Holiday Recruiting: How to Win Talent in the Slow Season

Sure, ‘tis the season and all that.  But don’t get drunk on holiday cheer and run your recruiting plan into a ditch.  It’s typical to take your foot off the gas to focus on other business activities when it appears everyone seems uninterested in talking about a new job.  So here are a few ideas on what your startup could be doing during the holiday season:

• Revamp your referral program.  Referrals continue to be the best source of hires, and a solid referral program is the best way to scale those no matter what your company’s hiring needs.  Take a good, hard look at what you’re doing now and ask if this will get you where you need to be by this time next year.  As Google discovered recently, throwing money at it isn’t enough.  If your employees aren’t making referrals, you need to ask yourself why.

• Make use of your entire suite of recruiting tools. Not only the tools you already have in place, but researching new tools, especially if they’ll help boost referrals.  If you don’t have tools in place that make recruiting and sourcing easy, consider making the investment.

• Don’t be a luddite!  In case you haven’t noticed, recruiting on social networks is all the rage right now.  Most applicant tracking systems and CRM’s have some sort of integration that makes it easy to share job openings on your employees’ networks.  Use it.