Times like these present us once in a generation opportunity to re-think what we are doing and overhaul and re-engineer various aspects of the business to enable us work smarter and faster.
COVID has revolutionised hiring and among many other benefits (only from recruitment perspective) hiring timelines have greatly reduced. Majority of the businesses are willing to continue with the current model and retain remote hiring even after COVID due to overall efficiency. One no longer need to get the board into one room to interview a candidate! Everyone can just Zoom in from anywhere yet achieve the same goal.
Recruiters can make this downtime amazingly productive by adopting a number of the strategies and prepare your business for the inevitable primetime.
Here is a list of items that we think will help improve your brand and speed up recruitment processes:
Re-think your website:
Website of any brand or individual is the most important thing in this era of digital marketing. Because of this downtime, everyone has time to spend on internet. Not only the clients but also the people seeking jobs will see the website of your brand. Website of any brand should be user friendly, so that if any potential candidate reaches to your website, he/she may get detailed information as far as your company or jobs are concerned. The architecture of the website should be simple and self-explanatory. Recruiters have time during this downtime to lift their websites up. Recruitly offers amazing WordPress and Elementor plugins to also convert your website into a fully featured job-board, you can talk to to our team on LiveChat to discuss how we can help with uplifting your website.
Plan or invest in SEO:
It is extremely important to build the website but just building the website is not enough. You need to attract the target audience to your website as well. Make this downtime an opportunity and work on the visibility of your website in top research results. Put some effort and spend time on your website to make sure whenever someone searches your website, search engine shows it on top. Best way to do that is to focus on the keywords. It takes time to work on keywords. Take this downtime as a blessing to work on this area to get good results.
Re-work your job descriptions:
Job description is the most important aspect of recruitment. The job description you write should be comprehensive and detailed enough to help the people realise if they qualify for the post or not. Job title, day to day tasks of the employees and both hard and soft skills which are needed for a specific job should be summarised in job description. So, you can design best job description during this difficult time. Not only the tasks but you should always explain in detail how to accomplish those tasks. It will make it easier to instruct your new employees. You can always refer to them job description.
Create chatbots for feedback:
Since everyone has time to get information from internet. So, you need to be efficient to answer the questions asked by the candidates or even by the laymen. For this purpose, you can integrate chatbots with your website as well as with the other social media platforms. These chatbots will save your time that you can utilise in some other constructive activity. These chatbots can answer similar questions easily. You can also design welcome message by using these chatbots to welcome your potential clients or going to be employees.
Implement a social recruiting strategy:
This is extremely important to choose the right social media platform to develop relationship with the potential candidate. You can specifically focus on LinkedIn. Learn to use both its advanced search and filtering options to get the in touch with the potential candidates. Apart from LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter and Instagram can also be used for the same purpose. You can take advantage of this time and make your presence on every platform of social media. Make sure your business accounts are updated on daily basis. You should provide every detail regarding your company like Phone number, address, events, achievements, goals and photos on every platform of social media.
Content for applicants:
Spend some time to design FAQ page for your website to answer all the important queries about the work and your company. You can also create videos on the mission of your company. Provide all the details about the charity activities, news, environment and work of your company. You have all the time to work on these two things to make your recruitment system clear.
Hire freelancers:
You can work on the strategy to hire freelancers instead of full-time employees. Because sometimes your company needs someone to fulfil the task immediately but hiring takes some time. In such situations it would be the best decision to hire part timers, freelancers or contractors for a specific project. This idea is cost effective alternate. And if you like the work of those freelancers, you can always turn them into full time employees. Spend time to explore and understand how freelancers are hired on different platforms. This would increase the potential work force of your business.
Work on passive candidates:
Passive candidates are the employees who are not willing to change their jobs. Because you have plenty of time during this downtime, you should make use of this time. Work on the passive candidates. It is definitely not easy to get passive candidates but is not impossible. Keep sending them relevant content which can change their minds. It will start building a relationship between you and them. You need a Recruitment CRM to organise your candidates, and we offer various subscription plans with a basic plan costing you just $1 a day.
Develop a mobile friendly recruitment process:
Mobile is necessity now. Everyone uses mobile now a days. Especially the people who are looking for some jobs, they keep checking different sites to look for the job of their choice. You can set up a mobile friendly recruitment procedure and launch it online. Make sure your website is fast and runs smoothly on every device and specifically on mobile. Make sure the call to action button works on your website and keep the procedure of application easy.
Work on your branding:
Everyone knows recruitment is the most difficult job as compared to other jobs. If one wants to stand out among others, make sure one has placed a powerful online message to let your clients and employees know when the business is going back to normal. In the meantime, you must work on your branding style guide, select the strategies that you see would work the best for your business. Create marketing templates to be used in future.
Introduced new tools:
You can apply all those new technologies that you always wanted to apply into your business. Now is the time to test them and if you find them suitable, apply them. A number of software are available in the market to meet all your needs. Select the one that suits your business. You can use Zoom for meetings, what’s app group for important announcements, email for important instructions, social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to promote your business.
Design SOPs:
You can utilise this downtime to design SOPs. Work on them in detail. Describe all the tasks step by step and explain how important these tasks or projects are to your business. This is the right time to think over the recruitment system if you can make it better. Bring amendments in every step of recruitment if needed. You can also design a Playbook of all the SOPs to make it easier to understand everything you want the employees to understand. You can simply refer to the playbook if any employee is uncertain about different tasks.
Clean your database up:
Time like these are always a good opportunity to look into the database of the company. Clean your database to be ready to start working when the market is opened next time. It is always productive to keep your database clean. You can also spend time to get to know about the best candidates you have through database.
To sum up, it is extremely important to stay focused and positive during downtimes. Only then you will be able to work efficiently with right mind set.
Equip yourself with every possible tool to lift your business. You should be active during this downtime as far as recruitment is concerned as it will be the first industry to BOOM after the COVID.
About the Author
Dilnasheen Hannan is a professional freelance writer. She provides ghost writing, article writing and copywriting services. Her educational background in English Literature has given her a broad base from which to approach many topics. For more information, kindly contact https://www.linkedin.com/in/dilhannan/
