12 Ways to Make Hiring a Priority — Even When You’re Swamped
Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers!
Today’s Question: Your company is slammed with work — but you also need to make a hire or two to keep the team running at full capacity. What do you do to ensure hiring doesn’t get put on the back burner?
These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization composed of the world’s most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and have created tens of thousands of jobs.
1. Change How You Think About Hiring
Shift the lens through which you view hiring. Instead of considering hiring as one aspect of company operations, view it as a way of life. When working with external sources, meeting people at networking events, or even talking with competitors, always be thinking of where the talent is. — Matthew Podolsky, Florida Law Advisers, P.A.
2. Assign a Dedicated Hiring Lead
Make sure you have someone on staff dedicated to the task of hiring. That’s the key. If someone is focused on this work, that will ensure recruiting is always moving forward. — Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.
3. Schedule Time for Hiring Activities
Set aside X hours per week for recruiting and hiring. Hiring is and always will be essential for the long-term growth of your company, so it’s worth intentionally baking it into your schedule. — Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance
4. Set an Interview Goal Per Week
Set a goal to do X interviews per week and follow through to meet that goal. If you want to interview at least three people per week and you know you don’t have any candidates on the schedule for the upcoming week, you’ll find the time to make it happen. This only works if you’re a goal-oriented person, however. — Andy Karuza, LitPic
5. Leverage the Right Tech Tools
To stay on top of the hiring process, it helps to use the right tools. This is especially helpful if your company receives a lot of applications. Recruiting software can sift through resumes, send emails to candidates, post listings, and do much more. This ensures that you stay up to date on your candidates and choose the right one. — Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
6. Have Weekly Hiring Meetings
Hiring is arguably the most important responsibility of the CEO. Provided the CEO recognizes this, it should always be one of their top two or three priorities, regardless of whatever else may be happening with the business. To that end, if you’re a CEO, you should have a weekly hiring meeting — and give recruiters priority access to your calendar — to ensure those important hiring conversations always happen. — Colin Darretta, Innovation Department
7. Collaborate With the Other Managers
I suggest collaborating with other managers when time is tight and you need to hire more people. Turn the process into a group effort where each person handles a different part of the hiring and interview process. If everyone can take a couple of hours a week to do their role, you’ll have no problem keeping your business staffed. — John Turner, SeedProd LLC
8. Save Time With Referrals
We have an employee referral scheme that helps us find qualified candidates to work in our business. This is an important part of our hiring process because referrals already know about our brand and what to expect, making our job of explaining who we are easier. It also helps people settle into their new roles faster since they have connections within the business. — Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
9. Post the Job Internally
If your team is already spread thin, it will be spread even thinner if you don’t dedicate some time to hiring additional A players. A great way to find new talent is to share the job internally with your employees first. Team members and contractors may already have people in their networks who would be a great fit. — Brian David Crane, Caller Smart Inc.
10. Maintain a Good Candidate Database
Knowing that you have a solid database of candidates can help you stay on top of the hiring process, since you can very quickly search for candidates when you’re in need of a certain skill set. Having the information you need organized and available is key. — Blair Thomas, eMerchantBroker
11. Always Be Accepting Resumes
Have a way for people to send you their resumes even during times when you are not hiring. Our careers page tells candidates to email their resumes to our recruitment manager if they don’t see a current role that fits their skill set. This allows us to create a pipeline of talent over time so that when we do have a role open up, we can reach out to those who have shown interest. — Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.
12. Stay in Contact With Candidates
Consistenly follow up with your candidates and stay in regular contact. This will keep candidates engaged with your company and ready to make a move when a role opens up. If you cannot maintain regular contact with potential talent, then find ways to automate or outsource the process. — Duran Inci, Optimum7