Resilience

It’s a trait that many in talent acquisition have had to practice, especially over the past few years.

In 2020, the pandemic scared many companies into slashing budgets and starting layoffs with TA professionals often being the first ones on the chopping block.

Just one year later, the demand for recruiters skyrocketed as hundreds of thousands of jobs were added to the economy each month and companies desperately needed the professionals and processes to fill open roles.

Today, we’re observing a potential repeat of 2020 with many companies in danger of setting themselves back by cutting short their recruiting efforts out of fear.

There are two things we know for certain.

1.    The market will continue to shift for years to come and organizational reactions are largely out of your control
2.    The best thing you can do to stay ahead is to take this time to make your recruiting strategies better, faster and stronger to withstand any market

What does that look like?

Assess Past Success and Evaluate Future Needs

Assessing Past Success Now’s a perfect time to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your team and processes, especially if hiring has slowed down at your organization. This will provide a framework that your recruiting team can use to guide hiring in the short-term and long-term. For instance, determine who you would deem as high-performers at your organization. What about them as contributors made them valuable to your organization? What kind of skills did they possess and what tasks did they complete each day, week, month and beyond? On the flip side, who has been let go at your organization over the past six months? Was there a common trend across those individuals that made them dispensable? Can you work with HR to determine another factor in your organization (culture, job expectations, or work/life balance)? Even if you’re not immediately hiring, this is one example of how you can assess what’s worked to build personas for future roles along with addressing areas in your organization that could impact retention.

How Do Your Needs Match the Market? Now that you’ve analyzed past successes and weaknesses, how do you address them and ensure the market provides what you’re looking for in future roles? Let’s say you’ve identified key skill sets of high performers from underrepresented groups. Should you simply hope that when you start recruiting those specific diverse individuals will flock to your career site or job postings? If you want to delay filling roles and eating up more of your budget, then absolutely. Instead, be proactive by gaining visibility on the talent market you’re looking to target and ensuring talent quality amongst those you plan to engage in new opportunities. By starting with a wider net of 800M+ candidates on hireEZ along with 30+ AI filters to focus searches, recruiters are able to: ●    Assess the talent market for their persona and convey that information to team members via reports ●    Refine their persona based on what’s available in the market for faster searches ●    Engage talent directly on hireEZ’s platform once those searches are conducted The result is mapping out what’s available in the market to fill your needs in the coming months.

Build Relationships with Talent

Experiment with Your Outreach Imagine your inbox at this very moment. It’s likely packed with promotional emails, recruitment content, candidate replies (hopefully), and so much more. The only time you stop scrolling is when something catches your eye that’s important to you, right? You have to consider the same approach when engaging with talent. And there’s no one right way to do this. Take the time now to experiment with: ●    Messaging styles (i.e. direct, humorous, inquisitive, etc.) ●    Length of messages (i.e. shorter, or longer) ●    The information you covey (i.e. acknowledging the current market, what value they bring, etc.) As you experiment, track how these different emails perform and have it inform your future outreach tactics for greater response rates.

Nurture Rediscovered Talent Many recruiters want to start fresh with their talent searches, which becomes even more enticing when you have access to hireEZ’s open web database. However, it’s important to remember that during an economic downturn, some candidates might be hesitant to move on to a new opportunity. To keep your company top of mind for future opportunities and increase the likelihood of a candidate joining you when the time is right, recruiters should be engaging their internal ATS database of warm candidates. Even if you’re not hiring right now, hireEZ’s outbound recruiting technology makes it seamless to integrate with your existing ATS, refresh all of your candidate data, and use that data to nurture them with automated and personalized sequences. Setting up a sequence that checks in with a past applicant once every few months could make the difference between a future hire or a missed opportunity.

Consolidate Your Processes

Remove Collaboration Bottlenecks When teams are working fast to fill open requisitions, there’s rarely time to spot inefficiencies during team collaboration. Yet, it’s the inefficiencies that slow down recruiting teams, lead to expectation misalignment, and confuse communication. Here are some questions to think through as you evaluate your ability to collaborate: ●    How did past changes to our workflow help or hurt our ability to recruit? ●    How are we ensuring our expectations for roles are clearly communicated? ●    Do we have the ability to communicate directly with our team members? ●    How can we streamline our current processes? Otherwise, you risk leaving cracks in your collaboration foundation that will only exacerbate those issues and threaten your recruiting success when hiring ramps up again.

Prioritize a Consolidated Tech Stack Similar to the potential bottlenecks between team members, it’s important you mitigate any that exist within your tech stack. In today’s talent landscape, recruiting teams are often relying on more than one tool for various parts of the recruiting cycle. While it would make the most sense to invest in a platform that covers the end-to-end needs of recruiting teams, the next best option is the ability to consolidate those tools to work towards an optimal workflow. Whether it be an ATS or an email scheduling software, figure out how you can integrate these tools to work more seamlessly together. With investments in your existing tech stack, you want to make sure it’s operating at its best.

Right now, everyone in talent acquisition has an opportunity to strengthen their processes and practices for long-term success.

If you’re a hireEZ user interested in learning how to implement the tips above through our platform, hireEZ is happy to help.

Author Bio

Kunwar Ishan Sharma is the Content Team Lead in charge of content creation across hireEZ, including external articles, blogs, webinar content, video scripts, and eBooks. Visit https://hireez.com/ Connect Kunwar Ishan Sharma

 
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