The last few weeks have seen me smack dab in the middle of the wedding circuit.  I’m getting to that age where a number of friends and family members are starting to get engaged and married and there is no busier time than the last summer months (July & August).

It’s in these months that the churches and reception venues get most of their business and the ones that are the most hotly contested with all the couples vying for the best venues and deals.  Couples that really have their act together know that they need to book early and understand what they want so that they can get the best date and experience for their special day.

While this is a relatively short window (8 weekends during these months) and is pretty targeted, I think that it can have some good parallels to recruiting.  Understanding your “wedding season” or the peaks and valleys of your hiring process can go a long way on how you best deploy the resources at your disposal to increase the performance of your recruitment marketing process.

Understanding timing in your Hiring process

For any hiring process, there are always ebbs and flows in terms of needs and open job positions.  It’s really up to the recruiting team to understand when the busy and slow times will be in their hiring process and understand what they can to best make use of their time and resources.

There are a number of things you can look at to make sure your timing is better in the hiring process.  But here are a few that can be good to focus on:

Anticipating Hiring Demand:  A priority hiring need can come upon you quickly and understanding / anticipating these needs can help you start recruiting for those candidates today.  Through a Talent Network or proactive sourcing you can start creating Talent pipelines for hires that you will be ready to make tomorrow.  If you can start creating relationships with these candidates today and engage them both individually and through targeted communications, you will more than likely have qualified candidates that you can pick from when these positions become available.

One interesting way I’ve seen this done is for positions that a company hires for a lot.  Some companies have used generic position job ads posted weekly to capture candidate information in anticipation of a position opening up.  This is a great potential strategy for retail and other high churn positions.

Resource Deployment:  Whether it’s your recruiters & sourcers managing their time or controlling your job board inventory, you need to understand what you can expect from your hiring demand in order to delegate resources effectively.  When internal hiring demand is lower, it may be a good time to start building out those Talent Pipelines for future job openings.  When demand is higher, it’s the time to use job board inventory in job distribution campaigns and spend your recruiter’s time on screening potential candidates.  Understanding these highs and lows will help you best use all the resources available to your organization.

Timing of your Job Ads:  While I talk a lot about tracking the performance of your messaging and the recruitment sources you use, here is another aspect of your job ads that may affect performance.  What days and time periods have the greatest impact on overall conversions?  By looking through your recruitment metrics, you may be able to find some key takeaways on when the best days and times to post jobs are.  While this is not an exact science, it may be something to analyze as you are looking to improve job ad performance.

Building a better strategy

As you are building out your recruitment strategy, it’s important to understand your current and anticipated needs over the course of the year.  It will help you determine the best use of your resources and start planning for the roles and types of candidates you need to start finding and engaging with.  You will most likely have multiple “Wedding Seasons” in your recruitment cycle and it’s crucial that you are ready to capitalize on every one.