As the holiday season approaches, recruiters and sourcers may experience a slowdown in activity. This is a common occurrence during the holidays as applicants tend to focus on preparing for the break and may not have extra time for calls. Additionally, with the end of the year approaching, many applicants may be waiting for bonuses. As a result, the recruiting field typically sees a slower pace during the months of November through February. To make the most of this downtime, I have compiled a list of activities that can be done during this period.
1. Building a Pipeline
Sourcing involves a lot of time with searching. The majority of my day is spent reaching out to passive leads by building out different pipelines you are “proactively” building out a list of applicants to contact. These lists can be either people that you’ve previously connected with or will connect with in the future. The more you can build a name-gen list the better you will be when the position is active. I’ve written a post about proactively building pipelines (here).
2. Building a Content Schedule for FY19
Say you are in charge of building out your own social media channels content. You can pre-build out content for the next year. There are many different types of scheduling apps like Hootsuite or Sprout Social that do a great plan of scheduling out posts. Focus on your target demographic i.e. diversity, women in tech, veterans, or niche skills sets and write content that relates to these core areas. Try connecting with your marketing department to get more inspiration. They might have content that you can use that relates to corporate life at your company. Still stuck? For more inspiration, check out my post about creating content during the holiday weeks (here).
3. Building Talent Maps
Talent mapping is the process of pulling job market data in your niche locations. You can figure out which companies are hiring, what colleges/universities are in the area, average comp ranges, and general population data. By taking all these data into consideration you are figuring out the level of difficulty and competition you will have on your future reqs. It’s also good to present this data to your hiring managers. You will be able to paint a more realistic picture of what’s going in your local job market. You can learn more about talent mapping (here).
4. Pulling your own ATS data
With the end of the year approaching fast it’s a great time to start looking at your last 12 months. Depending on your ATS you should work with your HRIS team to help pull all your hiring analytics. You can then figure out which departments were hiring, what types of skills did you hire for, what companies did you recruit from, & what locations filled the most reqs etc. Overall, there’s a ton of data sitting in your ATS whether you realize it or not. It’s highly valuable for creating goals and predicting future hiring trends.
5. Working on your Sourcing Process
Have you ever wrote out your entire sourcing process from start to finish on a whiteboard? This summer my team did a mind map of our entire recruiting process including sourcing. It really helped to improve our process strategy. At the time our manager was fairly new to the company and he didn’t fully understand my sourcing role. By, putting everything on a whiteboard we improved our process flow as well as communicated our strategy. Overall, it was a huge success. You can learn more about continuous improvement and improving your process (here).
When you’re approaching a slow week you should be thinking about all the projects you could be filling with your extra time. I know it’s easy to just coast through these types of weeks. Being the only Talent Sourcer at my company has its many challenges and having extra time rarely happens. So, when you do have some extra time I strongly recommend working on these above suggestions.
Recommended Reading:
How to Prepare for a Recruiter Job Interview
Amy Miller Interview Spotlight
Top Diversity Recruiting Tools to Find Talent
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