It’s hard to imagine that 2020 is officially halfway over.  Compared to last year’s summer check-in, the economy couldn’t be more different today. In the midst of COVID-19 still consuming most of the health and economic narratives, the jobs market has been incredibly disrupted. In this Hireology State of Hiring, we take a look at the trends seen in the first half of the year, and how they will influence plans leading into 2021.
 
While we’ve kept a close eye on the monthly jobs numbers, the recent downtick in unemployment is still substantially far away from leaving small and medium businesses feeling recovered. Like many of you out there, we’ve had to substantially alter our plans for the year, and are following CDC guidelines and our local updates on when it may be safe to begin reopening.
 
In any case, the Hireology State of Hiring today is a world away from where we were in January 2020. But even though there’s uncertainty in the market, you can be taking steps today to make sure you’re prepared to overcome the staffing challenges we may see for the last half of the year.
 

Updating Onboarding or Reboarding Policies

There’s no doubt that your policies for customer interactions, internal processes and facility management have had substantial shifts this year due to COVID-19. If your team is not currently hiring – or even fully open, now may be a good time to look at your policies to see if there’s opportunity to make any updates, and ensure these are clearly communicated during your hiring and onboarding processes.
 
If your organization has been an essential business during the spring and summer quarantine and you’ve remained open, it may also be a good time to see what other elements of your hiring process can be further automated to save your team time as you’ve been undoubtedly busy to keep up with demand.

Making your hiring process work for you

If you’ve been open throughout the first half of 2020, or hope to be shortly, getting ready for the needs of today’s economic outlook means you’ll need to have a process in place that works for you to free up your time, connect with your other systems  and help you provide a great candidate experience for today’s top applicants.

Hiring in today’s Applicant Economy

Hireology approaches the talent landscape as looking at the overall applicant economy – how todays’ top applicants continue to shape the hiring trends impacting organizations across the country. Today’s Hireology State of Hiring outlook couldn’t be more different than our outlook in January.
Expect Job Applicants to Skyrocket
 
The Coronavirus has effectively shut down large swaths of our economy. As millions of people have lost their jobs – either through temporary furloughs or long-term unemployment – it has created a situation where many new applicants may be flooding any open roles you may have for your organization today. HuntClub recently highlighted hiring trends in the COVID-19 era, showing that the average open position may now get upwards of 250 applicants per role as many new job seekers are forced to find new work.
 
Screening this influx of applicants will be challenging. Software platforms like Hireology can automatically highlight top applicants using a brief prescreen survey to determine who may be the most fit for the role. This can dramatically reduce time spent on applicants who lack the skills, certifications or expertise to do the job well.
 
Audit Your Brand and Job Descriptions
 
While a pandemic may not seem like the best time to review your job descriptions or career site content, doing so now will ensure you are ready to staff up when it’s time to reopen or expand. Do the roles you are looking to hire for still match the job descriptions you’ve been using? Do they go past a simple list of requirements and expectations?
 
A strong job description will take an applicant through your company history, highlight community involvement, training programs, workplace culture and excite top applicants to apply. If you’re interested in starting an audit of your job descriptions, be sure to download our job descriptions best practices guide to help you along the way.
 
Build Your Pipeline Today
 
If you have strong career site content and your job descriptions have been updated to reach today’s best applicants, you may want to consider opening a few jobs prematurely to build your talent pipeline. If you won’t be able to staff up until the future, be transparent about this with a notice on your career site page or in the job description itself. Hireology is putting this practice to work on our own career site. While we do not have immediate needs for talent today, we know this will change and we’re planning ahead.
 
Instead of waiting for a role to open up, we have several generic positions available on our site to connect with top applicants so our people team has a rolodex to reference once the market opens up. The key to this working well is to be transparent with interested applicants that there isn’t an immediate opportunity available now, but you hope to engage with them in the coming weeks or months when this changes and you’re looking to grow your team.
 
Evaluate Your Process
 
Beyond staffing, a key theme for the second half of 2020 will be to ensure your systems are driving you value. Be sure you’re looking at your recruitment ROI with a system like Insights – Hireology’s reporting platform. With our reporting suite, hiring managers can see how their process is working across all jobs and locations – and even see how much is spent (and delivered) across various job channels like the career site, job boards, social media and referrals. Keeping an eye one performance will help you lean in to the channels driving the most value, and having an applicant tracking system deliver these reports for you – automatically – will ensure that you get visibility into your process without taking time away from your day-to-day role.
 
The Hireology State of Hiring analysis for the first half of the year shows an incredibly challenging, ambiguous and stressful path to 2021. As we look to plan ahead for the remainder of 2020, know that Hireology is here to help. Click here to get a demo of our platform and to see what we can deliver for you and your team.