Our crystal ball for predicting trends for the next year told us to check back later, so we asked our recruiting pros for tips on getting ready for another year of hiring. We talk a lot about hitting the ground running – here’s even more NOS to get your team going.
Figure out each department’s plans for hiring for the new year.
As each department sets their quarterly and/or yearly goals and quotas, use these business goals to set up a hiring forecast. Meeting these goals can be interdependent on who you hire, so be sure to prioritize which departments to hire for first, how many hires the company plans to make, and when you’d like to onboard them to figure out training schedules and materials. Keep in mind the candidate dropoff occurs because of the large gap of time between your first touch with a candidate and the extended offer date, among other reasons.
Prep plans for hiring setbacks.
Your schedule should have room for flexibility – as much as you can create a plan for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding, unexpected hurdles come from the candidate’s end come up and forgetting how to work around them can create issues that easily snowball. How does your team prep for abrupt resignations? Layoffs? If a new hire’s start date doesn’t time well with business goals, will the rest of the department be ready to take on the extra work in the meantime? If your company is limited on resources, communicate to the team from the start there could be a chance they’ll have to bootstrap to make up for drawbacks. Identifying what’s historically been your best source of hires can also help shave off weight from your time-to-hire.
Take a look at industry events happening throughout the year.
In addition to planning on who you want to hire and when you want to hire them, factor in conferences, meetups, hackathons, talks, and other happenings into your hiring calendar. Getting these events on your calendar can help your team prep for more niche market recruiting – including who to approach, how to approach them, how to time outreach, which members of your team to send. Remember to factor in spring and winter college recruiting – planning for job fairs, building your internship programs, and interviewing candidates in tune with a post-graduation start date.
Set aside time to research new sourcing, recruiting, and hiring tools.
Hiring teams get their budget for the following year sometime during the closing quarter. Bear a close eye to emerging tools throughout the year and keep a list of the ones you want to propose budget for at the end of the year. Take advantage of trials, product demos, and consider setting dates for you and the team to select the most useful tools and to get acquainted with them.
This post is a complement to our previous post, “6 End-of-Year Techniques to Build Your Talent Funnel,” but so is the rest of our blog. (Tell us you didn’t see that coming.) Get a hold of our latest recruiting and hiring tips, and get to subscribin’! Before you sign off for the holiday season, save your seat for the last event in our webinar series covering three lesser-known networks for finding tech talent!
