44 Ways Recruiters Can Have a Big Impact Even During a Hiring Slowdown

Don’t lay off your internal recruiters. Get strategic instead. 

The talent acquisition team provides the face and voice of your employer brand. During a lull in hiring, focus your team on proactive projects to improve the candidate and employee experience. When hiring picks up — and if you don’t expect hiring to rebound, your company has bigger problems — your recruiters will have many experiences to share that will help applicants understand why they should want to work for your organization.

Make one or more of these 44 projects their focus. (In case you’re wondering where these ideas came from, I pulled many of them together at the beginning of the pandemic.)

So, instead of abandoning your recruiters, consider having them:

• Convert those awful job descriptions to compelling job postings to attract talent, not bore them.

• Create employer brand collateral — video interviews of leadership and employees, as well as “Day in the Life” videos or blog posts about key teams, such as sales, engineering, customer service, etc.

• Conduct in-depth exit interviews to improve employee retention.

• Interview and coach your employees to help them grow their careers internally.

• Develop a career pathway program so employees easily understand promotion options.

• Create automations in the ATS to speed up the process during future hiring peaks.

• Provide training to hiring teams on how to effectively interview.

• Develop standard hiring processes and assessment methods for “regular” hiring needs.

• Construct a succession plan and process.

• Analyze how to handle internal pay equity, especially in relation to external hiring.

• Create a program to move pay increases from a cost of living adjustment to a performance-based system.

• Gather feedback from all applicants in the last year. Analyze data. Improve candidate experience.

• Develop meaningful DEI programs to diversify future applicant pools. Possibilities include partnering with mentoring organizations; building a referral program that targets candidates from underrepresented groups; and reviewing the hiring process for bias.

• Plan early career pipeline and/or internship programs for future use.

• Identify new associations, universities, meetups, and tools for sourcing. 

• Develop and populate LinkedIn Recruiter projects for recurring hiring needs. At a tech company, for example, these might be for account executives, customer success managers, and software engineers with your tech stack.

• Improve processes for preboarding (between offer and start date) to decrease falloffs.

• Improve onboarding and first-week experience.

• Evaluate your employee referral program through a DEI lens. 

• Promote hiring team engagement during preboarding. Build a system of automated reminders to ensure the entire team sends personalized connection requests via LinkedIn and sets up targeted 1:1s during the first week.  

• Create or refresh your career page content. 

16 more projects for talent acquisition professionals

I published a post on my LinkedIn feed with the tasks listed above and that prompted a new round of fresh, crowd-sourced ideas.

• Forecast hiring needs for the upcoming year or quarters. (source: Tom Lynch)

• Design internal apprenticeship and job-shadowing programs for current employees. Let them try other roles in the organization. (Megan Thornton)

• Build a campus ambassador program (great employer branding and engagement of former interns). (Aspen Plummer)

• Consult your DEI programs and employee resource groups to identify additional talent pipelines for candidates from underrepresented groups. (David Clark)

• Create a plan to measure the results of the initiatives listed here. Continuous improvement and ROI are key to making the long-term business case. (Rasha Saad)

• Redirect recruiters to other parts of the business. It’s a great way to increase skills and knowledge of the business so your recruiters are stronger when they return to talent acquisition. (Gail Houston) 

• Create (or update) standard operating procedures for the talent acquisition team to support best practices and team professional development. (Tessana Nemenski) 

• Research alternative ATS systems/HR tech that could expedite process flow. (Tessana Nemenski) 

• Create “new hire feedback surveys” at the 30-, 60-, and 90-day marks. Use data to improve new hire experience. (David Clark)   

• Consider a customer success manager role. Recruiters have many transferable skills (for example, project management, negotiations, detail-oriented, and valued-based selling). (Michi Hu Pezeshki) 

• Design an employee referral program to identify great candidates. Turn your existing employees into employer brand and sourcing specialists. (Megan Thorton)

• Create videos for interview prep of future candidates. (Alex Campo)

• Cross-train your talent acquisition team. Help them learn new domain specialties (tech recruiters, say, learn finance recruiting). Marissa P. 

• Create an internal role rotation program for HRBP/People Ops/TA/Comp/L&D. (Catherine Hansen)

• Conduct team-building classes and activities throughout the organization to increase collaboration. (Karam S.)

• Build a compensation philosophy. Ensure leadership is aligned. Actively decide how competitive your company wants to be compared with other companies. Train members of the hiring and talent acquisition team on how to articulate the philosophy to potential employees. (Megan Thornton)  

7 more ideas to consider (clearly, there’s lots for talent acquisition to tackle)

In so many ways, this project has been the gift that keeps on giving. Here are yet seven more ideas from Megan Thornton, the chief people officer at ClosedLoop. (You’ll note some of Megan’s earlier ideas above.)

• Create video job descriptions. Candidates like them. Post to career page. Allow candidates to envision a potential future with your organization that is real and touchable.

• Interview boomerang employees who left and then came back. Understand why the grass actually wasn’t greener on the other side. 

• Create structured interview guides. Develop interview scorecards. Ensure interviews are approached in a fair and balanced way.

• Identify culture ambassadors solely responsible to assess for culture fit/enhancement. If a potential employee doesn’t fit/enhance the culture, it doesn’t matter how skilled a candidate is.

• Annually build total compensation snapshots for current employees. Highlight total comp including benefits, equity, 401(k) matching. Comp is so much more than just a salary.

• Create and implement key metrics: KPIs and SLAs that help you to track progress over time and create transparency. Report on this to the executive leadership team and overall organization on a monthly/quarterly/annual basis.

• Conduct a compensation analysis. Ensure you’re paying competitively.

Michelle Mehlis brings over 13 years of talent acquisition and talent development experience to her role as a senior recruiting consultant for Hirewell. Previously, she led the TA and onboarding team for a publicly traded company. In addition to being a full-desk recruiter focused on candidate experience, she helps companies identify and market their employee value proposition, develop effective job postings, build talent pipelines through sourcing, develop effective hiring processes, train hiring teams, and optimize their ATS. She’s managed searches for entry through executive level for all kinds of roles. 

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