Opportunity 1: Transform your Campus Engagement
The traditional careers fair season that has remained unchanged for decades is going to feel very different this Autumn. It’s highly unlikely that there’ll be any face to face events and both universities and employers are working tirelessly to ensure students still have the same engagement with recruiters. There is still debate as to whether the changes we see this season will remain post pandemic, but either way there is an opportunity to review your current attraction strategy and identify new ways to interact with potential candidates. With significant savings to be made from reducing giveaways, print outs and time out of the office, it could be possible to re-direct this budget to more digital focused strategy. Digital collateral including virtual office tours, video diaries and blogs are great ways to bring your brand and opportunities to life.
We’d also recommend utilising a candidate chat platform to facilitate conversations with target groups of candidates to connect them with your current grads, hiring managers and Early Careers teams. This can help support objectives including diversity and social mobility, managing expectations about the reality of the roles and programme and improving overall candidate experience.
Opportunity 2: Find your ‘Right-Fit’ Candidates
Without being able to meet people in person, it’s even more important that the assessment and selection tools you use can help identify the right candidates. Managing candidates’ expectations through clear and consistent messaging from the initial point of engagement and throughout the assessment and selection process is helpful both to drive engagement but to also allow candidates to self-select. Utilising a Match-Me tool prior to candidates applying is a quick and pragmatic way for candidates to check their fit with your organisation or role, prior to investing time in the application process.
To meet the pace of progression recruiting candidates with the potential to succeed rather than simply looking at academic requirements and past experience will become increasingly important. At Amberjack, we have identified the most important indicators of future potential as Grit, Digital Intelligence, Applied Intellect and Creative Force. By assessing candidates against these four pillars, through our in digital assessment product HiPo-i, organisations can also deliver highly interactive experience that will enable them to build a workforce capable of meeting the future needs of their business.
Opportunity 3: Explore New Technologies
Pre-pandemic, many organisations were at the start of their journey in terms of exploring new technologies. For many that’s now been accelerated as virtual recruiting has become the new normal. Early feedback gathered from the ISE on virtual assessment centres is reporting little detrimental impact on candidates and some clear standout benefits, which means we may see the continuation of this new trend post pandemic. But it’s not all about video interviews and virtual assessment centres. Having the right ATS to support your recruitment process from managing initial campus engagement to automating every step of the offer management and on-boarding process, significant efficiencies can be achieved whilst improving the overall candidate experience.
Opportunity 4: Take Control of your Pipeline
When budgets are tight, the focus needs to be crystal clear. Now more than ever, it’s important to ensure successful candidates are progressing through the pipeline. We recommend analysing how many candidates you need to fill vacancies, what your conversion rates are and focusing on the pipelines you need, rather than application volumes you typically receive, or what your stakeholders expect to see. This means having a disciplined approach with opening and closing dates, benchmarking, and shortlisting decisions and of course, it needs careful stakeholder (and candidate) education and messaging. Strong reporting will also facilitate good pipeline control. Our new reporting functionality, which is available in Ambertrack and also as a separate module to work with your existing ATS, will provide clear analysis of conversion rates and RAG status of whether you’re on track to fill your upcoming ACs and vacancies.
Hopefully, this gives you some ideas of how a new and potentially challenging recruiting season can also offer up many opportunities to improve excellence across your process.
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