As I write this post, my team is knee-deep in the holiday hiring surge. Our retail and hospitality clients are beefing up their workforces to keep pace with increased demand that will last through the new year. We’re headquartered in Florida, so for many of our clients, it’s also the beginning of peak tourism season, which means double the demand. It’s a busy time for recruiters, and without a strategic plan, it’s easy to get crushed in an avalanche of requisitions.
A hiring surge calls for greater attention to both efficiency and quality. As the volume of applications grows, you need to be efficient in order to keep up with them and screen enough qualified people. As hiring needs become more urgent, quality is even more important than usual since a drop in performance could put the entire operation at risk.
And there’s another factor at play that makes increases in demand challenging: competition. If your organization suddenly needs to hire more people, chances are your competitors do, too. This means higher stakes for landing the best workers, so your candidate experience and job offers need to be on point.
There’s a lot to consider, and tighter-than-usual time constraints can add a layer of stress that contributes to mistakes. To recruit the labor you need without compromising on quality, take a step back, pause, and review these strategies to navigate a hiring surge successfully.
What Causes Hiring Surges?
Seasonality
Holiday hiring, as I mentioned above, is one such example. Seasonality can also be defined by the seasons of the year, like ski season at a mountain resort or summer in a beach town. Or, it can be aligned with the market, like when law firms ramp up hiring of new grads right after the bar exam results come out.
Planned expansions
In a best-case scenario, you know growth is coming and can plan for it accordingly. A good example is a hotel client of ours that is adding new locations; we’ve known that they would need more people for their expansion since they started construction and have had many months to lay the groundwork for the accelerated hiring. Other examples would be launching a new product requiring additional sales staff or an added software feature that could increase technical support requirements.
Sudden growth
Sometimes, a hiring need develops quickly and is harder to plan for. This can occur if a firm wins a large new client or experiences a surge in demand due to a shifting market trend. Once, a client of ours had a product featured on a prominent shopping guide, and sales of that product spiked overnight. We responded immediately to fill multiple new fulfillment and customer support openings to meet the demand, none of which the company could have anticipated only a few months prior.
Increased budgets
Startups commonly experience an increase in hiring when they receive new funding. More established companies typically accelerate staffing in January and February, when they have been allocated their yearly recruiting budgets.
Even if you’re in a stable industry without a lot of seasonality, don’t assume that these increases can’t happen to you. COVID was the perfect example of an unexpected and immediate change that required countless companies to multiply or shift their workforces swiftly. Those who were prepared could adapt quickly, while those without a plan suffered or even closed up shop. It pays to be prepared so that if you’re hit by the sudden need to expand your workforce, you can shift into rapid hiring mode and respond effectively.
Strategies to Handle a Staffing Increase Without Sacrificing Quality
1. Tap into your talent pipeline
The best and most efficient way to meet increased demands without compromising on quality is to use a talent pipeline approach. Here, you maintain an engaged pool of skilled candidates who are ready to fill open positions as they occur.
Your pipeline consists of candidates you’ve actively sourced and screened and people who have applied to other openings or previously employed with or referred to your organization. Since these individuals are already familiar with your employer brand, you’re several steps ahead of the game when it comes time to approach them with a job opportunity.
Here’s the thing about pipelining: you must start it before you need it. It requires keeping in touch with high-potential candidates even when you don’t have openings to fill. My best advice is to start today by using an applicant tracking system (ATS) to begin maintaining and actively nurturing relationships with qualified talent.
Here are two posts that will help you get started:
- How to Build a Talent Pipeline
- Pro Tips for Choosing the Best Applicant Tracking System for Your Business
2. Leverage AI-powered resume screening
A hiring surge can mean an influx of hundreds or even thousands of applications simultaneously, which can overwhelm even the most experienced teams. Instead of manually sifting through resumes, AI-powered resume screening tools can boost your recruiters’ efficiency while still providing high-quality candidates.
AI resume screening tools use a combination of user inputs, algorithms, and machine learning to automatically scan and rank applicants’ resumes based on key criteria. In addition to helping you eliminate candidates who do not meet the minimum qualifications, AI tools can reduce unconscious bias and stress-based decision-making, promoting greater accuracy.
Automating the screening process gives your team more time to focus on interviews and culture fit assessments, which are the real high-value tasks for recruiters
3. Conduct pre-hire assessments
Pre-hire assessments are another way to evaluate candidates’ suitability beyond their resumes while taking work off human recruiters. My team utilizes a wide range of pre-hire assessments depending on our clients’ needs, including skills tests, cognitive performance tests, personality assessments, and situational judgment tests. These help us verify that a candidate has the right technical and soft skills as well as the personality traits required to succeed.
But pre-hire assessments aren’t just limited to skills. They can also help you connect candidates with the most relevant roles to their capabilities, interests, and backgrounds. Once again, this takes manual work off a recruiters’ plate.
Let’s say you have 100 people in your talent pipeline who are qualified in various ways for different job functions. Instead of a recruiter manually reviewing their credentials and determining which position to invite them to apply for, you could distribute an assessment allowing the candidates to answer questions and be automatically matched with best-fitting roles.
4. Automate candidate communications
Surges mean dealing with a larger volume of candidates, and all those messages you’ve been sending manually suddenly become impractical. Managing candidate communications individually can result in delayed or inconsistent communication during high-activity hiring periods. This is another aspect of how an ATS can be a lifesaver.
Automating candidate communications allows you to acknowledge applications instantly, prompt candidates to submit missing information, schedule interviews, send status updates, and more. Maintaining regular candidate communications makes candidates feel valued. Plus, it makes it easier to engage across channels, including text and social media, which can help you accelerate the hiring process.
5. Use hard data in your hiring
As with all things in business, data can help your team make informed decisions. One of the things 4 Corner specializes in is helping clients use data from previous hiring cycles to identify patterns, predict when surges in demand are likely to occur, and focus on top-performing hiring strategies. For example, by identifying the sourcing channels that are most likely to lead to a hire, we can lean on those channels more heavily during periods of increased hiring activity.
In addition to helping you anticipate hiring needs in advance, predictive analytics can forecast which candidates are most likely to succeed in your organization. This data can guide your decisions from sourcing to a final hire. Making informed hiring decisions isn’t always easy when the pressure is on. Looking at the data forces us to take an analytical view, which promotes better-quality hires.
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Speak to one of our recruiting experts today.
6. Embrace alternative candidates
It’s easy to get tunnel vision and focus solely on candidates who look like your “typical hire” or who check every single box in your list of requirements. But when you have greater need, it is precisely the time to broaden your search to include nontraditional candidates, like people with transferable skills, less experienced candidates, and temporary workers.
Sometimes, the most valuable employees come from the most unexpected places. Last holiday season, we worked with a client who needed to hire several desktop support positions. They typically had stringent requirements and only wanted people with an established IT background and certain certifications. After a rough start, we convinced them to open up their search to new graduates from the nearby university. The role was ideal for someone driven and wanting to advance in the IT field. They ended up hiring several young professionals they loved and even paid for them to get the requested certifications. One of those candidates is now the help desk manager. That’s what I mean by broadening your candidate pool beyond what you’re used to.
In addition to helping you respond to hiring surges quickly, alternative candidates can bring fresh perspectives and adaptability that contribute to stronger teams.
7. Supplement in-house recruiting staff
Even if you’re doing everything right–using a talent pipeline, maintaining consistent candidate communications, and so on–an increase in demand can overwhelm your internal HR team. Overworking this staff can lead to rushed decisions and hiring mistakes.
One of the best ways to weather busier-than-normal hiring periods is to supplement your in-house team with external support. This could include a temporary staffing agency or a search firm specializing in your field.
4 Corner Resources helps hundreds of companies fill positions fast while maintaining strict quality standards. We can assist with sourcing candidates, conducting interviews, maintaining candidate databases, and crafting compelling offers, enabling you to meet demand and maintain consistent operations during a hiring surge.
Are you new to working with a staffing partner? Do you only need short-term support? We’ve been there and have helped other clients like you. Contact us today to discuss your goals and find a recruiting solution that fits your needs.
