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Recruiters Must Be Chameleons

by Dave Nerz

Many jobs are difficult and so many have increased in difficulty over the past few years. The job of recruitment has become increasingly more difficult due to the pandemic, new laws, and the demographic changes impacting candidate availability. Good recruiters must be able to change their methods, styles, and approaches with every new law, market condition, or economic shift. They need to be chameleons, shifting to suit the environment “du jour.”
In 2019 it was difficult to be a recruiter. But in 2019, you could have your candidate meet your client company for coffee, a lunch, an interview and if hired, they would go to an office and be onboarded and begin working with a peer group. Hmmm. All those simple conditions are gone today! Yes, gone. Some very limited variations of previously common conditions might remain in part, or in other cases, be on the rebound for return in the years ahead.

Candidates will not meet their friends for coffee or lunch; a strange hiring manager or HR professional is out of the question completely. Interviews used to be scheduled and done in a face-to-face setting at the employer’s place of work or a meeting room. No longer; they are done by phone and video chat. Once hired, a candidate would go into an office and get trained and onboarded at the employer’s place of business. Candidates are now getting onboarded virtually in their home offices, spare bedrooms or at their kitchen tables. Wow. What we thought was complicated in 2019 is now a jumble of pieced-together accommodations to help address the pandemic, limited availability of talent, and process change driven by our new realities.

Let us layer in a few new well-intentioned laws and the jumble becomes an even more chaotic and random collection of newly transformed business practices. The recruiter must morph from the best practices used in 2019, to those suitable for the depths of the pandemic, to the newly-revived and ever-changing practices to suit the laws now demanding the attention of hiring managers and employers.

Did I mention the great resignation and the demographic drought that is upon us? Recruiters need to change their methods and approaches with amazing agility to remain successful. The funniest part is those recruiters that were great at what they did 5 years ago, are still great at what they do. They forge relationships, know how to source great candidates and excel at communication. Being a chameleon is just one small new trick they must master.

Get out the reptile recruiters and do your thing! You are an impressive bunch!!!

Posted in: Recruiting Resources

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