3 Tips to Hire Effectively with a Short-Handed Talent Team

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After more than a year of slowdowns, shutdowns, and general uncertainty, businesses everywhere have begun to shake off the rust and think about the positions they’ll need to fill in order to return to full operation. Job creation has skyrocketed, but recruiters are no longer seeing a mountain of resumes for every new job posting.

Instead, they’re hearing crickets.

Many companies have resorted to unusual measures to attract candidates, such as temporary wage bumps, signing bonuses, and even cash incentives just for interviewing. But these are short-term fixes, and they fail to address the reality of long-term staffing needs.

In our recent e-book, How to Hire Top Talent Quickly, we offer actionable tips and key insights to help any recruiting team that’s struggling to hire qualified candidates in the current labor market. We also explore five challenging scenarios facing today’s talent teams and provide real-life, actionable guidance to help navigate these unusual circumstances.

We’re also using the Jobvite blog to share our advice in a series of blog posts that provide a “game plan” for managing these scenarios. Check back often for advice that’s relevant to your hiring needs — or download the ebook now if you just can’t wait.

Today we’re covering the top tips to work effectively with a reduced recruiting team with our fourth recruiter, Morgan.

Hiring challenge: short-staffed talent acquisition team

Morgan is the recruiting manager for a mid-sized retail chain. The company is ready to start rebuilding its workforce of sales associates, department managers, buyers, and warehouse personnel. The problem is Morgan’s team was reduced to just a handful of recruiters during the pandemic and they’re struggling to manage the surge in hiring needs.

Talent acquisition leaders are expected to produce the best possible hiring outcomes, even when resources are stretched thin. Morgan uses Jobvite’s complete Talent Acquisition Suite to streamline hiring operations and free his team to focus on the talent — not the tasks.

Game plan for limited hiring resources

1. Automate candidate sourcing

The average recruiter spends as much as 30% of their time sourcing candidates. That’s just not feasible when you’re short-staffed and looking to hire at scale. With Jobvite’s AI-powered sourcing tool, talent teams can automatically tap into resume databases and job boards to build a wider, more diverse pool of talent.

AI-powered sourcing identifies the relevant skills and experience needed to excel at any job requisition and then searches the Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) database to find candidates who match those requirements. With more qualified candidates to choose from, you’ll be able to make better quality hires with less manual sourcing work.

“Jobvite’s technology has enabled us to reinvent the way we do recruitment. Not only has it streamlined and automated some of the most time-consuming tasks, it has also provided us with real insights that enable us to form a better recruitment strategy.”

— Terry Swann, Global Recruitment Manager, Brandwatch

2. Expedite the pre-screening process

Screening is time-consuming — which isn’t ideal for an understaffed team. It’s time to make the process more efficient. Textbots can automate screening, so the process continues even when recruiters are consumed with other tasks or even out of the office.

Using text interviews to screen candidates, you’ll be able to ask pre-selected questions and capture their responses instantly, allowing multiple conversations at once. When a candidate is qualified, the chat can be routed to a live recruiter to proceed with the next steps of the hiring process. And since these texts are integrated into your recruiting software, collecting the conversation data happens automatically within your system of record. This allows other interviewers and hiring managers to review those chats and weigh in based on the candidate’s screen.

3. Eliminate scheduling headaches

Interviews are a critical part of the hiring process but scheduling them can be a hassle — and scheduling delays can cause a drag on time-to-hire. While you’re trying to track down top candidates and coordinate schedules, they may already be meeting with your competitor.

Jobvite’s Smart Self-Scheduling lets you instantly send a set of proposed times based on interviewer availability and then automatically schedule the interview based on the candidate’s response. Scheduling changes or unexpected cancellations are communicated instantly so neither side is left hanging.

Let Jobvite help

Whatever hiring challenges you’re facing, having the right tools and technology in place will help you streamline workflows, increase operational efficiency, and improve the candidate experience. Jobvite empowers recruiters with solutions and services to find, engage, nurture, and hire top talent quickly. Visit jobvite.com and schedule a demo to learn how!

Other posts in this blog series cover topics like finding top talent for high-skill positions and managing “The Great Resignation” — so check back often! Or download How to Hire Top Talent Quickly for more advice to help you “hire right, when talent is tight.”