4 Fresh Ideas to Prepare Your HR Team for Fall Hiring Season

September to early November is one of the most active hiring periods of the year. Plugging through that stack of resumes can be overwhelming (we know the feeling), and if your strategy isn’t meticulously prepared and ready to go, it can be all too easy to get lost in a sea of unnecessary paperwork and less-than-stellar candidates. It’s best to streamline those procedures and compile those strategies before the busy season hits.

Here are four farm-fresh tips to keeping your fall hiring season less stressful this year.

1. Take Content-Based Recruiting to the Next Level

Having a marketing strategy in place specifically for hiring initiatives is imperative for attracting top talent. Your marketing department shouldn’t be the only department with a content strategy—there’s no excuse for HR not to have a killer campaign strategy as well! Remember, “corporations are people”-- how well is your corporate personality engaging not only with consumers but with prospective employees? To that end, it’s essential for HR to develop content for your ideal employee. Blogs and eBooks are excellent places to start—they give you a space to show of your company value as well as help them imagine what it’s like working for you. Whatever you do, just make sure your online content is catchy, polished, and using SEO keywords! Your candidate can’t find you if you’re not using keywords proficiently.

2. Leverage Social Media

As of July 2018, there are 2.2 billion active monthly users on Facebook alone. That’s a lot of leverage if you know how to use it. Fortunately, LinkedIn and Facebook have made marketing to potential candidates easier than ever with demographic and occupation targeting. The best way to stand out in the sea of social media is to know whom you want to reach. Who do you want on your team, in that specific role? Once you’ve figured that out, it’s only a matter of targeting that demographic. For example, Millennials make up 35% of the total US labor force and are most likely to use Instagram to find new products and services. The attention is there--all you need to do is slip in your stellar campaign materials and they’re all yours.

3. Maintain Your Presence on Recruiting Sites

Recruiting sites like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and UpWork have changed the hiring game drastically. However, candidates are getting smarter, too--they can tell when you haven’t put in the effort to make your job postings look tight and convincing. Additionally, recruiting sites are structured to reward engagement on both ends. The more invested you are in engagement—such as tailoring your copy to the needs of the site, regularly browsing candidates, and following up on reviews—the more likely the right candidate will be able to find you.

4. Streamline Your Screening Process

On the flip side, running background checks can be another unwieldy step in an already drawn-out hiring process. Let’s face it: traditional background checks can be a huge time-suck, sometimes taking up to two WEEKS for a single comprehensive criminal check or drug screen. That’s a lot of leverage lost to potential competitive offers as well as one more thing for you to babysit. Be honest with yourself: do you really care about your candidate’s car payment history? Does it have anything to do with the talent skills relevant to her job description? No? Consider streamlining that process. More modern technologies like social media screening can have a 24-hour turnaround. Why waste time with data entry when social screening software can peruse, sort, and flag a candidate’s entire web presence within a 24-hour window?