Conversation With A CEO: You Shouldn’t Stop Recruiting During The Coronavirus Shutdown
March 30, 2020
Last Friday I had a blog post => It’s Time To Go and in part:
Recruiting Into A Slowing Economy, Recession And Coming Out The Other Side
To be blunt… most companies are dropping the ball. So many groups have a blank career page. At a time when they could be communicating about future hiring needs and collecting contact information… they have nothing.
Whether we will have a V, W, U or L shaped recovery it will take most groups some (a lot) time to staff up again. This will increase the length of the slowdown for them. I don’t get it. They’re making it worse.
So… I will do a free webinar giving ideas that that leadership and recruiting teams should be doing during this time.
This morning I had a call with a CEO and they were wondering why I would do such a thing. They were not looking for how to recruit, but… why. Why should they continue to recruit during the shutdown.
We were on a video chat and I struck the pose above. I was wearing a hoodie but the facial reaction is the same.
I said:
If you shut down your sourcing and recruiting for 60 days, and it takes 30 days to get it going again and it takes 30-60 days to fill your open roles… you are 4 - 5 months from your next hire. Can your business afford that?
They said:
But I need to get through this first. I need to take care of this problem now or I don’t come out the other side.
I appreciate many CEO’s are making very difficult decisions. And I do not envy them.
While I am not a business operation person, I am a people operations person and I get building teams. And I surely appreciate the time, energy and resources it takes to build one.
I also understand we do not know for sure when social distancing ends, when the economy is fully open for business and when things will get back to “normal”.
I also understand companies have different cash flow and budget issues.
My belief is this… whenever the economy comes back on it will likely be with some pace.
And now a company may need to recruit a new recruiter. They will take some time to onboard and get used to the culture, team, etc.
Then they need to start sourcing and recruiting. At the same time when everyone else like them is doing the same thing.
#wowzers
What if we got really strategic about our hiring when many others are running for cover?
What if instead during this shutdown we collected info from those visiting our career page, rewrote those archaic job descriptions, reached out to those we will need to hire when we are told “go” and started conversations with senior leaders we need to add later this year?
What if because of all this work we made it so we didn’t have to pay search fees the rest of the year?
That last one… that likely covers most of the “cost” of keeping your recruiter(s).
At the end of conversation they said the reason they were so adamant about have this call today is because after taking a deep breath and holding it for the past two weeks… they have some business decisions that need to be made this week.
They end with:
Thank you for this… we’ve been a bit reactionary. We do need to think about how we come out the other side and how best to use the time we have until then.
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Nailed it Paul! Such great insights. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Janelle Schrader-Lundeby | March 31, 2020 at 07:47 AM