entry and settlement" model, and each time a person is recruited, the employer needs to pay an average of 1,000 yuan in intermediary fees. In addition, the high rate of worker turnover has led to a further increase in the cost of recruitment.
Over time, factories have difficulty recruiting people, but workers can't find a satisfactory job, which has become an urgent problem for blue-collar recruitment.
In this case, some Internet companies and anchors have thrown themselves into this track, trying to use professional knowledge and social trust to change the function of middlemen and gradually change the antiquated gameplay of blue-collar recruitment.
As early as February 2020, 58.com launched live recruitment. In March 2021, Kuaishou Service Invited Leading Merchants in Manufacturing, Housekeeping, Catering and Other Industries to settle in, and held a live recruitment session for 5 consecutive days, of which the Riders Special Session attracted nearly 4,000 people to apply. In addition, Lagou, TikTok and others have also tested this field.
At the same time, more and more anchors are beginning to get involved in blue-collar recruitment, and Kuaishou is the most important platform. In addition to the larger number of users in the sinking market, Kuaishou's trust culture is also more conducive to narrowing the distance between anchors and the audience, providing the natural sense of trust necessary for recruitment.
However, compared with traditional recruitment websites, Although Kuaishou does not lack traffic, it is a novice in the field of recruitment. How to make the process run smoother, so that the candidate and the employer can get a more efficient match, is the next step to solve the problem.
For anchors, they are more concerned about how to scale. After having a preliminary user base and accumulating a number of corporate customers, blue-collar recruitment anchors are trying to emulate the cargo plate and transform into MCN institutions.
Liu Chao plans to open a few more live broadcast rooms this year, train some excellent employees, and double the size of the team. But it's not a simple thing.
"At present, we have incubated two anchors, and I am trying to help them stand. But very few people come to the live broadcast room, and they have not yet been able to generate trust through the screen. Liu Chao said,
This also reflects that the first wave of blue-collar recruitment anchors has not yet formed a complete methodology for how to replicate their success after becoming popular. Compared with the more mature runways, games, goods and other sectors, blue-collar recruitment live broadcasting has just started, and there is still a long way to go.