Confidence In 2022
Happy New Year!
It’s one of the first business days of 2022… I hope you’ve set your resolutions
for this year because I’ve sure been setting mine.
My personal focus is to create confidence with my team, clients, prospects, myself, and literally
everyone I come in contact with.
If you’re a person involved with recruiting, you’re probably not feeling super confident about this
upcoming year. In fact, you might even be at your wits end… ready to give up.
Do you feel like the problems your organization faces with attracting and engaging great talent
are completely out of your control?
Things might feel out of your control, more specifically, for your ability to…
Solve problems
Take the right actions
Start seeing progress
See indicators that things are getting bette
And, be able to influence the end result….
That’s all where confidence comes from!
The problem right now is the world is in utter chaos- some things are better, and some
things are worse. But overall, most of us feel uncertain about what the future holds… even in
the next month.
For HR and the hiring world, the single biggest issue is creating a dependable and
scalable talent engine for your organization. A scalable and dependable talent engine
means that you have a proven strategy, but most teams don’t have anything in place that they
actually believe will create that outcome.
With an efficient talent engine, you have levers that you can pull that will work. When you pull
them you’ll consistently get a flow of qualified talent who…
● Feel excited about the prospect of working for you
● Will be less likely to ghost or reject you
● Will accept your offers so you can afford them
● Will get going and be successful as soon as possible
● Are committed to sticking around long enough to make an impact on your organization,
● Won’t bail at the first offer they get for a few more dollars per hour.
The lack of a proven strategy causes a lack of confidence.
Almost everybody in the business world right now feels unsure. If they don’t feel like they can
drive and generate qualified applicants for their jobs, then they are feeling fairly unconfident.
So what we end up doing is pulling back. We don’t want to make the wrong decision or waste
our time, money, or energy…
We don’t see any choices or options that are proven to work out there (or any that are even
hopeful to work), so we don’t make any decisions at all.
We freeze. But, even doing that is a decision… a decision that actually gives you less control.
When you decide not to change, not to act, not to do something that causes some momentum in
a good direction, then you’re left with the whims of the market and your competitors.
Look, you’re not alone in feeling this way. Almost every HR person and every organization I run
into right now feels this way.
In fact, my team felt the same way back at the beginning of 2021. Back in q1 almost a year ago,
they came to me and said…
● Our applicant flow was down for internal jobs. It was slipping.
● Quality was a bit down.
● People were taking longer to get back to us for interviews.
● Some of our jobs were staying open for a really long period of time, but shouldn’t have
been ones we’ve generally struggled to fill.
My team felt like we were no longer as unique as we used to be… it felt like we were just
another job in the crowd of jobs that all seem the same. But the funny thing is, looking back on
the data, we were actually out-recruiting almost every client in our system when measuring
applicants per job or employee referral results or anything like that.
But that didn’t matter. I could see my team’s confidence starting to decline.
Think about it… If you’re trying to grow a business at 45% per year, after 15 years of… growing 30 to 50% every single year, adding 1000s of new clients per year, building tons of new features,
launching new programs, dealing with the chaos and disruption of trade shows and SHRM events,
dealing with the chaos and disruption in the labor market, changes to job boards,
new competitors entering,
and consolidation...
Most likely, the biggest constraint will be your ability to grow your team when you need to grow
it. And the truth is… we were growing fast!
In 2021 we grew from 140 employees to 260… Hiring over 160 people during the last 12
months.
I’m guessing you’re being asked to help your company grow, expand, move forward, or at the
very least just ensure that you keep your headcount where it’s at with quality people.
Maybe you’re feeling like you can’t or don’t know how to do that, which probably causes you to
feel unconfident.
For the last year, I’ve worked to massively level up my own recruitment marketing game, as well
as that of our teams. And let me tell you… We saw amazing results!
We increased our direct applicant flow for our jobs by 300%.
We saw a 200% increase in applicants from free job boards.
We saw double the employee participation in our referral programs resulting in an almost 5x
increase in our employee referrals.
And that has been increasing each quarter, so 2022 is looking even better when it comes to
sourcing qualified talent. Across all of our positions from entry-level to customer support up
through sales, we’re seeing great results. But also for some really, really difficult jobs to recruit
for in product management and programmers. Jobs that are currently seeing massive pressure
from outside competitors offering insane amounts of money and generating high turnover within
our industry… we’re still able to source qualified talent!
But it wasn’t just that our recruitment marketing worked for us!
We also took on the recruiting of a restaurant chain for three months while their HR person was
out. We increased their management applications by 250% and left them with a strategy to
dramatically increase their entry-level and team-lead applicants.
We also launched a small business recruiting program in 2021 and brought on over 1000 small
businesses with five to 30 employees.
But, instead of just selling our software to these small businesses, and teaching them to go do it
on their own, we did something more… We took over their sourcing!
We created job seeker personas, wrote multiple versions of their ads, ensured that those jobs
weren’t just distributed to job boards, but that they targeted the right people with the right
message, and drove those people to apply.
The results were fairly impressive! Our small business clients who would typically be at a
disadvantage in a tight labor market were now out-recruiting our big clients who were running
our software on their own. They were generating almost 50% more applicants per job and
spending 1/5 of the ad spend.
Stop and think about that for a minute…
This idea that there are no applicants out there, or the market is so tight that there’s nothing you
can do simply isn’t true. There are small businesses with less money, less team, less budget, and less to offer people who are generating more applicants for less money than you are. It’s not there to brag, it’s there to show you that… There’s potential!
There are ways to solve some of these problems. This is really just to give you hope. There’s a
way to solve your organization’s talent problems! I’m giving some credibility to some of the ideas
I’m going to be sharing pretty aggressively this year.
So to kick off 2022, I challenge you to set a resolution and a goal.
Go grab your results from last year or last quarter.
1. Assess your flow. How many applicants did you generate? Divide that by the number of
jobs, the number of hires, as well as even your number of employees or locations. You’re just
trying to get your applicants, per job, per scale
2. Assess your sources. Grab all the total number of applicants for each of your sources.
Divide that by the total applicants to figure out the sourcing mix or what percentage of total
applicants are made up by each of your sources.
3. Assess your sourcing power for each of those sources. Take the number of applicants
you generated during a given period of time and divide that by the number of hires from that
source. This will tell you which of those sources aren’t just making up your applicant flow, but
which ones are the most powerful when it comes to actually generating hires.
4. Set a goal. Decide what you’re going to focus on for the first quarter. How much energy and
action are you willing to put towards it? What level of improvement would take it to a win, where
you would feel like it was showing progress and giving you confidence.
I’d love to hear what you came up with. So hit reply and let me know!
For me, our team will be focusing this quarter on further expanding our employee referral
program. We’ll be driving more and more referrals into our applicant pool to hopefully enable us
to hire another 200 to 300 people this next year!
If there’s any way I can help with your recruiting goals, I’d be more than happy to.
I’m offering a few free 60-minute hiring needs and strategy audit consultations! We can
set up a time to jump on a zoom call to unpack where you’re at today, talk about what’s working and what isn’t, and outline a recruitment marketing plan of attack for the first quarter of 2022 that will put you at the top of the hiring competition in your area!
Just reply back and let me know a couple of dates and times that would work for you and your
team. I’ll put something on my calendar and send you a zoom link.
I’m looking forward to an amazing year and I hope that you are too.