Ready to Kick Recruiting into High Gear? Your Timing Couldn’t Be Better
If you plan to engage talent before year’s end, the next two to three months are pivotal, especially for growing startups in the always competitive tech industry. Like students going back to school, job seekers get serious when summer comes to a close and actively explore new opportunities more than any other time of the year, with the exception of January.
LinkedIn data supports this and indicates that the majority of these new candidates will land at their next gig just after the calendar turns over. So, September and October represent a prime opportunity to bring in and get to know the candidates you need to build your teams and ensure your organization gets off to a great start once 2019 kicks off.
Companies that fail to recruit hard now risk coming up short on their annual recruiting goals and—more importantly—risk falling behind the competition. Post-Halloween, recruiting becomes frighteningly difficult (no pun intended!) as the year winds down and the holiday season forestalls business growth making it impractical for companies to launch campaigns, form new partnerships, and make new hires. That’s why the pressure is on if you seek to put your organization in the pole position out of next year’s starting gate.
Think of Recruiting Like the Tour de France
In all of sports, there is no race quite like the Tour de France. It tests cyclists in all sorts of ways but especially in their endurance. Today’s Tour de France consists of 21 stages over 23 days, but some stages provide significantly more opportunities to succeed—but also, to fail—than do others. Winning riders must conquer technical routes that wind through narrow village streets and over cobblestone roads without a hitch. But it’s the stages that climb up and down the Alps and Pyrenees where the tour can be won or lost, and where the eventual victor extends his advantage or makes up lost ground.
With autumn fast approaching, this is the stage in your search efforts that decides more than any other whether your company’s recruiting and talent management campaigns will ultimately meet the goals you set when the year began. Like the mountain trials in cycling’s most famous endeavor, this stage requires you to grind it out when things start going uphill and headwinds try to knock you off your game. Just remember: this is your best chance to pass up the competition in the drive to find and land the best candidates—but it’s also their best chance to outdo your efforts and leave you behind.
Stay Focused: It’s Worth It
To capitalize on the growing number of qualified job seekers this month and next, know that the work you put in now will pay off as you head down the other side of the recruiting mountain during the holiday period when, with few exceptions, companies remain in whatever position they find themselves in until January. So, now that the summer slide is over and applicants polish their resumes, it’s important to make your big push and be persistent. Job hunting season is open! Make the final months of the year a victory lap you can savor. Otherwise, you’ll have to play an impossible game of catch-up in hopes of filling the key positions you need to become more efficient, productive, and profitable.
If you want to fill key roles by the beginning of the year, each week that passes makes that objective a little bit harder. The recruiting cycle takes time. Once you’ve engaged a candidate it’s easier to keep the interviewing cycle moving through traditionally slower times, such as mid-November through the end of the year. If you haven’t got things rolling by then, most likely you won’t build any recruiting momentum at all over the winter. That’s why it’s time to launch your candidate outreach programs now. Any hesitation can cost you significant time.
HireLabs Can Ensure You’re Ready to Go
Don’t let this prime recruiting period find you unprepared. Do you plan to start off 2019 at full throttle with new team members in key roles, but haven’t devised the right strategy to get you there? HireLabs has a vast recruiting network and decades of experience staffing growing tech companies from coast to coast, especially startups.
HireLabs can help you maximize this season’s opportunity. But only if you get in touch soon. So, contact us now, and let’s see won’t we can accomplish together.