When you work in the field of talent acquisition, the threat of a market uncertainty is scary. Since recessions generally mean fewer job openings that means less demand for a recruiter’s job filling abilities. However, there are many tactics recruiters can use to ensure a recession doesn’t harm their career drastically, but many of those actions must be done before the recession arrives. With over 300 million American’s claiming unemployment in March, 2020 we are facing a market down turn. Below is how Recruiters can succeed during the Coronavirus epidemic.
Building Strong Relationships
You already know that relationship building is a key skill for being a recruiter, and those relationships you have will prove even more important during a recession. If a candidate has lots of talent, they don’t necessarily need a recruiter to find a job, so looking to build strong relationships with hiring managers and other clients (alongside candidates) is important so they see your value when they are in need of your services. There’s many industries that are still BOOMING in North America: Healthcare, Insurance, Shipping/Ecommerce, Retail, and Trucking/Transportation.
Hone Your Skills
In a growing economy, recruiters can often do just fine even if they aren’t working hard to hone their skills. But, during a recession, it’s your strong skillset that’s going to help you pull through. So, diversity your skillset. Learn a lot and you’ll be able to bring more value to your organization. Focus on HR, career advising, learning the skills your candidates need, or working on your hiring strategy.
More than ever it’s a great time to focus on yourself! I wrote a post about book recommendations (here).
Tracking Your Recruiting Metrics
Data is a powerful tool that every recruiter should be utilizing. In order to find the right candidates, you need to be using data to back your approach. Using your own metrics is also important, and you should be tracking and measuring candidate experience, the effectiveness of your outreach methods, and the things that motivate candidates with various skillets. Make sure to track all your drop offs a lot of applicants are willing to talk over the phone but may want to delay the process for 1-3 months depending on there location. You will need to give these numbers to your leadership and HR teams to have them truly understand these recruiting impacts. I wrote a piece about tracking recruiting metrics (here).
Diversify Clients (Agency Recruiters)
Rather than over-investing in a few clients, you should always be working to expand your client base and diversify across many different types of clients. When a recession hits, this will benefit you since you’ll have a number of potential clients hopefully across many industries. You should also focus on industries that are least likely to be impacted if a recession were to occur, including healthcare services, discount retail stores, and so on.
Refine Your Screening Process
You should avoid wasting time as much as possible, and that means being as efficient as possible. Optimize your screening processes so that you can quickly attract and engage the right candidates, which will help you pick out the right people worth working with as more people seeking jobs seek out a recruiter during a recession.
How To Deal With These New Recruiting Challenges
While a recession will obviously bring about new challenges, there are also opportunities to be found during a recession:
1. Competitive Positioning: Companies need any competitive edge they can get during a recession, which means they need a recruiter more than ever to bring them the right talent.
2. Focus on Experience: Attracting high-quality candidates is the biggest challenge most hiring decision-makers face. Reduced hiring volume during a recession means you should focus on bringing quality candidates in.
3. Swift Closings: Closing is a lot quicker and easier when your candidate is in-between jobs. Your candidates during a recession are going to be focused more on the security of their new job than the perks or compensation it comes with.
4. Changing your process: Allow applicants to do remote interviews. Make the process as simple as possible. If you need to do several rounds of interviews – split that up between several days.
5. Onboarding: Work with your HR department to create a better onboarding process with your new employees starting.
6. Responding to concerns: You may have applicants wanting to delay the process altogether here’s some ways to combat that (here).
7. Building a Talent pipeline: Focus on building a large list of applicants for future openings. I wrote about building a passive talent pipeline (here).
During this slow down it’s important for recruiters to reflect on themselves. Try and focus on the positive and you will succeed in the long term. I wrote a piece about developing grit and perseverance during uncertain times – I strongly recommend reading that (here).
Recommend Reading:
How to Improve Your Communication Skills as a Recruiter
10 Note Taking Tools for Recruiters
SourceCon Roundtable Mike and Jonathan’s Recap
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