There’s no better time than the present to hone your TA skills and prepare for the moment that hiring resumes in full force. What exactly do I mean by that? Check out the recording of a webinar I recently participated in, TA Today, on the topic of up-skilling and re-skilling.
TA Today is a five-part series that brings together talent acquisition experts who share their ideas on how to emerge from the current economic downturn—stronger and better equipped than ever. Below, you’ll find a recording of the session, as well as key insights to keep in mind after viewing it.
Session 2: The time is now: Re-skilling and Up-skilling
Panelists
- Johnny Campbell, SocialTalent
- Sandi Lurie, Optimizely
- Brad Cook, Intuitive
- Jesse Ryan, High Road Human Capital
What we’re seeing
- The skills of the TA team change when you hit a crisis. Recruiters are taking on new skills such as virtual onboarding, video interviewing, and jobinars (job fair in a webinar).
- Having to find new ways to support candidate experience and new hire onboarding (i.e., virtual office tours, more frequent check-ins with hiring manager, bifurcating the onboarding process into different days).
- Organizations are preparing for the next three to six months by building up candidate pipeline, doing more strategic sourcing, and replacing systems.
What you can do right now
- Build up your best in class talent acquisition warehouse now so so you’re ready for when everything comes back online.
- Focus on business acumen that will benefit recruiters in their current role and for the rest of their career (pipeline, sourcing, talking about the company’s value prop to candidates).
- Try new candidate experience ideas:
- Virtual office tours to help candidates get a sense of the culture.
- Set up virtual happy hour – speed dating for recruiters, hiring managers and candidates to meet.
- Each TA member should get his/her ‘recruiting house’ in perfect working order by doing self introspection – slow down, take stock and address your gaps.
- Don’t accept the downtime, get on top of the skills your organization needs most help with now, and not necessarily just recruiting skills – get back into the business, show data, and why it’s important.
Advice from the panel
- Get the fundamentals right first, walk before you run.
- Focus on candidate nurture and attraction: being a good marketer makes you a good recruiter.
- Don’t forget about screening and closing skills: now that you have more time, make sure you screen each candidate and provide each candidate with closure. It will do wonders for employer branding.
- Use your data to identify where to focus. If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.
- Ask yourself: “If we add x% more or reduce by x% of this or that…Will what we do still work?”
- Stop presenting TA as a standalone business. Can you design the organization in a way to mobilize teams in a different way and at scale? What about using everyone in your org as a recruiter?
- Think about coming up with processes that supercharge what you want to do. In a couple weeks when the dust settles, TA is going to be the “most popular kid.” It just doesn’t feel like it at the moment.
Quotable session quote
“This is the time to perfect your skills before you go back to [the hiring] war.”