Summer Vacation

How to Keep Your Team Engaged in Recruiting Over the Summer Months

You can picture it now.  White sandy beaches, sleeping in, breakfast by the pool, no meetings, no email, no obligations… And so can your team.

Summer vacation planning is likely in full swing, whether you are aware of it or not.  It’s highly probable that your team is spending some part of the day dreaming of a get-away in the not-too-distant future (it is nearly May, after all).  While the erratic Spring weather leaves us all guessing, getting online to find the perfect escape is easy to do.

While you would never begrudge your team the vacation they’ve earned, you also need to keep them engaged while they are in the office. This includes their commitment to hiring.

Recruiting typically sees a seasonal slow-down during the summer months.  Largely in part to the availability of both the candidates and the hiring team, making the hiring cycles extend beyond what had been experienced earlier in the year.  Adding days or even weeks to the hiring process will ultimately be felt in the long run, as it materializes itself in slipping projections.

It’s easy to feel the “take it easy” attitude on a beautiful summer day, but given that you still have milestones and deliverables to hit, it’s best to keep your team on task. If recruiting is an ongoing effort for your company, consider having alternates and redundancies built into the hiring team (this is a good practice anyway!), giving some team members much-needed vacation time while you continue the interviewing pace needed to meet your hiring goals. As the hiring manager, if you are the single-point of failure, consider ways in which you can leverage another manager (even a non-technical one - product management?) to cover for your own time away.  Keeping your cadence will become even more critical as your team marches toward the holidays.

If you don’t have a strategy to meet your hiring goals this year or are concerned yours may be lacking, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at stephanie@hirelabs.com.

What are your holiday plans for summer 2018?  Let us know in the comments below. Us? A couple of us are going to Mexico!  Others to California.  And probably a lot of camping (or glamping in my case!) in the near future.