When the pandemic first struck, employees across the world faced mass layoffs. Now, the Great Resignation has hit industries like a tidal wave, reshaping traditional work models and causing massive shifts in work norms. As a result, talent acquisition managers and HR professionals have to redesign their recruitment process.

Here are three measures to improve your hiring methods as a corporate HR leader or staffing firm.

 1. Deconstruct your hiring strategy

In football, players are consistently looking for ways to increase their average ratings. One of their techniques is to repeatedly review video clips of their past games so they can observe and analyze moments when they are at their best and identify what needs to be worked on.

This is no different in recruiting. It’s vital that you breakdown all the elements of your current hiring process, looking at past performance through metrics like time to fill, cost per hire, and more. If you have collected candidate feedback, this is a great time to go through that and pick out any trends of what applicants liked or didn’t like about their recruitment experience with you. Besides, leveraging changes like mass job reshuffling gives you a great opportunity to rebuild your talent pools, letting you stay on top of rising employment trends such as the gig economy.

By looking at each stage of your process under a microscope, you will easily uncover both your hiring successes and the obstacles that are causing you to miss out on potential candidates or clients.

 2. Comb through your biggest pain points

In the football example, once a player lists out the challenges to their performance, they can begin working on them individually. This gives them time to reevaluate and record their improvements incrementally rather than trying to fix everything all at once. For instance, a slight adjustment to their posture could make radical improvements to their gameplay.

Likewise, it’s better to experiment with multiple solutions as a hiring professional so you can take stock of what’s useful and what’s not. Then, the tweaks you make will be more calculated and yield a larger return on your investment. If candidate management is an area where you’re falling short, you might be better off focusing on the smaller issue of candidate communication. This will allow you to analyze the effectiveness of your solutions at a more granular level.

Once you’ve narrowed down the problem areas in your recruiting strategy, put key variables to the test until all the solutions you choose come together to form an effective and cohesive hiring process.

3. Follow a data-driven approach

Hitting a road block in your hiring process is frustrating, especially during such a tumultuous time for the recruitment industry. But what matters is how you overcome this slump. Conditioning yourself to be proactive and prepare for issues ahead of time is the best way to handle an uncertain jobs market, and the best way to be proactive is with data.

These days, gathering the data you need to make improvements to your hiring strategy may require diving into technology. Evaluate your digital data ecosystem, and see whether adopting or migrating to an ATS would benefit you and your team. An ATS allows you to design a workflow that efficiently automates repetitive tasks, giving you more time to reconnect with and earn goodwill with clients and candidates. Moreover, an effective AI-powered ATS provides real-time data that is stored automatically and accessible anytime through reports or dashboards.   

If you’re finding it difficult to gather the data needed to compete in today’s recruitment market, learn how Zoho Recruit’s Applicant Tracking System can give you the information you need to make spotting weaknesses and developing solutions easy.