Another out of office email hits my inbox. It’s early August and the Great British Summer Exodus is in full swing.
The long school holiday is the perfect opportunity for many people to get away with their families.But just because many people choose to take their vacation at this time doesn’t mean that businesses stop working or that people stop looking for a new job.
It may be counterintuitive, but summer is the perfect opportunity to get ahead on both strategic projects and closing on those key hires you’ve been trying to make all year.
Once September rolls around, work will get busier and interviewing can become deprioritised. People are still looking for jobs during the summer so those employers who stay on course can hire top talent with less competition from other companies.
At Hired, we see the number of active employers drop by 30 – 40% during holiday periods, and those companies that continue to hire benefit from this drop off in competition for talent. Your employees may actually have more time to interview candidates in the summer because it isn’t a busy time for the organisation.
Not only is summer a good time to focus on hiring internally, it’s also the period when people start to think about their next career move. Many of us still work to the academic school year calendar, hitting our start date anniversaries in Q3.
Approaching the two or five year job-versary causes many people to turn their thoughts to their next step and the obvious time to start a new job is September, after the summer lull – a fresh start for the new school year!
Other people decide to start looking for a new job on their summer break. They have time to start their job search and more flexibility to interview.
For candidates, the summer hiring slowdown can be frustrating if they are trying to look for a new job – with hiring managers and recruiters away, the recruitment process can become painfully slow. Continuing to interview during this period will enable you to access this fresh batch of job hunters before anyone else.
What if you don’t have an immediate hiring need? My advice is to always be looking to hire and always interviewing. Even if you don’t have an immediate need, you might meet a great candidate you want to keep in touch with. The key in this kind of situation is to remember that how you decline someone is often the most important thing you can do.
If you leave someone with a positive impressive of your company and team, even if you don’t hire them today, you might hire them in the future and they will tell their friends about what a great company you are (and you might end up hiring their friends!). Focusing on giving candidates a great experience and declining them with grace and respect is a win-win situation and can be a way you differentiate yourself from the competition.
Top Tips for Summer Hiring:
– Develop a pipeline – Candidates continue to look for jobs during the summer so use this time to attend meetups and conference, host developer socials and scour recruitment marketplaces like Hired.com for top talent in order to build you talent pipeline. There will be less competition for the best candidates at this time so be strategic and stay active!
– Make hiring a priority – Just because several people from your team are on vacation doesn’t mean you should declare a hiatus from hiring. Assign someone in your team as responsible for making sure recruitment processes stay on track and be flexible with scheduling interviews.
– Keep in contact – Best practice is to get back to a candidate within 24 hours of an interview to let them know your decision. If you can’t call them the next day then make it part of your process to respond to them with a decision or an update within three days. Ideally schedule the next round of interviews within three days of the previous interview.
– Move Fast – Top candidates are usually off the market within three weeks. Being continuously in the market for top talent and refining your recruitment practices to make them more efficient will enable you to capitalise on everyone else’s slow processes.