It’s no secret that talent acquisition teams today face a lot of pressure as they navigate change and uncertainty. Attracting top talent in what has been a historically competitive job market for years has proven to be a difficult task, one that C-suite executives see as critical to overall business performance.
A recent Gartner study found that CEOs and senior executives ranked the talent shortage as the most damaging factor to their business outlook – over such weighty factors such as the impacts of inflation, recession, supply chain problems, rising interest rates and energy costs.
Further, Gartner reported that 83% of HR leaders said they struggle to find enough talent with the skills they need.
The pressure is on for TA teams to deliver. And while investment in TA continues to be strong, like many areas of business, many teams are expected to deliver improved results while keeping budgets and headcounts steady overall.
All of this enhances the pressure for everyone on your TA team, a situation that can ultimately lead to recruiter burnout, low morale and even attrition issues for your TA team itself (which only compounds the challenges and pressure for your team).
So what’s a TA leader to do?
TA leaders have to continuously evaluate their approach to team management, just like any other business leader, in order to keep their people happy and productive. Making sure your team has the tools and resources they need to perform their jobs effectively is a crucial aspect of successful recruiting team leadership – and taking care of people on a human level is just as important.
Address Recruiter Burnout by Setting Your Team up for Success
The most effective talent acquisition leaders equip their recruiting teams with the tools and resources they need to thrive even in a challenging environment by helping address core, strategic aspects of the TA process – and by gathering feedback so that they can address critical issues head-on.
Let’s take a look at how TA leaders can set their teams up for success by working to:
- Understand and enhance the candidate experience
- Innovate the recruiter experience and reduce time spent on repetitive tasks
- Adopt technology and processes to accelerate the hiring process
- Collect regular employee feedback to inform decision-making
1 – Understand & Improve the Candidate Experience
With candidate resentment on the rise, creating a great candidate experience is more important than ever for organizations struggling to recruit top talent. And in the day-to-day of sourcing and recruiting candidates, the issues exacerbated by a bad candidate experience are likely to directly impact your TA team on a daily basis, which can rapidly erode morale and lead to recruiter burnout.
That’s why it’s critical for TA leaders to maintain a relentless, consistent and transparent focus on understanding your organization’s candidate experience – from a candidate’s perspective. Regularly secret shopping your recruiting process can be an eye opener for many TA leaders and help them uncover critical issues that you can address to improve the process for your teams – from needlessly long application forms to gaps in the candidate communication process that exacerbate candidate frustrations (sadly, the dreaded “resume black hole” is still a problem for many organizations).
In addition to auditing your employer brand, career site, application and automations from a candidate POV, you should also consider how emerging technologies like ChatGPT may be influencing potential applicants. Take the pulse of sentiment on career review sites and look at critical metrics such as time to hire – all from a candidate’s POV. As you evaluate your candidate experience, keep the expectations of candidates in mind. For example, PWC candidate research showed that:
- 60% of candidates believe the hiring process should take less than a month from the time they submit an application
- 56% said they would discourage others from applying for a job at a company due to a bad recruiting experience there
- 71% said employer reputation is more important than brand
Honestly evaluating your candidate experience against the expectations of candidates will reveal areas you can focus on improving across the entire recruiting journey – like speeding up your time to hire, providing more robust and engaging information about open opportunities and enabling candidates to interact with your TA team at scale.
Equipped with this knowledge, today’s TA leaders should work to address candidate experience issues through a strategic combination of technology and process enhancements. Addressing these challenges through a more integrated approach can not only significantly improve the candidate experience – it can also improve the recruiter experience and help your team achieve their goals better, faster and more efficiently.
2 – Innovate the Recruiter Experience & Help Your Team Save Time
Recruiting involves a lot of repetitive tasks and administrative work. But you don’t want your team feeling weighed down by the minutiae – another area that can compound recruiter burnout. Fortunately, today’s best practices and technology solutions offer many ways to help your team save time.
First, review the hiring process from the recruiter’s POV from beginning to end and look for opportunities to batch tasks, streamline steps or reduce friction. Evaluate how much time your team is spending on repetitive tasks that could be automated. Just like gaining a deep understanding of the hiring journey from a candidate’s point of view, investing in creating a recruiter journey map can empower TA leaders to resolve issues that are often hidden, uncover opportunities for the adoption of technology and ultimately create a recruiter experience that is empowering rather than demoralizing.
For example, talent acquisition platforms can help recruiters save time by automating repetitive tasks, optimizing vital aspects of the sourcing process and freeing recruiters to focus on building relationships with quality candidates.
3 – Measure & Speed Up the Hiring Process
Accelerating the hiring process comes with a variety of benefits. Because of today’s talent market, speed helps employers compete for top talent, which means your recruiting team can land more wins. An accelerated hiring process also improves the candidate experience and helps reduce candidate ghosting, which also reduces frustration for your recruiters.
To effectively accelerate your hiring process, benchmark and evaluate key metrics for your organization, such as time to fill and time to hire, so you can put strategies in place to improve both metrics. Regularly measure these metrics and investigate significant changes, good or bad.
With these insights in hand, implement a multi-faceted approach that seeks to reduce delays across the process both internally and externally. Adopt practices that leverage technology to help move candidates more quickly through the funnel, address operational issues that expand timelines along the recruiter journey and work with hiring managers and company leadership to identify and address broader roadblocks to reducing these metrics – especially time to hire, which directly impacts the candidate experience.
Stewarding an ongoing practice of measuring time to fill and time to hire metrics, evaluating issues and obstacles on a regular basis and deploying processes and technology to speed up the hiring process is a critical step in setting your recruiting team up for success that will pay dividends over time.
4 – Conduct Regular Employee Sentiment Surveys & Take Action to Influence Change
Ideally, you’re already conducting weekly check-ins with your team members about their priorities and challenges so you can support them on the spot. Watch for signs of recruiter burnout and have candid conversations with your team to identify issues that may lead to recruiter burnout so you can take steps to address problems proactively.
In addition to these informal touchpoints, it’s vital to conduct more formal employee sentiment surveys that reveal your team’s attitudes and emotions about work on a broader scale. Ask about everything from team dynamics, workload and schedules to wellness, benefits and career aspirations.
Most importantly, act on the insights you gather from these surveys. If your team has major complaints, work (visibly) to address them — or at least acknowledge the issues if you don’t have the authority to resolve them yourself and be transparent with your team about what you’re doing to influence change. Feeling seen and heard goes a long way toward helping employees feel engaged and empowered, which allows them to do their best work.
Talent Acquisition Team Performance Drives Organizational Health
Helping your team feel seen and supported – as humans, as individuals, as professionals – is not just about having a happy crew. It’s a vital element of developing a team that is equipped to meet your goals and rise to the challenges and pressures of recruiting in today’s market. Focusing on these areas as a talent acquisition leader helps your team get the job done more efficiently and effectively, so your entire organization can perform better and achieve great results.
Remember, your recruiting team plays a pivotal role in helping shape your organization and enabling it to meet its overall goals. Prioritize your team’s experience (and their results) by implementing the right processes, practices and technology solutions so they can meet their goals with confidence and leave work feeling satisfied and fulfilled.
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