The 2010 Hiring Challenge

No doubt all of you have completed or are putting the finishing touches on your 2010 Business Development Plan. We are in the latter group and find much of our planning effort is devoted to forecasting what will happen with the economy, changes in employment levels and the resulting impact on the use of Prevue Assessments. We thought it might be interesting to see if we could encourage a dialogue on the subject which we will kick off in this article.

Let’s start with the economy and its impact on employee recruiting activity. Based on reading way too many economic forecasts we concluded that the USA will continue to show signs of recovery with some, but not a lot of recruiting activity beginning in the second half of 2010. The UK and other parts of Western Europe will continue to hope there is a recovery that will start sometime in 2010 and Canada, Australia and South Africa will all see some pretty good but not robust hiring activity.

There will be two major problems for those who are fortunate enough to be hiring in 2010. In most cases there will be too many applicants for new job postings that will require extra time and cost to screen or filter down to find those who are actually qualified for the position – but despite the larger numbers of applicants it will still prove difficult to find top talent. On the other hand there are some fields like health, financial services and IT where the biggest issue will be trying to find applicants, let alone talented applicants.

There are many reasons for the dearth of top talent in almost all occupations – such as changing demographics with the retirement of baby boomers, attitudes of the Generation X and Y groups, the rising cost and declining quality of educational institutions (or facilities) and many more. We can’t individually do anything about those problems in 2010 but we can do things to perform better within the constraints that have been imposed upon us by the recession.

We believe that if you want to hire good people you will have to respond to job applicants more quickly and more effectively. Not only are there large numbers of people now seeking work there are several recent studies that confirm there are equally large numbers of people who will be looking to change jobs as soon as the job market warms up. So there will be lots of people to choose from and some good opportunities to find top talent but if you want the best you will have to move fast to identify and hire them. If you don’t, you will be making your hiring decisions out of the second best applicants and maybe even the third best.

So what can you do to become more effective and efficient in hiring new employees? We believe there are two objectives you should set:

First is to develop a hiring process that is more effective without costing the moon;
Second is to use tools and online facilities that reduce staff time, increase speed of response to applicants and help focus your available time on the best applicants to make sure you are hiring top talent.

And how do we propose to help you to meet those objectives? Our answer for 2010 is to encourage you to examine and implement the following;

Take the time to examine your hiring process. Do you have a good understanding of what you are looking for in your labor force, both short term and long term? What talent do you already have on board who may not currently be in the right seat? Do you really know what you are looking for in your new hires – i.e. do you have good job descriptions for your positions? Are you seeking applicants from the right sources? Are you using your Prevue Online hiring facilities as effectively as you should be? Your authorized Prevue Distributor can help you to find answers to these and other questions that will help you improve your hiring process. Take advantage of their talent.
If you are not already using online applicant tracking or applicant processing facilities then get on with it – now. These systems are not expensive and the benefits are innumerable. Prevue will be offering a range of these services through 2010 that will provide Prevue customers with larger numbers of qualified applicants for each job opening, identify the best applicants more quickly, simplify the use of Prevue testing, reduce response time to applicants and reduce overall time to hire – all of which will assure that Prevue customers are making better hires.

We would like to hear your thoughts and feedback on what you see in the way of recruitment issues and solutions for 2010. Don’t be shy; we will only publish your response on the blog if you give us permission to do so, unless of course you would like to become a feature article.

Written by Ken Danderfer

Insights

January 21, 2010