After the year we just endured as a global community, should anyone (economist, epidemiologist, astrologer or otherwise) feel comfortable making predictions about what’s ahead? At Employment Enterprises, we have one employment prediction for 2021 that we offer up with certainty: It will be the year of the dedicated recruiting solution. Why? Because decades of job market ups and downs have taught us that rebuilding business strength and stability begins with people. Big comebacks take skilled talent.
While not every business will enter 2021 with a deep, in-house talent acquisition team, any business can tap into contract-based recruiters through dedicated recruiting. A simple way to augment in-house resources, a dedicated recruiting solution pairs a business with an industry-focused contract recruiter—or team of contract recruiters—with significant experience in the organization’s industry. Here are seven reasons why Employment Enterprises is certain this solution will be a key asset to HR and talent acquisition teams.
Reason #1: Expertise Is an Advantage
Inside most organizations today, recruiting teams are lean. They’ve endured the same budget and hiring freezes and (sometimes) staff cuts as other business groups. But finding skilled employees takes expertise, especially when industry insight and skillset knowledge are the advantages needed to beat competitors to the best candidates. Contract recruiters offer a simple way to increase both recruitment capacity and expertise in 2021. Even for businesses that are not looking at hiring until the third or fourth quarter of 2021, establishing a strong pipeline of qualified talent is essential. Expert contract recruiters can augment and sustain a candidate pipeline as the organization gains stability and hiring momentum.
Reason #2: A Steadying Force through Peaks and Valleys
While 2020 may have had plenty of record-breaking employment valleys, there were also peaks as bursts of recovery brought opportunities back. Unemployment skyrocketed to 14.4% in April from a February record low of 3.8%, according to the Pew Research Center. By October, the job market had recovered more than halfway, reaching a 6.6% unemployment rate. That rehiring surge was challenged again as unemployment claims rose with the worsening pandemic in November. It was a rollercoaster year for the job market.
With a global vaccination program gaining momentum across the U.S. and around the world, businesses should expect hiring surges in what some have called “the Great Rehire of 2021.”
To manage the ongoing ups and downs of hiring in 2021, businesses will seek out solutions that can help teams maintain equilibrium whether demand is rising or falling. A dedicated recruiting solution does just that: They balance understaffed talent acquisition teams with expert resources when demand surges, and they restore them to their lighter, leaner numbers when demand falls.
Reason #3: No Warm-up Necessary
Leveraging contract recruiters means working with talent experts who have been continuously engaged in recruitment across a specific industry, whether that is engineering, hospitality, tech, healthcare, retail, life sciences, government, or any number of sector specializations. They have active industry networks, full talent pipelines, and are ready to get to work from the moment job requisitions hit their inboxes. Employment Enterprises, for example, works with a national pool of dedicated recruiters who all have numerous years of concentrated talent engagement and acquisition experience in their industry of focus.
Hiring new full-time recruiting team members, on the other hand, can be time consuming and expensive. It also often requires bringing new hires up to speed on processes, tools, and industry nuances while giving them time and room to build candidate pipelines. That can quickly add up to weeks of lost search, sourcing, and engagement time during which strong talent can slip through the cracks.
Reason #4: A Tools and Resource Lottery
Along with the professional recruiting expert gained by employing dedicated recruitment solutions, businesses also instantly win a new set of recruiting resources and tools. At Employment Enterprises, we give each dedicated recruiter full access to our recruiting tool set and technology stack. That includes powerful social media outreach and engagement channels, such as LinkedIn Recruiter, as well as job board and talent network resources and tools. It is an immediate boost to talent access that exponentially improves recruiting capabilities and access to quality candidates.
Reason #5: Employment Life Cycle Support
When hiring demand skyrockets, contract recruiters may be the first need, but other challenges can quickly arise. A dedicated recruitment solution connects businesses to an expert workforce solutions partner that can also support additional needs related to sourcing, recruitment and even employee onboarding.. Take for example an 11,000-person hiring surge Employment Enterprises supported for a government client. While recruitment was one critical aspect of this sizable hiring effort, an equally critical need was onboarding thousands of vetted workers. As these pre-selected candidates flooded in, the client realized that more onboarding support was needed. Employment Enterprises was able to easily take on the added employment life cycle work without missing a beat, helping the client meet the tight timeline constraints of the government contract. It was a second, critical level of support that ensured consistency and expertise across the employment life cycle.
Reason #6: Diversity and Inclusion Takes Focused Resources
2020 was the year of the pandemic but also a year of racial reckoning that saw important efforts from employers to increase workplace representation and opportunities for diverse talent. Contract recruiters can be additional, expert allies in that effort, whose pipelines and networks can expand a business’ access to talent. As organizations and hiring managers look to improve diversity hiring efforts, a dedicated recruiting solution can be one way to put focused energy and expertise behind an important 2021 recruitment goal.
Reason #7: Meeting the Need for Speed
Just as many businesses had to move to remote work models in mere days thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, employers and HR teams should expect the pace of change and challenge to remain quick in 2021. Activating vetted, proven contract recruiters is a rapid solution that can help businesses quickly meet tough timeline challenges. Recently, a Department of Defense contractor client of Employment Enterprises, which supports military and veteran communities with health, career, learning, financial and other services, needed to hire 150 financial specialists in just 90 days. While you can watch the full video case study of the solution, here’s a spoiler: In just a few weeks, Employment Enterprises’ contract recruiters delivered all the candidates the company needed to make its hiring deadline. The immediate infusion of the dedicated contract recruiters won critical time for the business.
A Certain Choice
It may sound odd to speak of certainty after a year of near immeasurable global uncertainty, but it is the advantage of contract recruiting resources: guaranteed talent and industry expertise without long-term costs and commitment. It is a certain and safe recruitment choice at a time when employment growth patterns, valleys and peaks, will remain uncertain.