Using Tech to Reset Your Recruiting Strategy When Hiring Stalls

With the dust of the Great Resignation settling and a potential recession on the horizon, talent acquisition teams may be tempted to slow down their efforts. It makes sense; it’s been a hectic year trying to transition from a pandemic footing and contend with fierce competition for talent. If anyone deserves a break, it’s TA(Talent Acquisition) pros on the front line. 

However, the momentary shift from speed, scaling, and competition is only a relative calm before the next storm. When things pick back up — and they always do — your talent acquisition will either be positioned ahead of the wave or behind it.  

The threat of a recession is not a reason to pause your talent strategy but rather pivot from a reactive to a proactive process. The current lull provides a valuable opportunity to dig deeper into your existing candidate pool and pipeline, consider what future organizational goals you’ll be hiring for, and bolster how you qualify talent. 

The good news: You don’t have to go it alone. Integrating and leveraging technology can streamline your talent acquisition process and revitalize it. 

Here are three use cases on how tech can help you deepen your talent acquisition strategy.  

Tapping the Source

Recruiting can feel like endless sourcing. According to the recent State of Outbound Recruiting in 2022 report by hireEZOpens a new window , 55% of recruiters say they spend most of their time sourcing. The sheer amount of time spent sourcing talent makes it a fertile ground for improving the talent acquisition process. 

To start, consider revisiting your habits. In crunch time, we tend to stick with what we know, either what is more immediately accessible or what has worked for us in the past. For sourcing, this can be an overreliance on LinkedIn, job boards, or internal or external referral networks. 

The current slowdown presents a chance to cast a wider net. Sophisticated sourcing platforms can pull thousands of candidate profiles from numerous professional networks simultaneously and automatically, offering a more well-rounded view of available talent. 

Technology can also empower more intentional sourcing. The Great Reshuffle encouraged a more reactive, frantic offer-letter-after-one-interview approach to hiring. The return to steadier hiring rates provides an opportunity to screen candidates for fit with organizational initiatives (e.g., DE&I), current and future skill gaps, and culture. Sourcing platforms can focus talent acquisition efforts with filters for diversity and needed skills. Talent acquisition tech can challenge institutional bias by surfacing candidates without conventional degree-based qualifications.

Empower Outreach

Outreach is the lifeblood of healthy and impactful candidate engagement. Creating meaningful touchpoints with potential talent, keeping candidates in the loop, and tracking key analytics are at the heart of an effective outreach strategy. A solid outreach strategy attuned to candidate experience can reduce the noise, nurture streams, and foster engagement.

Even the most seasoned TA pro can benefit from the added perspective data can provide — often telling a compellingly different story than what we tell ourselves. Tech platforms can surface insights to design and validate outreach strategies.

Rather than take your chances with a generic email and leverage technology to make outreach personal, TA pros can compare data on what message formats, lengths, and timings inspire the most interaction in what use cases and demographics. Maybe emails that use first names have a higher reply rate than stuffier communications? Maybe messages that use an emoji in the subject line get more clicks? Which cadence is most successful for senior candidates vs. early career candidates? 

Data empowers talent acquisition to delve deep into what makes your candidate tick, and to craft communication that meets that candidate where they’re at. Seek out recruiting platforms with built-in engagement features, such as email sequencing and scheduling, to reach highly qualified candidates directly, and chart your hyper-personalized outreach in advance.

Spring Cleaning

Implementing tech isn’t all “in with the new, out with the old.” Indeed, certain interventions can help you enrich your existing ATS data and systems. Slower periods provide the perfect opportunity for a bit of spring cleaning. 

Consider adopting new technology to help you make the most of your existing infrastructure. For example, recruiting software can clean up and enrich profiles in your ATS, removing duplicate profiles and updating your database to reflect a candidate’s current status. With a stronger footing, TA professionals will be better positioned to regain attention and interest from previous candidates, cultivating a pipeline ready for the next hiring frenzy.

Now is also a great time to dig into the data you’ve worked so hard to collect. Software can help TA pros delve into their databases of past hire statistics, discerning what outreach cadence promotes successful hires, how the number of interviews influences time to hire, how different onboarding processes impact retention, or what characteristics candidates ghosted you might have in common. 

Use data to level set on hiring KPIs, to level up your process for reevaluating candidates for the future, and to upgrade your candidate experience.  

Regroup, Reevaluate, Revolutionize

Changing things can be hard, especially when you’re presented with a seeming moment of calm. But these moments to regroup also provide the opportunity to reevaluate your approach to recruiting, improve your game, and stay ahead of the ever-changing market. 

Platforms that help TA pros source talent pools wide and deep personalize every aspect of candidate engagement and refine hiring databases to provide the means to pivot your strategy when the market shifts. With the right technology and the bandwidth to experiment, now is the time to be bold! 

How do you think technology can help talent acquisition professionals to streamline their recruitment strategy? Share with us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to know!

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