The most common approach to recruiting - especially for small and medium-sized businesses - is really short-term; a “shotgun strategy” whereby a company realizes it needs to fill a position and races around to do it as quickly as possible. Of course, in too many cases, they needed to hire that person a few months ago, and only pulled the triggered on tackling the problem when it became dreadfully obvious.
Companies can’t ignore short-term recruitment strategies - for example, posting on job boards with a 30-45 day window to drive job seeker attention and flow.
But a longer-term view of recruitment is going to be more effective.
Jason Buss talks about optimizing your 2009 recruitment budget and has some great ideas. But I think it’s also time - given the economic slowdown and uncertainty - to optimize your recruitment strategy.
Fewer companies are hiring in the short-term. That’s a given. And more questions are being asked about whether or not a company really, really, really needs to hire someone today or can it wait a little while longer? Those are valid concerns and questions. But very few companies stop hiring forever. And too few companies are prepared, during a hiring slowdown, to think long-term.
The two most common forms of recruitment are job boards and recruiters. They’re also “shotgun” strategies, used to fill positions as quickly as possible and then they return no future value. The next time you have to hire people, you have to start from scratch.
Budgets will shrink over the next little while for these types of recruitment strategies. But I think HR and employers will look longer term at how they can build up increasing value over time. They may not want to spend a ton upfront on job board postings and recruiter fees, but if a company ignores HR completely at this stage in the game they’re missing out. Now is precisely the time to look at long term opportunities, re-jigging HR spending and how you can gain more control and power over your recruitment strategies and recruitment marketing.
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