It’s A New Year, Don’t Waste A Prime Recruiting Opportunity

It’s the beginning of a New Year, and this is the time when many people make resolutions and set goals. Usually, these resolutions or goals have something to do with their current job. For some it may be to work towards a promotion, and for others it may be to start fresh and get a new job. For recruiters, this is prime hunting season for new talent! Below are some ideas on how to seize the moment.

Don’t Procrastinate: Many of us have just gotten back from the holidays. The holidays are a great time to clear your head and get ready for the new year. In reality what ends up happening is that many people come back to work and they are in a post-holiday haze. You come in to work and sit at your desk trying to figure out where you left off and where you need to start. For many people, this can be an overwhelming task. The best thing to do is to prioritize your desk as quickly as possible and get down to work. The temptation is to take the first couple of weeks to get settled in before aggressively going after new candidates. Don’t let other recruiters get a jump on the best candidates!

Meet With Your Hiring Managers: A great way to get focused on recruiting again is to meet with your hiring managers. I am sure most of you meet with your hiring managers regularly, but this is great time to map out the year as far as recruiting is concerned. Find out how many open positions each hiring manager has budgeted for the upcoming year and what quarter they are slated to be filled. This will give you the opportunity to map out your workload for the year. Also, by meeting with your hiring managers it will show them that you are focused and ready to start recruiting as soon as they are ready. You can also use this meeting to educate your managers on how critical it is to start recruiting now as opposed to a month from now, if they have current or upcoming openings. They might not realize that many job seekers are out looking now and if they wait too long, they may miss out on some of the better candidates.
Make a Plan: Once you have met with all of your hiring managers, you should have a much clearer picture of what their hiring expectations are for the upcoming year. Take some time to map out your recruiting strategy for the entire year. This will help you avoid wasting valuable time by allowing you to identify the immediate needs for the first and second quarters. If you were to look over the recruiting needs for the entire year for all of your hiring managers, you would become quickly overwhelmed. Break down your hiring by each quarter so you can determine what times of the year will be more hectic than others. This type of analysis will allow you to allocate resources (e.g. advertising, Internet sourcing, job postings, etc.) to the busier times of the year.
Use Your Systems: Now is the time to make sure that you are using your applicant tracking system to the fullest extent. Many of the applicant tracking systems today will help you automate your recruiting process, but many recruiters don’t take the time to learn about all of the features that these systems offer. By taking advantage of all of the features like resume agents or automated multiple job postings you will be able to save valuable time.

As you can see, NOW is the time to hit the ground running and start the new year off with a full head of steam. It is easy to get distracted this time of year because new budgets are in place however, if you follow some of the suggestions listed above you should get out of the gate fast which will set you up for a successful year of recruiting. <*SPONSORMESSAGE*>