November and December can be traditionally slow times for hiring. But recruiting needs can shoot off like a cannon in January. This fact suggests that your recruiting team should continue sourcing candidates during the holiday season instead of holding back. We have three ways you can continue recruiting this holiday season, building a robust pipeline of candidates so you will be ahead of the game when 2023 starts.
How to Keep Recruiting During the Holidays
1. Clean up your database from the last 11 months.
An up-to-date database is a gold mine of candidate information. Keeping it up-to-date takes time and effort. During slow times, recruiters should pull out candidates, dust them off, and update their current work status. LinkedIn Recruiter allows you to tag candidates with an alert when they are looking for a new job. You should also check the candidate tags in your ATS. For example, in Exelare, you can tag candidates for skills, experiences, or anything else you want to flag them for. This is hugely beneficial when conducting a candidate search. December is a great time to make these small but vital updates to our current database of candidates.
2. Start preparing for January.
Surely your managers can get some hints about what’s next in open jobs for January? If you’re using a good ATS, you should have data showing when hiring peaked, the top jobs where you searched for candidates, and even what job boards resumes came in on most frequently. Look for trends such as:
- What’s the technology stack you hire most frequently?
- What time of year do you usually hire sales or customer service?
- How often did a particular role open?
Understanding these patterns is easy if you’re using an ATS like Exelare. Your managers can run intelligent reports from one dashboard that track these and other trends. This will help you start to pipeline for the jobs more likely to open up in January. Then you can spend December getting ready.
3. Improve your employer brand.
To attract a better candidate, every recruiter should know that the candidate’s experience matters significantly. But when was the last time you went on your careers page and applied for a job? A slow hiring season is a time to improve the careers page on your website. You can increase your social media presence and work with marketing to increase blogs and other content for the New Year. Try developing individual recruiter strategies for using social media first quarter. Recruiters can even take classes during their downtime to help them improve their social media reach outs to candidates. Even building recruiting videos during this time is a great way to upgrade your brand during slow recruiting times.
Are You Recruiting During the Holidays?
These three tips were brought to you by Exelare. We are a leading applicant tracking system offering our clients all the tools they need to improve their recruiting efforts. Contact us to find out how we can help you get ready for a stronger, better, and more successful 2023.