27.01.21
COVID-19 has posed many new recruitment challenges for companies. This difficult time has forced businesses to close, reinvent themselves or invest in new ways of working. Whilst on the other end of the spectrum, others have seen high-growth and need to recruit talent quickly. The unpredictability of the current climate leaves companies wondering, where should they put their recruitment efforts?
Even as you pivot your business, it’s difficult to envision what recruitment will look like in a post-COVID world. If candidates are already in secure employment, it’s difficult to attract them to your business. How will you stand out?
The steps that you make now to improve your recruitment strategy will be essential for coming out on top post-lockdown.
Don’t forget about your current employees
Whilst searching for new talent is the priority, leveraging the power of your current team will help smooth out the process. Let them know that the company is hiring, find out what was enjoyable for them in the hiring process / what changes would they like to see? Your employees went through whatever recruitment strategy you have in place and they will be invaluable to critic the process.
Build and nurture connections
As we continue to navigate through the current climate, the threat of unemployment is an on-going and consuming worry for many employees. This means that, depending on the situation of their current employer, they may be more likely to make the jump if a new opportunity arises with more stability. Utilise social platforms to highlight your credentials. How have your faired through coronavirus? Have you won new business/achieved X % of growth? These key factors are now a top priority for candidates who are looking for a new job.
It’s also useful to capture the current market. LinkedIn is flooded with candidates who are ‘#opentowork’, furloughed or a part of businesses who, unfortunately, do not have the capacity to keep employees on in the new year – by building your talent pipeline now, you can begin to build relationships with fantastic candidates and be better positioned to rebound when hiring resumes.
Revaluate the candidate experience
Personalising the candidate’s experience during the recruitment process is essential. If you haven’t already, adopt video-technology to offer more personalised experiences to remote candidates and as well as employees.
As mentioned earlier, ask your current employees for feedback on how the process of hiring can be improved. No one is perfect, and it may take a few tries to find the solution that works best for your business, but real-life experiences allow you to see the strengths and weaknesses.
It’s also important to ensure time is set aside to give feedback to successful and unsuccessful candidates you’ve interviewed. Listen, we get how time-consuming that is. As recruiters, providing individual feedback each time can consume a lot of your day. We’re not saying you need to provide a dissertation-length email of why someone didn’t get the job, but it’s important to make them aware that they aren’t successful and why. This person has spent time researching, preparing and psyching themselves up to interview with you, and then nothing. It’s awkward and you feel bad but leaving them in the lurch won’t help them improve and leaves a bitter taste in their mouth whenever they think of your brand.
Build your brand
Your visibility and brand reputation will play a key role in your recruitment strategy. If you want a potential candidate to connect with your business, you need to build a brand that stands out. Key things to think about are:
Look at your diversity and inclusivity within the company
No two employees are the same. As multi-faceted human beings, each person has individual needs and will bring in a different perspective to your brand.
Look at your current workforce. Is there a similar pattern emerging? How can your business flourish when there is no diversity within your team? As Einstein said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Diversity hires are one thing, but you need to ensure you implement the same attitudes within your culture, too. Whiteness is more than just about colour. It’s within the culture set up in your business and how people experience and perceive that environment.
In an article about improving diversity in PR Black and POC interviewees said that the industry’s culture and the way, people reacted to them, unconsciously rather than deliberately, had made them feel different and like they didn’t fit it.
Invest money, time, and effort in resetting your structures within your company. Pay Black and POC educators who can implement training sessions for you and your staff. Buy their content, books, workshops (there are plenty) and start to unlearn all the biases that we have towards race, neurodiversity, and the LGBTQ+ community to ensure that these candidates are attracted to your business and, once they are in, want to stay.
Set aside time specifically to focus on recruitment
Recruitment overall is a lengthy process and requires your attention. Organising your calendar and blocking off time will allow you to focus on the task at hand, rather than getting caught up with other tasks.
Or, failing that, you could hire a specialist recruitment agency that works within your field to take the task of recruitment off your hands completely. If you work within the PR and Communications industry and you’re feeling lost on how to streamline your recruitment process and hit the ground running, let’s grab a virtual coffee!
Written by Chantelle Brown – PR Recruitment Consultant – Latte
Want to improve your recruitment strategy & employer brand experience? Contact Dean Connelly from Latte on 07544 431 759 | [email protected]