How We Overcame Our Talent Shortage.

Everybody’s been struggling with a talent shortage. If you want to work for a successful organization, it’s going to need to build a powerful talent engine. And it’s not just an HR problem.

A lack of a properly running talent engine- finding, hiring, driving performance, and retaining people will either amplify your growth, stall it, choke it out, cause your decline, or even potentially cause the failure of the organization.

And it’s surprisingly no different for a technology company like ApplicantPro.

We had a crazy leap year last year and my team went full-tilt into recruitment marketing. We came out stronger now than we have ever been.

Looking back to 18 months ago, we were struggling with our managers feeling like they weren’t getting enough applicants. They weren’t getting as many applicants so they weren’t able to hire the skilled people we needed them to hire. I figured I’d pull the curtain back on what we have done over the last 18 months.

Let’s start with the backstory…

Looking at Q3 2020 through Q4 2021- That’s 18 months or six quarters where our team grew from 129 employees to 234. That’s an almost two times headcount! We added 130 people, and had to hire over 180 people to get there because of turnover.

We were also growing like crazy, not just from a headcount but from a revenue standpoint.

-Our background checks were back and active.

-Other teams and companies were out there trying to find more talent, therefore engaging us.

-We were launching new initiatives and new service offerings.

-We were going after new niches and building new platforms.

These new initiatives were creating new types of jobs. We now needed different people with different creative backgrounds and different business skills. As an organization, we hire along the entire spectrum of jobs: data entry or telephone-based customer service up to technical jobs, such as product managers, programmers and testers, business or lead-gen jobs in marketing or the content writing space, and lots of salespeople who are part appointment setters, Account Executives etc. We also hire accountants and HR people and everybody else a normal business would hire.

Our challenge was back in the last half of 2020 as the economy opened back up, and things were roaring back to life. A lot of our initiatives over the summer were starting to pay off but our team was struggling to fill some customer service positions that we normally wouldn’t struggle with. This struggle is what started the entire conversation.

We were also forecasting needs for new management-level positions, higher-level sales reps, and just general growth of new initiatives. We were seeing pressure and what would become some pretty major turnover in programming/product management teams, because of how ho the tech market has become and continues to be. I got all fired up! This is my thing.

How can I expect our clients and prospects to actually believe that we can solve their sourcing and recruitment marketing problems if we were struggling?

So I went head down and learned everything I could about recruitment marketing, I dug into the history of normal marketing, normal lead demand gen marketing, to come up with all the ideas that we could possibly find. As a team, we came up with a plan.

Now understand, we weren’t exactly failing when it comes to sourcing candidates.

Actually, we probably were about the best company out there for our size and demographic. If we compare our applicants per job, and especially from power sources like employee referrals- per employee, we actually saw that we were at the top of the pack compared to all of our clients.

We had access to that data. Our measurement for employee referrals per employee per quarter was 0.43. Compare that to the average for a big group of clients at 0.20. We were twice as good!

But twice as good doesn’t solve the problem. Our managers were struggling to feel confident

in:

-making hiring decisions

-growing their team

-driving employees into promotions out of their own departments into bigger jobs

We were seeing fewer applicants and less qualified candidates than normal. It caused a huge

confidence challenge for a lot of our team.

As I would bring initiatives forward and say, Hey, we want to do X. And when we do this, we’re going to need this type of talent or this type of talent growth or expansion, their confidence was clear in their eyes that were not really sure that we could do that. They were concerned that it could cause us some other issues like longer time to fill, lower quality of hires which means

needing to invest more time training and developing talent, and potentially a higher cost per hire.

So we came up with a plan. The first thing we’re going to do in the first few quarters is short-

term emergency management… putting out some fires which normally involves taking our

inbound strategy and retargeting.

Who are we trying to engage?

Are we getting in front of them?

Do our ads actually speak to their pain?

How can we adjust the type of job structure?

How can we improve our benefits compared to everybody else?

In the midterm (the second two quarters) we reset our entire employee referral program, even though it was already more successful than any of our clients. We took it on ourselves to figure out if we could make massive improvements in the number of referrals we were getting, and then long term driving massive referral marketing, not just employees, but ex employees, customers, people in our community influencers etc. And so that was kind of our three step, short term, mid term long term strategy. We came up with some different ways of how we measure success, really, it comes down to finding not just the number of applicants received the quality applicants, but some measurable to compare it against. 

Generally this, this either has to do with the number of hires, the number of openings, or my favorite now is the number of headcount, we’d look at applicants, hires and headcount. And then we’d start to extrapolate or compare those numbers by dividing them to come up with a metric that we could then compare versus our starting point and each quarter of improvement. We also drill down those same metrics into each of our segments inbound, which would be normally job board, marketing of facebook group marketing outbound, which is where more disruptive email type marketing, and social media marketing, and then finally referrals, employee referrals, ex employees, customers, and influencers out in the community. And in each of these areas is the same kind of segment and metric total applicants, total hires from those things that could says applicants per hire, the number of higher growth and the percentage of hires as a total pool of hires for that given segment.