Recruiting in a post-pandemic world

Once upon a time the key challenge in growing a business was finding customers, and many businesses are still built on that basis. Sometimes that remains true, but today the growth limiting factor may be your ability to recruit enough people to deliver what you can sell.

That was actually my challenge in the dot-com and millennium bug driven boom for the IT industry prior to 2000. After a lot of pain we solved it by realising that recruitment was the business process most limiting our growth. We solved it by treating it as a sales and marketing process in it’s own right.

We asked ourselves a number of questions including:

1. What is our employer brand? How do we position ourselves as the best employer rather than just the best supplier?
2. How do we generate (employee) leads? How do we convert them – for the good candidates?
3. How do we close them quickly? (We discovered we were losing many of the best candidates in the delay between interview and accepted offer)

We ended up with a process that took less than 7 days from first contact to job offer with the potential of starting on day 8. Quite a shift from the 6-8 weeks prior to our reengineering of our approach. That plus deliberately doing marketing and PR to position ourselves as a great, indeed the best, employer in our sector radically changed things for us.

That’s the most critical message! You can stop here… no need to read any further. However if you choose to, below is a link to some more detailed thoughts, tips and tools derived from our MD2MD meetings intended to get your brain buzzing.