4 Ways to Prepare for Peak Recruitment Cycles
Proper preparation for peak recruitment cycles can help manage your hiring process.
When it comes to hiring a new employee, you want to find the best and brightest candidate with the right skills for the job. Not only that, but you want to fill your open positions as soon as possible. But before you make a new hire, consider and prepare for peak recruitment cycles.
These are the annual trends a company sees when it looks at its hiring patterns. For example, many organizations amp up their hiring efforts in the first quarter of the year, tapering them off during the summer and near the holidays. Peak recruitment cycles vary by industry, but understanding what you're likely to see can help you better manage your hiring process.
Here are four ways your business can prepare for peak recruitment cycles.
1. Understand Your Peak Recruitment Cycles
In order to prepare your business for recruitment, start by grasping the trends. According to Monster, hiring initiatives often begin in January, with another push in September. Hiring usually slows down over the spring and summer, unless the business is seasonal, in which case efforts may increase in the spring.
2. Plan in Advance — Long Before It's Time to Hire
It can be tempting to hire as soon as you need help. But you may want to be strategic about when you take on a new employee, keeping in mind how the hire will fit into your organization's recruitment and other large-scale cycles. That's why you should try to plan your hires well in advance. It's important, for example, to understand when the budget will open up for hires, as well as when your company has the greatest staffing needs.
3. Equip Your Staff With the Information They Need
Although your human resources department may have a good understanding of its peak recruitment cycles and how they relate to hiring at the organization, does the rest of your staff understand how hires happen? It's a good idea to equip staff with the information they need in advance so they can plan for the time they'll spend interviewing and onboarding new hires.
4. Put the Pieces in Place Before the Peak
Because hiring can occur when things are generally busy at your business, it's a good idea to have a hiring system that's easy to begin at any time. For example, if you know you want to hire a new employee in the fall, it's a good idea to put together a job title, job description and compensation package well before you begin advertising the role. It might be a good idea to do this over the summer, when things are quieter. That way, when Sept. 1 strikes, you'll be ready to go.
All that said, don't be afraid to go off cycle. While it's smart to get a handle on hiring patterns, they're not the be-all and end-all for your business. If you need to make a hire, you should do so when you can, especially if your business is small enough to feel the impact of the presence or absence of individual employees acutely.
