Pandemic’s lesson in recruitment: How to staff quickly and efficiently during a crisis

If we were to examine all the different lessons we’ve come to learn from this outbreak, we would all discover some in time management, adaptability, and maintaining productivity. However, the pandemic’s lessons did not end in personal matters or personal achievements. Every sector out there has had the chance to see companies survive or succumb to the coronavirus pandemic.

The lesson in recruitment, however, was slightly different from the rest. It doesn’t pertain to survival or require over-the-top measures to implement. The lesson learned was that hiring during a crisis demands a little bit more effort and impeccable timing.

Anticipating crisis

Perhaps the example of the recent pandemic is different in this regard but the point stands. It’s impossible to see calamity coming a mile away, but anticipating when a situation will escalate into a crisis allows HR professionals and recruitment agencies to act before it’s too late.

Recruitment is a very competitive process. More often than not, highly qualified candidates are a very valuable asset on a local or national, if not international level. With that in mind, you can expect those high caliber candidates to be taken off the market at the nearest sign of trouble. With competitive nature, come competitive offers and packages. Taking action early on while the situation is still developing can put you ahead of the competition in terms of sourcing and retaining rare and valuable talents.

Going the extra mile

Being ahead isn’t everything, at least not in recruitment. Sure, it gives recruiters a distinct advantage, but it ultimately boils down to the offer and whether the talent you’re after thinks it’s good enough. That’s why companies that are hiring for certain positions should prepare a crisis scenario type of offers.

All that you’re doing here is giving the candidate a perk or package that they cannot refuse. This is the most direct and straightforward way to take rare talent off the board early on. With that said, here’s how you go the extra mile.

• Refreshing your existing database

A developing crisis is the right time to re-visit the database of candidates that you’ve accumulated over time. The purpose behind this is to keep candidates engaged for potential placements. You can be certain that once the situation develops (think February-March 2020) there will be difficulty in locating quality candidates. Re-visiting candidates you’ve encountered over time is imperative and time-sensitive, otherwise, you’d find yourself slogging through a seemingly endless list of lower-tier applicants.

• Boosting the process

Remember all those recruitment metrics, achievements, and placement rates that your recruiters or HR professionals proudly report? You’re going to need to double the effort.

When the situation is uncertain, success undergoes a different measurement. During a crisis, it’s best to double the effort and try to boost outreach, communication, and placement.

When the situation is stable, and life is uninterrupted by unexpected global pandemics, it’s easy to look at the numbers and make a fair estimation of where they’ll be within a few months or a year. However, when the situation is this uncertain, any projections for the future become impossible to discern. The limitations and the rules are out the window, and you need to throw out all your parameters for success alongside it. At this point, as far as recruitment agencies are concerned, it’s the grind that yields results.

• Needs & demand

Not all industries have suffered during the pandemic. Some have actually seen more business than ever before. And the demand for supply means demand for talent. Now, this might be more relevant to recruitment agencies than internal HR professionals but keeping an eye out for that talent in demand can earn you some very good business. Amazon, for example, announced a recruitment campaign that aims to add 100,000 workers to address their customer needs. Grocery & food supply chains are accelerating recruitment for delivery staff and distribution-center workers.

In the meantime, healthcare providers are also attempting to deal with the rising surge in patients. Retailers and food chains are steadily increasing their payrolls to high customer demand.

As for a recruitment agency with a vertical approach, you might not have the luxury to capitulate on this high demand for specific skillsets. However, these industries and businesses function like any other at the corporate/office level and generally have the same needs as your current clients. Building relationships with professionals in these sectors can open doors to very exciting opportunities that fit your operations.

Saving time & effort with one ATS

It’s needless to say that recruitment during trying times will be a slow process with very little yield. But this is where that increased effort and raised KPI’s come in play. Here we can only recommend constant and consistent action. Effort during a crisis is the make or break factor. Now this will most definitely translate into tirelessly diving through a huge amount of candidate profiles and slowly working your way through. If your process is well defined, you probably wouldn’t reach the end of the database until the crisis blows over. But either way, being able to manage, and handle that much data is crucial. And automating aspects of that process can simplify the deal.

We developed Manatal for recruitment agencies and HR professionals alike. We aimed to create a recruitment software that can cover the entire recruitment process, automate as much of it as possible, and provide insights that can turn a recruiter’s day of work into a few hours.

A global pandemic was never on our mind when we created our cloud-based ATS, but every single recruitment challenge that we aimed to solve falls right under the points we’ve established above. Manatal’s ATS provides AI-powered recommendations that analyze candidates and rate/score their affinity for each particular position before it matches them to the one they fit the most. From social media enrichment and intelligent candidate sourcing to interactive onboarding, our ATS covers each step of the recruitment pipeline and provides a highly customizable interface so that you can mold Manatal to fit your company rather than the other way around.

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