When is Hiring Season and How Can Recruiters Prepare for It?
Finding the right talent is a year-round challenge in recruitment, but some months are busier than others. Traditionally, December is when employees leave their current roles for better opportunities. For this reason, recruiters often gear up for the peak hiring month in January.
Talent acquisition teams like yours may have dubbed January “hiring season” since the new year tends to result in higher-than-usual competition. Here are some helpful strategies and tips that can empower your team in the competitive recruitment landscape.
When is hiring season?
The hiring season often starts in January, following December’s “resignation season.” As the year draws to a close, workers often reflect on their career goals, with many choosing to leave. This trend during the first few months of the year is when companies hire the most to fill gaps left by departing employees. Thanks to these patterns, recruiters can prep for the hiring season with some degree of certainty.
5 Tips to Prepare for Hiring Season
Your company doesn’t have to mindlessly navigate hiring seasons. The following tips can guide your organization through these challenging periods, improving your recruitment ability in the face of intense competition and uncertainty.
1. Build your talent acquisition team
A robust talent acquisition team is the cornerstone of a successful hiring season. Begin by assessing your current staff’s strengths and identifying the roles necessary to speed up recruitment. Whether it’s sourcing specialists, interviewers, or coordinators, each role plays a crucial part in the hiring journey.
EmployTest’s Pre-Employment Testing Planning Worksheet can help you build your talent acquisition team. It’s helpful for describing the responsibilities of your staff to cover the different steps of your recruitment process. Remember, a well-organized team is vital to successful recruitment, especially during the hiring season’s greater demands.
2. Optimize your hiring process timeline
Time is of the essence during peak hiring periods. Reflect on your last hiring period to determine how long it takes to receive applications, shortlist candidates for interviews, and extend job offers. These details can help you make efficient adjustments to shorten your time-to-hire.
To shorten your hiring timeline, identify bottlenecks and areas where you may streamline the process without compromising quality. For instance, consider doing remote sessions instead of requiring face-to-face interviews. Online setups have the seal of approval among 41% of hiring leaders, thanks to their inherent convenience.
An efficient hiring process ultimately positions your company ahead of the curve during competitive hiring periods. By optimizing your timeline, you’re not only filling roles quickly—you’re also securing the best candidates before your competitors do.
3. Review your talent pipeline
In the hiring rush, it’s easy to overlook the goldmine of your talent pipeline from previous recruitment cycles. Revisit past applicants who might not have been the best fit for previous positions, but may become valuable assets for your organization with the new openings. Tapping into this pool may expand your applicant base without starting recruitment from square one.
Ideally, if you create a database of past applicants’ contact information for easy retrieval, it significantly cuts the required time and effort to identify suitable candidates during fast-paced periods.
Lastly, don’t neglect internal recruitment. A junior team member with a broad skill set from one department might be the perfect candidate to fill a vacant position on the company’s management team.
4. Automate with recruitment tools
A sudden influx of applications is typical during peak hiring periods, especially when you offer multiple positions. Thankfully, improvements in recruitment technologies have emerged from the AI craze. These technologies help optimize each step of full-cycle recruiting, helping you save time and labor in the process.
For example, an applicant tracking system (ATS) can help you filter candidates who are best fit for the job. Then, you don’t have to spend much time manually sifting through paperwork.
As you gear up for the hiring season, having a well-oiled tech infrastructure makes a significant difference. So, don’t forget to maintain your systems as well. Renew your software licenses to avoid technical and legal issues down the line, and invest time and resources in training your staff to maximize these tools.
5. Prepare skills assessment tests
Resumes aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. A survey from ResumeLab reveals that 70% of workers lie on their resumes, indicating that these documents aren’t entirely reliable. Even worse, 80% admit to lying in job interviews.
How can you be sure of candidates’ abilities?
A simple solution is incorporating pre-employment skills assessment tests into your hiring process. They’re an effective way to gauge an applicant’s practical skills, giving your hiring team concrete data beyond someone’s resume.
Gear Up for Hiring Season
The hiring season doesn’t have to be stressful—all you need is adequate preparation. Take steps to build a solid, cohesive team and take measures that improve your hiring efficiency. Don’t shy away from leveraging technology and skills evaluations to make better-informed decisions about your recruitment practices.
Contact us at EmployTest as you prepare for the competitive hiring landscape. We offer numerous pre-employment assessment tests to optimize your hiring strategy and help you quickly confirm top talent.
Check out a free sample test today.