How many times have you heard the statement business recruitment activities tend to slow down during the holidays? Despite what you might think it is not just Holiday shopping, parties and office festivities in December.
Jobseekers and savvy recruiters are taking advantage of time off, relaxed attitudes and real desires to start a new year off on the right foot.
This time of year often proves to be very active for talent acquisition. Many of our more progressive clients take advantage of this time to get a head start on their New Year’s goals by adding personnel that will impact their business, and help take their business to the next level.
Here are a few reasons to assess year end strategic or growth hiring plans.
- Beat the competition. While your competitors take a rest over the holiday period, surpass them in the race to acquire impact players for your firm.
- Top performers are still working during the slack period – because top performers are driven, they are less likely than others to take advantage of an opportunity to slack off. That means that driven individuals will still respond to messages and that they are still looking for opportunities to learn on online technical talent communities. Because top performers remain fully engaged, never assume that they are too focused on celebrating and shopping to appreciate a great job opportunity when it is offered to them during this period.
- December is bonus time – almost all year-end bonuses are given out in December (and most top performers get them). Therefore, the financial incentive for a top-performing employee to stay diminishes almost immediately after their bonuses are paid out.
- Get the “on-boarding process” behind your new employee. It is common to take between 30 – 90 days to achieve the path of maximum effectiveness from a new employee. Why not take advantage of year end business cycle to deal with the biggest chunk of scaling a new employee’s productivity curve?
Because most firms don’t recruit during this period, it’s easy to follow the crowd and to also shut down your own recruiting effort. Strategically, however, that would be a huge mistake and a missed opportunity. The best time to recruit is when others are idle and when the candidates are most available and receptive. This is even truer if you are a lesser-known organization that has little success when you must recruit side-by-side against better-known competitors.
Wake up and realize that recruiting is a 12-month profession not an 11-month job with one month off for slacking. And just think how many more of your recruiting goals that will be met if you have a full 12, rather than an 11-month recruiting effort.