The recruitment industry is always up for new challenges and opportunities be it the gig economy thriving or the great resignation phase or even the layoffs. Hiring freeze truly is the most unwanted time anyone from the recruitment industry wants.
Unfortunately, when a hiring freeze hits you and your company, it becomes a huge hurdle since many clients put a hold on recruiting new talent.
There can be several reasons why your clients have hit a zone of hiring freeze such as financial setbacks. unnecessary hirings, company scandal, or worldwide crisis (like covid; wars etc) which directly impacts the company’s business.
Startups that have raised funds in the past few months have been hiring crazily and hence the recruitment ecosystem is again up for a boost; especially the boutique recruitment agencies. But the survival of the fittest is something every recruitment agency had to look out for during the freeze.
You ought to remain a significant asset to your business throughout a hiring freeze. It is a continuous process and this is how you can sail through an unprecedented hiring freeze:
1. Sustain Client Relations
Take into account your expertise in the market and industry. You always had the ability to forecast what emerging patterns will impact your clients. Keep yourself in your clients’ minds by actively offering industry and trend information that might influence recruiting processes, choices, and demands.
Make informed forecasts about post-freeze results due to the knowledge you learned from past hiring freezes. Clients will appreciate these insights. They’ll understand your worth and recognize your concern for them. Supply previous data so customers may estimate how long it will take to restart the recruiting process. Provide your forecasts on the needs that top applicants could bring to the recruiting process after a long hiatus. Always keep clients informed about the challenges they see in the hiring process and how your company can assist them.
2. Maintain Candidate Relationships
Nurturing a positive recruitment relationship with applicants is crucial otherwise your customers’ rivals and other hiring firms will have an easier time attracting excellent individuals. If you don’t handle talks regarding your client’s recruitment process properly, though, relationship-building may appear useless to many prospects.
Maintain contact with applicants to discuss upcoming opportunities. A clear candid conversation avoids the possibility of them feeling led on and helps develop a sense of trust and transparency. Keep them talking about their job hunts, such as:
- Are you currently looking for a job switch?
- Are you more into permanent jobs or looking for gig projects?
- What would your job hunt objectives for the near future of under 12 months entail?
- Would you prefer to look for a job immediately or wait for the perfect opportunity?
Having an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is very advantageous that you and your clients may access when a position becomes available.
3. Become more Tech-savvy
Evaluating and modifying procedures might help you better understand how technology interacts with customers’ systems. Certain tools may just have performed effectively in the past when it came to sourcing and interviewing. If you see a dip in crucial metrics like applicant dropout rate, engagement ratings, or hire time rates, you’ll need to adjust how they’re deployed or abandon them entirely.
4. Open and Transparent Communication is key
Transparency is the most critical aspect to consider when it comes to keeping candidates motivated. This should be the case from the moment you contact prospects, whether it’s to advise them that their application has been rejected or to explain the recruiting process. Thanks to automation and email templates, this can be accomplished rapidly.
It’s also crucial to keep candidates updated on their status during the hiring process. Candidates want to know where they stand in the recruitment process. According to best practices, candidates in the midst of the process should be contacted once a week through email and every two weeks by phone. Maintaining a strong relationship with applicants when hiring resumes will place you in a far better position.
5. Keep up with hiring processes’ evolution
Post hiring freeze, some customers might require significant modifications to their hiring process. Upgrade your procedures so that you really can best assist clients with recruiting. Consider how developments in management or the loss of key personnel may impact their hiring. Apply the new knowledge to how you analyze prospects and take interviews.
Instead of concentrating just on ongoing postings as you revise questions, take the time to refine how you arrange interviews and your assessment process to successfully identify future potential candidates. Design structured questionnaires and screening questions that probe each candidate’s long-term professional ambitions and career advancement aspirations.
6. Establish Thought Leadership with the best content and insights
During this period, you cannot sit back and let competition sneak in on potential. Use video interviews to keep great prospects in front of your clients’ minds. Create repositories with all forms of content like video, tops, how to’s, ebooks, and blogs that will help clients keep up to date with hiring practices, share real-time tips and tricks for video interviews, remote hiring challenges and how to overcome them, and much more. Try to establish thought leadership with the content and get other leaders to come on board and share insights
A candidate story is an organised strategy for asking key questions about whether a company’s values, mission, or culture are a good fit for potential employees. Request that your clients assess the interviews so that you can quickly pull up the best candidates after the hiring freeze.
Recruiters should guarantee that their connections with customers and applicants remain strong and fostered through times of crisis by keeping communications and being prepared for when hiring freezes ease.
7. Collaborate with leading HR Tech Platforms and Recruiting Marketplaces
AI and machine learning (ML) innovations, as well as their continuous evolution, have ramped up the recruiting, onboarding, and other corporate processes.
Recruitment agencies as a unit now have to reassess how they operate, especially in the last two years, in order to keep workplace morale high and encouraging. Many recruitment tech businesses have used technological advances to reinvent everything from hiring to employee engagement, providing them with a push in their endeavours.
The skill gap has expanded due to recent changes in work dynamics and fast digitalization across industries. Companies are getting into a vicious loop of saturating various job sites and non-specialized conventional companies with ads. This results in a time-consuming hiring procedure, which has a substantial negative impact on the business.
Spottabl provides on-demand recruiting partners who supply vetted applicant leads for all job openings. The partners are significantly incentivized based on a profit-sharing plan after each shortlist and closing. This creates a self-sustaining flywheel, which is pushed even more by Spottabl’s AI-driven hiring lifecycle optimizations.
At Spottabl, we are Rewiring Hiring.
