Talent acquisition has more questions than answers these days and this fact alone should sound the alarm that candidate feedback is important, now more than ever. If you’re not asking yourself these questions, and seeking the answers actively, you are risking your organization’s ability to properly navigate some very dangerous times:
- How will our response to the economic downturn affect our employer brand?
- How does our employer brand affect our ability to hire and retain employees?
- What factors can we control that will affect our employer brand and our ability to hire and retain employees?
- How will a reduction in hiring affect our candidate experience?
- What factors that we can control will most affect our candidate experience, assuming decreased hiring?
- How will a reduction in hiring affect our diversity and inclusion goals?
- How do we ramp up hiring given a sharp increase in the need for talent?
- How do we ramp up hiring without affecting our ability to get our top choice candidates?
These are just a few of the questions that will help you understand what you’re up against, no matter what your circumstances as an organization. And that’s not even addressing how today’s challenges change the makeup of your talent pools, and therefore, the way you hire:
- How have talent pools changed?
- Have their intrinsic motivators changed?
- What can the organization do to compassionately support an influx of candidates with heightened employment needs?
Now is the Time to Act
Think about it. If the Covid-19 pandemic ended today, the makeup of the available workforce is drastically different than it was just a week or two ago. Three out of five jobs in this country were hourly positions. This is the segment that appears to be most affected by the fallout in the short term.
That means that the vast majority of those re-entering the job market right now come from that segment. How are you finding them? Treating them? Hiring them? Rejecting them? What impact will this have on your employer brand? Is your process designed to meet their expectations? Do you know their expectations?
If you have shed hourly jobs and are facing significantly lower supply in the face of significantly higher demand, the way you handle this change could be a defining moment for your employer brand, both internally and externally.
Many organizations must continue filling highly skilled positions while shedding jobs and reducing hiring for less skilled workers. Your employer brand perception (driven in large part by ratings on Glassdoor) can hurt your ability to hire these strategic roles.
Candidate Feedback is Important for Diversity and Inclusion
Shedding jobs and changing hiring velocity (whether accelerating or reducing) will have an affect on your D & I targets. Understanding how this change flows through your recruiting process will be VERY important in the short and long term.
Does your process work for underrepresented groups as effectively as it does for highly skilled candidates AND for the influx of displaced hourly workers?
No Time for Guessing
Look, the stakes are high. Given the current climate, candidate feedback is important because there is little visibility into short or long term effects. This usually results in knee jerk overreaction from business leaders.
In this climate, REAL talent feedback can change the conversations the business has around how to respond. Experiential data from internal and external talent can provide, not only the answers to the questions we all face, but answers to questions you didn’t even think to ask. And historically, it’s the questions organizations didn’t think to ask that tend to be their undoing.
Real time talent feedback is the future of HR service delivery. Whether you’re using bots or real live people, hiring and retaining employees is about people and the value they perceive from a company or an organizational program.
Open the flood gates! Ask everyone how it’s going? Understand who they are and how they need to be treated. Find out what drives them. What scares them. Find out what you can provide as an employer that connects with them.
Don’t guess. Know. Don’t gather macro data, gather employee segment data. Specific to strategic roles or demographics that are important to your organization going forward.
You need to “know,” because any guesses you’re making right now are based on how things USED to be. Things have changed. Permanently.
