The success of an event is determined by the event staff, the success of the event staff is determined by the hiring process, be it in-house or via an agency – these are the most common but incredibly easy to avoid mistakes we have seen when it comes to event staff hiring.
Through experience, knowledge and market understanding we wanted to piece together the areas of event staffing that seems to appear time and time again. There’s a solution for all of these problem areas, it’s just getting into the habits of overcoming them with the use of technology and intuition.
Here goes…
Lack of Understanding of the Event
It’s vital that pre-event you, your event staff and everyone else involved has a firm understanding of the actual event. The program, the market, the industry, the attendee’s demographics and so on. Why?
Because when you look to hire the right staff it’s important that you start your search by looking for staff that will fit in right away. It’s no secret that if a staff member has experience or knowledge of the industry or market then it would be wise to approach them first, then working your way down the relevancy of staff.
When event staff are well prepared and understand the event it ensures that they can deal with any questions that come their way and understand what the goal of the event is – lead generation, sampling, photos etc – which are measures of success of the event. Successful goals = successful event = repeat clients.
Missed Focus of the Events Needs
Touching back on the point above – the event goals – it helps to understand right at the beginning what the aim of the event is. Is it lead generation? Is it to simply sample as much product as you can to get the most exposure? Or is it to walk around and scout people out for photo opportunities?
The point is that each event, each client will have different requirements and as the event staff is on the frontline, they need to have the right capabilities to complement the goals of an event.
Filter staff based on event goals, so consider key factors such as experience both in terms of previous events and to a lesser extent if their educational background is in line with the event, for example, a marketing event – in this case someone with a marketing degree or certification would be able to engage in more deeper, articulated conversion simply due to the fact they have some form of understanding.
Recruitment is Taking Too Long
This can be blamed due to two factors – technology and time. The reason being that recruiting event staff in the traditional way of using spreadsheets to locate staff, contact individually and wait for response adds a lot of time to the process.
Then you factor in event planning and management then it’s safe to say your time is spread thinly across multiple areas, not ideal for delivering a quality event let alone hiring the perfect staff.
So with old school technology such as spreadsheets then having to go through the process of finding, interviewing and hiring event staff you can see where the recruitment process can take too long. Another key factor to consider is that some staff may pull out at the last minute which inevitably means going back to the spreadsheet and finding suitable candidates to start the process all over again.
Not Reviewing Your Team
So you’ve managed to get the team in place, you know which event staff you want, you have lined them up and are awaiting the event.
Did you find out what clothing size they may need? Do they have any allergies? Location? Do they know the code to access the door? Are they actually suited for this team? Is the team full?
For a seasoned event planner or manager these may seem like trivial questions to ask yourself, however, these are the questions that are vital as clothing needs to be fit, allergies need to be known and the staff needs to know exactly where to go and how.
A simple checklist in most cases will suffice but in the fast-paced world of events and depending on the event staff numbers you can find yourself scrolling through spreadsheets in a panic from time to time.
Overview
We began to understand that these problem areas above were all common, very easy to avoid but it needed another way to overcome these issues and not just spreadsheet workarounds and developing a large event staffing tech stack.
Within the Liveforce platform, you can experience crew management without the headache through the use of your event staff database, dedicated crew job app, payroll management and most importantly staff scheduling for events.
All of these key features were designed to ensure that event staff can be hired, managed and paid without diving into multiple spreadsheets and wasting valuable time and money.
Event staff have rich-content profiles meaning that key information can be seen at the click of a button, filter through potential candidates with requirements such as driving licenses and read reviews and ratings from previous roles too.
With successful event staff hiring there needs to be a laser-like focus to ensure requirements are met, the right staff is hired and you know why the staff member suits the event. The Liveforce platform does all of this and then some ensuring easy staff hiring for your event.
