Are You Ready for the Hiring Bounce Back?

We don’t normally take (or even consider) HR advice from Michael Scott, but when we do, it’s because the turntables have… well, turned. 

With over 26 million Americans filing for unemployment in the past five weeks, the tables have turned and the ‘war for talent’ is on pause. Quality candidates have been furloughed and laid-off across the nation, leaving them in search of new positions, new careers, and new opportunities. The result: a large pool of high-quality talent. 

As our nation prepares to reopen and companies bounce back, talented individuals are now on the hunt for their next job opportunity. Due to the current situation, many of them are likely to take the first job they are offered, which means reducing your time to hire is more important than ever if you want to secure high-quality candidates. Here are our three tips on ensuring your hiring strategy is ready for the hiring bounce back. 

Communicate Your Hiring Strategy With Your Teams

We don’t have to tell you—these are uncertain times. In times like these, communication has to come first and it has to come early. Now is the time to make sure your hiring team is on board with your organization’s hiring needs, procedures, and capabilities. Have open and honest communication about your current approach to recruiting, hiring, and onboarding candidates and be open to making adjustments. Make any adjustments now so you can act quickly as the nation reopens. 

And hey, if your hiring team is a team of one, that’s okay! Communicate honestly with the rest of the leaders in your organization to make sure they’re on your team too. Consider:

• Sharing your hiring process strategy, including interview objectives and tools
• Understanding what their needs are
• Offering areas where they can step in and get involved 
• Asking them for feedback

When you’re transparent and aligned with the rest of your team now, you can better avoid time-consuming confusion or concerns later. 

Re-evaluate Your Vendors

If you’re one of the organizations that is currently experiencing a hiring freeze, you may want to consider using this time to re-evaluate your current hiring tools. Are you getting everything you want out of your ATS? Is your onboarding solution ready for the new reality of completely remote onboarding? Are your background check turnaround times fast enough?

Ask yourself this: Are my HR solution providers helping my organization prepare to bounce back after the COVID-19 pandemic? If the answer is “no” or “I’m not sure”, you may want to take this time to re-evaluate. Consider completing a vendor evaluation. A vendor evaluation gives you the opportunity to objectively evaluate your solutions and their effect on your hiring strategy. It also opens the door for you to explore other vendors and solution options. Once again, now is the time to make adjustments and ensure you have a provider that supports your hiring strategy’s need for speed. 

We can help! Access our free background screening vendor evaluation here and complete it on your own!

Include Texting in Your Hiring Strategy

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: texting is key to reducing your time to hire. Instead of playing phone tag or sending email after email, consider implementing texting in your hiring strategy. Incorporating texting into your hiring process can improve your time to hire by:

• Offering a convenient way to respond. Text messages reach your candidate wherever they may be, encouraging timely responses. In fact, while a candidate takes roughly 90 minutes to respond to an email, a text message generally generates a response in just 90 seconds.

• Establishing better open rates. It turns out, candidates are way better at texting than they are at opening and responding to emails. So much so, that the average open rate of a text message is about 99%, with 97% being read within 15 minutes of delivery. Email, you may ask, has a 28-33% open rate. Dun-dun-dunnnn... 
• Making the hiring process easy. About 90% of job seekers said that getting texts during the hiring process would be more beneficial to them, and what do you get when a candidate has an easier application process? A reduced time to hire and a new employee!

Quick Tip: Verified First’s texting feature is now available for all Verified First clients with no extra charge! Learn more about this feature here.  

Looking Forward

At the end of the day, these are some of our top tips. And while we can’t foresee the future, we can help keep you informed, encouraged, and prepared. We believe that our nation will bounce back, but we want to make sure your hiring process is bouncing back too. Please consider taking advantage of our screening vendor evaluation. If you have any questions, we’re always right here for you!