New Year! New Me! New Strategy! …isn’t that how it’s supposed to be.
Without a doubt, January is one of the best months for recruiting. If you don’t have a solid plan your #MondayBlues will start hitting you and will make you tense. A large pool of new active candidates would be coming onto the market and you would love to take advantage of this opportunity. You surely don’t want to enter the office without a plan, rather you want to walk in January raring and ready to recruit.
The pointers below summarize what we are going to talk about in this article. If this looks interesting, scroll further as we go in-depth with these topics:
-
Avoiding panic hiring.
-
Preparing marketing campaigns.
-
Filtering out old data.
-
Setting strategies that make sense.
As well as a couple of additional points. Let’s get started!
1. Panic Hiring - A Big No-No
Making a wrong hiring decision can affect your agency gravely. So make sure to take time and find the most valuable candidates for your clients. On the other hand, you do not want to rush the process and indulge in panic-hiring. Don’t let competitive spirit come in the middle of the recruitment process, be smart and careful while hiring because a happy customer leads to a good business and an unhappy customer leads to damage in loyalty as well as business. Hence, don’t rush and be patient, rest assured it’s not the end of the world.
2. Preparing marketing campaigns
A good marketing campaign can help gain traction but the best marketing campaign can help gain candidates. Going into the year with a couple of eye-catching marketing campaigns can certainly work wonders for your firm.
Because marketing campaigns have gotten extremely popular in the recruiting industry, everyone is using MailChimp or other marketing-focused email software. While that is great, a lot of recruitment agencies do not need that much legroom to work with. That is why, we, at Recruitly, have built marketing tools within to fulfil the needs of recruiting agencies.
3. Filter out old data
To excel in recruiting, your data needs to be the best. By data, I mean the candidates that you currently have in your database. At the end of every year or the beginning of the new year, teams should conduct a filtering process to churn out all the candidates that we haven’t interacted with and the ones that haven’t given us their GDPR consent. It’s typically a good idea to do this filtering process semi-annually but even then, clearing your data in January can seem like a fresh start to welcome more candidates and keep the data new.
The newer the sourced data is the more chances of you placing those candidates can become. A lot of recruiting firms have moved on from using excel to a more robust CRM software to help them store their data. If you haven’t made the switch yet, consider recruitly.io, the fastest CRM software for recruiting agencies. Just like Recruitly, a lot of CRM software companies offer users the ability to filter candidates out based on activity, GDPR consent authentication, etc. With the help of those filters, you can weed out all the candidates that haven’t responded in months or given you their GDPR consent. This can help you focus on the candidates that are new, active and are actively looking for a job.
4. Setting a strategy that makes sense
We all have new year resolutions that we do not fulfil. The same applies to setting goals and creating strategies as well. A lot of recruitment firms create certain strategies that they swear by at the beginning of the year and tell themselves that they will follow those strategies for the rest of the year and by the time it’s March, everyone is barely covering what they currently have on their plate. The most efficient way to follow strategies is to set semi-annual, quarterly and monthly goals. That way, everyone knows their targets for the current month and the months ahead.
There is no point in setting unrealistic goals that you know nobody is going to achieve. Goals are supposed to be achievable and they can act as a motivation for your employees when things aren’t quite working out. Also, make sure to restructure those goals/targets every quarter to reflect the current performance of your recruiters individually. Restructuring the goals/targets can also be a great way to be given a second chance. Restructuring can also help recruiters during an “off-season”.
Other key points to consider:
-
Letting your winners run:
As someone who has an active interest in stock markets, the most important thing in trading is letting your winners run and cutting your losses. What this means is to focus on the clients that have already given you a lot of business and cut the ones which are just not worth your time and resources. January is an appropriate time to set new client goals for the year, too. While a recruiting firm might prefer all the clients to come their way, it is simply not healthy or sustainable for a firm to have all types of clients. One demanding client can outdo all the hard work put in by your recruiters trying to source candidates for them. -
Maximise your recruitment software program.
Are you and your recruiters optimizing the recruitment CRM software to its full extent? Using a good software program could make a huge difference to recruiters’ numbers. So if you are using a software program that’s slowing you down within the present-day marketplace, you’ll be dropping out on placements that your competition are reaping.
