The worldwide impact of a global pandemic will create a new normal for hiring and recruiting, but we don’t know exactly what that looks like right now. There’s no playbook for something like this, we can only look at how the world changed after life altering events like 9/11 and the Great Recession of 2008. And those may seem minor compared to how the spread of COVID and the effect on our economy will change how we live and work.
What we do know is the market will come back; it always does. We just have to be prepared for how long that might take.
Preparing for Recruiting After the Crisis
If you’re waiting this out while handling crisis response for your workforce, working from home like so many of us have been since early March, and wondering what you and your team should be doing now while your hiring may have stalled, there’s no better time to start setting your recruiting up for success. No matter what the new normal will look like, you’re still going to need to prepare for your hiring efforts to ramp back up and if there is any upside to a crisis that has us all sheltering in place, it’s that we have some time to take a step back and start to work on creating alternate recruiting strategies that allow you to adapt when we emerge from the crisis.
What’s on your recruiting dream team’s list that you have pushed to the back burner?
Audit Your HR Technology
Now is the time to take a look at your current technology and its capabilities. Does your ATS allow you to automate candidate communication? Are you able to get the reports you and your team need? Tech companies are operational, as most are functional with 100% of staff working from home offices. Work with your team to make a list of what you need from your ATS and HRIS technology, what your current technology can and cannot do, and schedule video or conference calls with your current vendors to find out if you’re missing an update or feature.
If your current technology is outdated or insufficient, research companies that are doing cutting edge development for HR technology, make a list, and schedule demos and trial periods for new tech. At the least, you’ll learn that you might not be using your current technology to its full capability, and at the most you will identify what new tech you may want to implement in the coming months. It’s time-consuming to launch a series of testing and trial periods, but if your hiring has stalled, your team has time to devote to this now.
Test Your Automation
If you’re using your ATS or HRIS to communicate with candidates via automated email, set up a project to map out the touchpoints for your automated communication, what the triggers are, how it impacts candidate experience, and how automation helps you better communicate with your current workforce.
Review any repetitive tasks, like data entry, payroll, screening, and contact management to see if you could benefit from automation. By automating repetitive tasks, you and your team can collect, create, and update data and make different workflows available to different users and candidates, depending on the job role. For example, payroll often means that dedicated HR staff spends hours entering payroll data. With automation, these employees can perform a few simple steps in order to complete the same tasks, which means they can focus their efforts on other important functions that do require human processing.
Evaluate Current Recruiting Strategies
This is where you can really dig into recruiting metrics that matter. If your ATS has a dashboard for reporting, collect your data on source of hire, qualified candidates per hire, time to hire, candidate acceptance rate, and interview to hire ratio. If you haven’t set up your dashboard reports in your ATS yet, this would be the time to do it, and reach out to your vendor for help. Will these metrics look different once this crisis has passed? Likely, but having benchmarks can help develop improvement goals for future recruiting campaigns.
Related article: 5 Metrics to Measure for High-Volume Recruiting.
High volume hiring is challenging because the hiring and recruiting process must move at lightning speed.
Once you have a good high-level metrics analysis, you can review and evaluate your current recruiting plans and strategies. What’s working, what isn’t, what could be better, what should you stop doing? You and your team together can whiteboard the current strategy and have a green light session on what you expect the talent marketplace to look like after a crisis. Should you focus on high-volume hiring? Prepare for reorganization? Shift the focus of recruiting campaigns? Rework your recruitment content marketing? All these things are relevant now, and they will be relevant in a new economy.
