How to Avoid Spooky Hiring Situations

Halloween can be a fun time to dress up, venture through a haunted house, and watch a scary movie or two, but this season can also give HR professionals quite the fright-- recruiters, especially. Let’s keep you from starring in this year’s scary movie! Here’s how to avoid some of the more ghoulish parts of recruiting for an all treat and no trick recruiting year.

Being Buried Alive by Paperwork

Sometimes, a recruiter’s desk can feel like a corn maze. From hundreds of resumes to background screening permissions, it’s difficult to keep track of every little thing. Applicant tracking systems can definitely help clear the clutter, but you’ll want to have one that isn’t afraid of working with your other solutions. The better your ATS can integrate with other solutions, the less spoooooky your desk will be this Halloween.

Hocus pocus lost paperwork be gone! Learn more about ATS integrations here.

Witches’ Brew of Competition 

With such low unemployment rates, recruiters often find themselves trick or treating for candidates who fit their needs. Get the best batch of candidates by:

• Having a brand reputation as a great place to work. This takes a lot of work, but when your culture is strong, candidates will line up to work for your company. 
• Keeping your time to hire as minimal as possible. If you move too slow, candidates are likely to accept other job offers in the meantime. Keep in mind, though, that moving too quickly can decrease your quality of hire. Achieve both speed and quality with a reputable screening provider. 
• Clearly communicate with your candidates. It can be tempting to use a lot of technology solutions to streamline your hiring process, but if candidates feel like they’re never talking to a human, your company will come across as cold as. Use hiring technology wisely. 

Night of the Living Candidate

With competition as high as it is, it might feel tempting to just reach into the bowl and grab whatever cand-y-dates you can, but if you do that, you might not like what you get. While you may see a bunch of applications and candidates, they may all be like zombies-- not really interested in your company or its culture. Avoid this by dedicating time to your job postings. When writing a job posting, be real and honest about what it’s like to work at your organization. LinkedIn suggests going beyond your benefits by disclosing the company culture, its commitment to diversity, and other company priorities and/or initiatives. 

Vampire Candidates 

Sometimes, you find a great candidate, but when you try to reach them, it feels like they’re afraid of the sunlight or something… They don’t answer calls and scheduling an interview is nearly impossible. With candidates like these, use technology to your advantage. Use texting to communicate with candidates. On average, it takes a candidate just 90 seconds to respond to a text, according to CTIA.org. 

For interviewing, there are a lot of great solutions-- you can have technology automate interviews for you or you can conduct interviews over video-- saving time for you and your candidates. Alternatively, lots of recruiters are now using pre-recorded interviews. This not only allows you to ask the questions you want, but it gives candidates the flexibility to respond.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Halloween kicks off the holiday season in the U.S., and while it can be super fun and exciting, the nightmare before Christmas hits recruiters every year. With holiday shopping and events, recruiters are stretched looking for temporary employees. The National Retail Federation found that consumers spent an incredible 701.2 billion dollars on holiday shopping in 2018, and that number is expected to rise in 2019. All of this extra spending means additional work. To manage this, start hiring temporary employees as soon as possible with the help of hiring technology. 

For more scary hiring situations, check out our blog from last year!