Leading HR and talent industry analyst Josh Bersin shares how to optimize frontline hiring strategies with high-speed, human-centered tech.
Julie Jares
Director, Newsroom, Thought Leadership
Workday
From healthcare and retail to logistics and hospitality, frontline workers are the vast majority of the global workforce—82% in the U.S. alone and 2.7 billion workers worldwide. As the public face of their companies and the first point of contact for customers, they have a significant impact on brand reputation and overall business performance.
Despite this, HR teams often prioritize corporate, office-based roles and hiring processes. Out of touch with the candidate experience frontline workers want and expect, companies are losing them faster than they can recruit them.
We talked recently with Josh Bersin, founder of the industry-leading HR and talent advisory firm, The Josh Bersin Company, about the importance of the frontline workforce to business performance and why hiring and talent acquisition of these workers must be prioritized more effectively.
“Frontline workers know what's broken and what's working,” Bersin notes. “They know the ins and outs of the company because they see it every day. They are incredibly important, so people in HR must understand the complexities of the frontline workforce and the benefits of investing in this part of the hiring operation.”
Breaking the cycle of high attrition, according to Bersin, requires moving beyond traditional HR systems and processes and embracing hiring strategies designed for fast, flexible engagement from the first candidate interaction through to hiring, onboarding, and long-term retention.
When frontline workers aren’t given the right technology to succeed, they’re 3X more likely to also feel they’re not getting equitable treatment.
Report
Enterprise talent acquisition is still largely dependent on HR systems designed for administrative convenience rather than the realities of frontline work. While frontline roles may be “deskless,” technology is a primary concern for employees.
When frontline workers feel an employer doesn’t offer them the right technology and tools, they’re 3X more likely to also feel like they’re not getting equitable treatment with other workers.
This extends to the hiring process. Asking frontline candidates to navigate complex, multi-step application portals creates a technical hurdle that’s simply not in line with how the frontline workforce operates. It sends a message that the employer doesn’t understand frontline needs, or worse, doesn’t value the candidate’s time at all.
Bersin highlights two primary reasons organizations must shift toward an accessible, mobile-first approach to engage frontline candidates:
Velocity of the frontline market: Frontline workers are often looking for jobs to start immediately. A streamlined and conversational process (vs. extended resume screening and multi-step interviews) matches the pace frontline candidates need and expect.
Candidates as brand ambassadors: Frontline employees are often the public face of the brand. There’s real brand value in responding quickly and providing clear closure. When candidates are left waiting—or worse, ignored—they may walk away not only from the role, but from the brand altogether, choosing not to do business with it in the future.
“Candidates for [frontline] jobs don't wait weeks to get hired,” he emphasizes. “They want to get on with their life, so they find another job the next day, and your company loses them and you have to start over. There is a brand value to that, too. If you can get back to a candidate quickly and either make them an offer or not, that's a better experience for them.”
To engage top frontline talent most effectively, teams must move away from portal-first thinking and build a process that treats frontline candidates with the same level of professional urgency found in corporate hiring—but in a way that’s in line with how they operate.
”In hiring for the front line, there’s a direct connection between speed and revenue.”
Josh Bersin
The Josh Bersin Company
There’s a direct correlation, according to Bersin, between hiring velocity and a positive frontline workforce experience. Slow velocity has ripple effects that impact overall business health. When essential roles stay vacant, companies suffer from diminished service levels, higher strain on existing teams, and measurable revenue leakage.
“The volume of business you can do is limited by the quality and number and skills of the people you have,” Bersin advises, “And if you're understaffed or you have a high turnover or people are undertrained because it's taking too long to hire people, you're underperforming as a business . . . In hiring for the frontline, there's a direct connection between speed and revenue.”
Reaching out to candidates quickly—when possible, within minutes of their first interaction—can determine whether you land top talent or miss out. That requires recruiting workflows designed around the frontline candidate experience and supported by technology that enables fast, flexible engagement. Here are five key steps to achieve it:
Move at frontline speed: Automate screening and scheduling to engage candidates in minutes. Speed is a competitive advantage because frontline workers often accept the first offer they receive.
Prioritize human connection: Shift administrative tasks to technology so managers can focus on the interview. This initial relationship is the primary driver of culture and long-term retention.
Signal organizational quality: Provide a seamless, mobile-first experience to reflect a supportive work environment. Efficiency during the application process proves the company respects the worker’s time.
Remove handoff friction: Eliminate manual approvals and internal delays between the application and the offer. Every hour of stagnation is an opportunity for a candidate to find another job.
Treat time as a survival metric: Reduce cycle time as a core business necessity. In a high-volume market, a slow process is the leading cause of losing top talent to competitors.
When teams build hiring around frontline speed, they stop asking candidates to absorb the cost of internal delays. The process becomes predictable: clear next steps, fast decisions, and consistent follow-through—so roles get filled before service suffers and before candidates move on to other opportunities.
With much of the focus around HR technology on efficiency, the natural assumption is often that technology is what removes the human element from the hiring process. But when it’s used right, it’s the very thing that enables human connection at scale. At the same time, it helps talent teams hone in on candidates truly best fit for their roles.
“If you engineer a high-speed hiring process, you force yourself to build a high-quality candidate experience because you build a screening process made to be finished quickly,” he notes. “You end up soul searching about what the perfect candidate looks like, because you have to refine your screening to bring the right people in and let everyone else select out quickly. You're going to make the process more precise by focusing on speed.”
AI is a central part of achieving this scaled precision, particularly from a skills perspective. With the sophisticated ability to analyze skills data within an organization and enter that data into a candidate pipeline, talent teams can match potential employees to jobs where they don’t just check a box for standard certifications or degrees, but truly have the skills and experience to succeed.
More than 8 in 10 leaders say skills-based approaches power equal access to opportunities and greater economic growth potential for the business.
Leaders overwhelmingly agree this is the right approach—more than 80% of leaders reported to Workday that skills-based approaches both open more equal access to opportunities and power greater economic growth potential for the organization at large.
In frontline industries in particular, which are experiencing some of the highest turnover rates of high-performing employees, prioritizing this level of good fit, quality experience, and successful business performance is imperative.
And in this type of tech-supported, human-centered model, speed and genuine connection are mutually reinforcing. Streamlined hiring reduces uncertainty for candidates, improves clarity of fit on both sides, and signals that the organization values time, follow-through, and respect from the first interaction.
Report
In the past decade HR has undergone a major evoluton from a supportive role to a strategic one. However, as this report finds, HR teams are more conservative on AI than finance and IT. That makes the potential competitive advantage even greater—learn more below.