Director of Recruiting at Labelbox - passionate about building global inclusive teams and talent functions from scratch.
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Most people are aware of the recent waves of tech layoffs and reorganization connected to increased interest rates, high inflation and economic slowdown risk. Companies have been cutting anywhere between a few percentages to over 20% of their teams in order to prepare for a potential downturn.
It’s not particularly surprising to see recruiters at the top of the risk chart in terms of being part of layoffs or reductions in force. A recent study by Revelio Labs on 17,000 people and their LinkedIn profiles shows this clearly.
Recruiting Debt
These kinds of team cuts usually carry medium- and long-term costs for the organization, even though in the short term they might bring financial relief and reduce burn rates. You may have heard the term technical debt in engineering. Technical debt happens when you take a shortcut in the code now, in order to ship something quickly, with the intention of fixing it later. Unfortunately, “later” often never comes, and the debt keeps compounding.
The same concept can be applied to recruiting teams. When we rush to hire fast, it sometimes feels like we're building an airplane while flying it. We design the interview processes, coach interviewers and build the best candidate experience we can on the go. All this adds to the time to hire and creates more friction in the long run. Imagine if we could actually design the interview process before starting to interview and map all the touch points in the candidate journey to create a great candidate experience that can set us apart from other employers. Imagine having everything ready before starting to hire.
Often, people view recruiters as solely responsible for sourcing candidates and filling open requisitions, so they are quick to let us go first when hiring is slowing down or stopping. However, that’s not all that we do. In addition to sourcing, we also work on learning and development programming for hiring teams, process improvement, candidate experience, data integrity and reporting, as well as employer branding programs. Because of the versatile skill set that we have, we are able to support many other teams such as HR, marketing, operations, sales and even product. Next time you think about letting go of recruiters due to lower hiring needs in the short term, explore the possibility of assigning them to other teams that need support.
Recruiting Recruiters Only When You Need Them Is Often Too Late
Recruiting is usually brought in when the pain point is already affecting teams and everyone is feeling the pressure. In addition, recruiting is one of the first teams to be impacted by a slowdown or a layoff. Instead, consider bringing in recruiters at the beginning of a project, when they can help with its planning and execution. For example, they can help with organizational design and needs-gap analysis to effectively scope out new roles for your team, develop interview plans, and train the interviewers to be able to assess and select talent
Hiring is not easy and it takes a lot of coordination between different parts of the company.
Retain The Best People For The Best Results
When you are in a race to stay ahead of the competition, it’s hard to keep up and recruit the best talent. In addition, the market for recruiters is becoming increasingly competitive, which drives recruitment efforts to recruit other recruiters (R4R) up so much, creating an incredibly competitive market. So you end up behind on your broader hiring plan because it takes so long and costs way more to find a solid recruiter who can help you at least catch up.
This forces the recruiter profile to be on the senior end of the spectrum because there is so much to handle, immediately, with little to no onboarding investment. That means that many recruiters end up working long hours to help teams achieve their goals, often on an unrealistic timeline. This leads to burnout and reduced productivity and retention in the long run, further contributing to the highly competitive R4R market. This is not an easy path to follow, and it takes a lot of dedication and a lot of work.
When markets are unpredictable and companies are always in need of new employees, it's important to carefully explore all your options and even get creative with how you can leverage your existing team to weather the storm and come out stronger at the end of it. Otherwise, you could find yourself in a never-ending cycle of scrambling to keep up. When you have a plan, you can make sure that you are making the best investments for your team. You can also avoid hiring the wrong people, which can have a negative impact on your team and your business.
Stay Ahead Through Upskilling
One way to stay ahead of the game is to upskill your current employees. This is usually cheaper than rehiring, and it has the added benefit of making your employees feel more valued. When you upskill your employees, you are investing in their future and in the future of your company. This is a win-win situation for both parties involved.
There will always be a hiring need—the only thing that changes is the volume. This is because companies can’t just stop production when the economy slows down. Instead, they need to keep going and find ways to do it with fewer employees.
To keep your strategic agility in this competitive talent market, avoid the reactive cycle of hiring recruiters when the need is already high and letting them go when the need slows down. Instead, find the baseline that works for your company by identifying what your recruiting team should look like in a downturn and supplement bandwidth with external resources to meet higher demands when needed. In a downturn, allow your recruiters to address recruiting debt and further contribute to building a strong culture. Unfortunately, this isn’t easy to do, and it doesn’t always happen; however, we can always learn from our past and do things a bit better next time.
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