There may not be the level of vacationing in the U.S. that there is in Europe in August, but there can be some slow days. Some people take PTO; hiring may slow; and there are fewer conferences and conventions.
This is an opportunity for talent acquisition.
For TA departments wanting to become more data-driven, some suggested activities if you have a quieter moment:
- Revisit intake forms. Are they capturing what you need from managers?
- Visit with employees you’ve helped hire. Ask them about the hiring process, and how they’d improve it for others. Ask them if the job is what they expected. Ask them who else they know who’d make a good employee.
- Dive deeper into your screening and assessment data. Are years of work experience correlated with performance? Is there a cutoff where more experience doesn’t impact or negatively impact performance? For example, perhaps after four years of experience, everyone performs equally.
- Dive deeper into your interview data. How do interview scores correlate to tenure? How do interview scores correlate to performance?
- Examine your job application. Look at your application completion rates to measure. Where are people dropping off?
- Dive deeper into time to hire. Are there aspects of the hiring process you could automate? Could some interview questions actually be screening questions? Was that third or fourth interview necessary?
- Dive deeper into quality of hire. A great new employee who starts on Labor Day and leaves on Halloween isn’t a great representation of quality of hire. Make sure retention is part of your quality calculation.
- ROI: Calculate your turnover costs (let us know if you want help). Companies are known to squabble over small differences in pay or benefits when the cost of turnover is exponentially higher than a slightly bigger job offer.
Those are just a handful of activities to keep busy if you have a slow day or two in August. And if you’ve built a data-driven hiring process, you’ll be doing most of these activities anyhow, each week, all year ‘round.
