A recession is a challenging period for everyone, including talent acquisition departments. If your organization had to freeze or cut back hiring, how do you invest productive time and effort so your business is ready when new job requisitions start again?
You must proactively address gaps in your talent acquisition, even in slow periods, as that allows you to stay ahead of your competition. Thus, you could establish a career win to add to your accomplishments list.
This article provides insights into how a recruitment slowdown is a top-notch time to optimize and enhance your talent acquisition practices, develop a talent pipeline, reinforce your employer brand, and revisit your hiring tech stack.
1. Optimize Your Recruitment Process
When recruiting candidates at full speed, you often need more time to assess data and determine what requires tweaks. Moreover, hiring managers may even have so much on their plates that they can't dive into how to improve their actions.
Having time to identify potential roadblocks in the hiring funnel can feel like a luxury. Here are the questions to ask and simplify the process:
Are diverse job applicants moving through the pipeline successfully?
Where are job applicants dropping out of the funnel?
Do your KPIs show that some business areas perform better than others?
Do you use onboarding to deliver what you promised during the interview phase?
Do you nurture effective recruitment criteria for determining job applicants who will become engaged workers?
2. Enhance Reporting
Although you'll have less activity to include in reports, you can leverage slow periods to re-assess your reporting strategies. Identify whether your current reports help your recruitment team have informed decision-making and if there are any gaps.
You can also use this period to integrate HR and talent acquisition data. Finally, you can connect information from various systems to understand how learning and development departments can work more effectively with talent acquisition.
3. Develop Your Talent Pipeline
If you haven't yet, this is a stellar time to use recruitment software. An extended recession can lead to more incoming job applications, increasing your candidate volume. A top-notch applicant tracking system will help you keep job applicants engaged during that period, developing a stable talent pipeline. Thus, some candidates who didn't seem like a good fit could become compatible as their careers evolve.
4. Reinforce Your Employer Brand
A recession is ideal for compiling workers' stories, updating your social media and career, and developing branded communication. Identify the best person for sharing employees' testimonials and experiences, which can help refresh your brand and industry position.
You can also enhance your website and focus on networking, which will help you reach qualified candidates afterward.
5. Re-Assess Your Recruitment Tech Stack
Identify gaps technology can address and close, helping you optimize your processes. For instance, recruitment software can help you automate candidate screening, sourcing, and interview scheduling.
Use a slow recruitment period for auditing your entire hiring tech stack. Understand whether your technology platforms are giving you what you want - if data is well-connected and everything works well.
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Despite being challenging, the past three years have shown us that good things come even from difficult times. Hence, even though recruitment can't go the 100 percent speed at all times, you can use it to re-evaluate your processes and transform your systems.