The other day I was driving down the street and I saw a national pizza shop chain offering iPhones to new hires. I’ve seen signs in windows offering $500 to new hires. I was in a meeting with my boss talking about his niece who was considering signing a contract as a nurse for unlimited hours because the pay was too good to refuse. Everywhere you look—there’s a shortage of candidates and hires. What’s the best offering to get them in your pipeline?
This past year has been weird. Back in March of 2020, hiring slowed way down, and we lost a lot of colleagues because none of us knew what was next. How could anybody accurately predict how the economy would react in the short or long term in light of everything? A year and some months later, and we’ve flipped to clamoring for candidates to staff back up as quickly as possible—and truth be told, it is proving hard to find enough!
As a recruiter, you are always on the hunt for new ways to engage and attract candidates to work for your organization and attracting talent has always been challenging. Finding talent after the unexpected events of 2020? Well, that’s been extra daunting, hasn’t it? But you’re a seasoned professional! You know that this is a journey, not a destination. Adding extra layers of safety measures to your hiring process was just the first step. As you wait for the world to open up, you need to keep the momentum going. As you maneuver yourself out of the woods and further into 2021 how can you think outside of the box when it comes to engaging with candidates?
Just because 2020 is over doesn’t mean that the search for the essential worker is over. So long as people are waiting for their vaccine, and ordering groceries online, and driving through testing centers, we’re still going to need to focus on continuing our hiring of those that kept us going through 2020, the brave, the courageous, the essential worker.
For those tasked with hiring essential workers – we have to think about all aspects of the hire, from where we find them, who we target, how we message them, when we can onboard, and what we do to keep them engaged.
What happens when our employer brand doesn’t match up with our candidate experience?
We enter the New Year with new goals, new perspectives, new year, new me. One thing that doesn’t need to be revamped is our top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We can apply new programs and we can revitalize a lot within our organization to attract new candidates in 2021, but ways in which we measure our success will just need a renewed focus so we can observe our progress.
