When "We Need More Applicants" Isn't Actually the Problem
What talent leaders in high-volume hourly hiring are seeing in their funnels right now, and the best practices they are putting in place
"We need more applicants."
It may be the most common request talent acquisition teams hear from the field. A store is short-staffed, a requisition is open, and the operator wants candidates now. But sometimes the applicants are already there and nobody got back to them. Sometimes the interview times didn't work. And sometimes the hiring funnel of a new store is being treated exactly like every other location, even though talent is much more scarce in that market.
The bigger question isn't simply how to get more people into the funnel, it's where candidates are actually getting stuck in the hiring process. We sat down with talent acquisition leaders at over a dozen leading brands in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries to discuss their current challenges, and how they are overcoming them. Here's what stood out.
Find where candidates are getting stuck before spending more on attracting more talent
When a store asks for more applicants, the instinct is to increase sourcing efforts. A better first move is checking if and how fast candidates are being contacted and dispositioned, and the qualification rates of your current application sources.
Tracing ten candidates through the funnel, apply, contact, interview, show, hire, at one struggling location usually surfaces issues fast. How quickly are people contacted? How many are dispositioned? How much interview availability actually exists? If most candidates aren't getting scheduled within the first five days, that's the thing to fix, not the ad spend.
The underlying question is simple: if applications doubled tomorrow, could the downstream process actually handle them? If not, more budget isn't the answer. A candidate aging report, pulled from your ATS, showing everyone still sitting in "new" or "under review," sorted by how long they've been waiting, can show exactly where a location's real problem sits.
If the speed at which you qualify and schedule candidates for interviews is a bottleneck in your process, consider automated assessment and interview scheduling capabilities that can help your hiring managers save a lot of time, while reducing leakage in your funnel by letting pre-qualified candidates self-schedule their interviews based on actual manager availability. Without it, a manager still has to physically call every candidate to set up a time, which means recruiting can generate all the flow in the world and it still comes down to whether a busy manager makes the calls.
You have interview slots, but are they the right ones?
Interview availability is a practical constraint that's easy to overlook. A store needing someone who can open at 5am on weekends, but only offering interview slots from 2 to 4pm on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, has interview availability on paper and almost none in practice.
The fastest check: compare the hours a role actually needs someone to work against the hours you're currently offering to interview them. Most scheduling platforms include an interview slot utilization report showing booked versus available windows by location. Ask for it!
New-store hiring: same playbook, different results
Opening a new location every couple of weeks with a small team leaves little room to reinvent the strategy for every market, so one consistent playbook becomes the only option. The hard part isn't really the playbook itself, it's predicting which new locations are going to struggle even when everyone follows it exactly the same way.
Brand recognition can swing wildly from one market to the next, and in places where the brand is less known, grassroots tactics and recruiting from the zip codes where local employees actually live tend to matter more than the radius immediately around the store.
This means a market report before opening will be key. One that shows local pay rates for nearby competitors, current unemployment, how many other employers you'll be competing with, and where nearby employees actually live.
Quality matters even more when speed is required
Applicant volume is the easiest thing to buy and the least useful thing to buy badly. When the top of the funnel isn't qualified, two things go wrong at once. Your managers burn their limited screening time on people who were never going to get hired, which slows down everyone who would have. And your cost per applicant looks great at first, but your cost per hire quietly climbs.
Most ATS platforms can already show which source drives the most applications. Very few can show which sources produce hires, and that gap is usually where "quality" gets decided by default. An ATS report connecting one role's source data all the way through to 90-day retention usually changes the conversation, and has recruiting leaders looking at their top-of-funnel sources very differently.
But a report you read once a quarter only tells you what already happened. The teams getting the most out of their budget are closing that loop continuously instead: feeding funnel progression data from the ATS back into their advertising systems, so what happens after the apply informs where the next dollar goes. Which locations are already converting the applicants they have and don't need more spend. Which ones are genuinely short and need more.
Done that way, budget moves toward the hard-to-fill roles and the markets that are actually behind, instead of spreading evenly across a portfolio where half the stores were fine. That's the whole difference between optimizing for cost per applicant and optimizing for cost per hire. The most effective teams today use solutions like SpendSmart to take in their ATS outcome data and adjust spend on it automatically.
The candidate journey doesn't start with the application anymore
Job seekers increasingly don't start their search on a career site at all. Asking an AI tool directly whether they're qualified, what a job pays, and how it compares to other employers happens before a career site ever enters the picture.
That changes what makes a posting discoverable. A job without listed pay may not surface at all when someone asks an AI tool to compare their options, no matter how good the actual role is. Titles matter too. A listing for "back of house" won't reliably surface for someone asking about "cook" jobs, even though it's the exact same work.
It also changes where it pays to post. A handful of job boards now integrate directly with AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude, which means the jobs listed on them can surface inside the conversation a candidate is already having about their options, rather than waiting to be found through a search results page. Posting where those integrations exist is one of the few discoverability levers that doesn't require changing anything about your process, and it's worth asking your current partners whether they have them.
Five easy-to-implement best practices
Pick one location that is asking for more applicants and trace ten candidates through the apply funnel: apply, contact, interview, show, hire. If most of them didn't get scheduled for an interview within the first five days, fix that first, not the ad spend.
Compare your open interview time slots to your actual shift times for one hard-to-fill role. If they barely overlap, that's often the real reason a job isn't filling, not a shortage of applicants. A store that needs someone who can open at 5am on weekends, but only offers interview slots from 2 to 4pm on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, has interview availability on paper and almost none in practice.
Before your next new-store opening, get a market report that shows local pay rates for your competitors in that area, current unemployment, how many other employers you'll be competing with, and where nearby employees actually live. Use it to understand what success may actually look like in that market before the store opens.
For one role, see which of your hiring sources actually produces people who stick around, not just people who apply. Your ATS may already be able to show you which source drives the most applications. Go a step further and check whether those sources are also producing hires, and if those applicants are still there 90 days later. That gap is usually where "quality" quietly gets decided.
Make sure candidates can find you through AI tools. First, post on job boards that are connected to assistants like ChatGPT and Claude, so your listings can surface inside the conversation a candidate is already having about their options. Ask your current partners whether they have those integrations. Second, make your job data findable once you're there: ask an AI assistant to find relevant jobs in your area and pay range, and see if your listing even shows up. If it doesn't, that's usually a five-minute fix, add the pay, use the words candidates actually search. Update the job description itself too, so it reflects how you actually want to be perceived next to your competitors on an AI chat like ChatGPT, not just whether you're visible at all.
What to take back to your team
The next time someone says "we need more applicants," a few questions are worth asking first: Where are candidates actually getting stuck in the process? Can the store interview the people it already has? Is this a sourcing problem or a market problem? How much work does this currently ask of managers?
Hourly hiring is hard, and sometimes the honest answer is that you need more applicants. But sometimes the applicants are already there. The real opportunity is getting better at telling the difference.
You can learn more about the latest best practices and AI-powered technology to help you optimize your application funnel and ad spend by chatting with one of our experts today.
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