How can Talent Acquisition create value when hiring is slow?

Grow your relationships

The best talent acquisition professionals understand how their work fits into the businesses they support. However, recruiters and other TA professionals don’t always have time to meet with hiring managers outside of filling requests. A lull in hiring is a great time to build your relationships with the business. Connect with leaders, learn more about their work, understand their goals, and get to know them. Set up informational conversations where you come prepared with questions to better understand the work they do. Most business leaders would be thrilled to sit down with the teams that support their business and help them better understand all the nuances of what they do. 

Get proactive

When a company isn’t rushing to fill roles- talent acquisition has a unique opportunity to source and connect with high value talent before there is an active need. If you’re reaching out to candidates for the first time when you’re trying to hire them, you’re already behind. A lull in demand is a great time for you to anticipate future needs and map out the talent pool beforehand. You can host events, informal chats, build pipelines, research key locations, and more. Once hiring picks back up, you’ll be well prepared to hit the ground running.

Revisit your processes

Are your organization’s hiring processes serving you? Is it costing good talent? A lull in demand is a good time to reevaluate your hiring process. Where is the biggest candidate drop off happening? Who or what is responsible for the first round of rejections? How many interviews do candidates go through? Are there tests and assessments? How do job descriptions get created? Where does a search begin once a job has been opened? Is each step of this process serving your overall goals? If there are parts of the hiring process that don’t have a defined formal process, make one. Slowdowns are a good time to reevaluate what is serving you and what needs to be updated or formalized.

Build your employer brand

Talent acquisition professionals understand the importance of having a strong employer brand. Candidates are more discerning than ever about what kinds of companies they work for. During a slowdown in hiring, you can take time to build your brand. Go through your company website, careers page, job board profiles and social media. Is everything on there reflective of how you represent your employer brand? Find out who is responsible for maintaining this content and offer to help refresh it. In TA, you get a unique insight into what candidates care about and what values resonate with them. A slow down in hiring is a great time to share that perspective.

Benchmark and labor research

Downtime is also a great opportunity to start benchmarking and collecting labor research and data points to present to your business leaders. Become a thought leader in your organization. What kinds of roles is your organization investing in? What profiles of people do your closest competitors hire into those positions? Who are your competitors hiring? What skill sets are they growing in? 

A slowdown in hiring can feel eerie for usually busy recruitment teams but there are so many other ways that talent acquisition can deliver value and help the business move forward.