How to Sidestep the Staffing Summer Slump

Avoid the staffing summer slump by dodging the distractions that affect your business, placements, and recruiter productivity. Here’s how.

While many firms are seeing surges in client business, there is still a massive shortage of candidates across the globe.

On top of the candidate shortage, summer typically means more distractions for both recruitment teams and candidates. And everyone.

“According to a recent study, workplace productivity is estimated to drop 20 percent during the summer.”

To help, we’ve compiled these tips to dodge distractions, keep candidates (and recruiters) engaged, and even enhance your processes.  So, you end up having more time for summer fun without losing your profit margin.

A February 2021 article notes, Distractions cost the US economy more than $650 billion each year. When you consider workplace disruptions and social media notifications, employees can be off task up to five hours a day. 

1. Distraction Diverters for Recruiters

Dodging Communication Barriers

Like most people, summertime comes with vacations, time-off, and kids out of school. All of these factors (and more) are not only a distraction and schedule challenge for recruiters, but also for candidates they are managing or seeking.

Communication is a fundamental necessity for any successful business. An internal chat system allows teams to seamlessly communicate whenever and from wherever so no one gets lost or dropped along the way and everyone still gets to enjoy their time off!

Our TrackerChat feature was designed to keep teams on the same page and “in the know” with important details. The biggest advantage of TrackerChat is that it is fully integrated into your Tracker ATS and CRM, meaning all chats and communications are logged and linked. Easy. This 2-way chat allows you to tag others on important messages, send links, and keep a history. All from any device (including mobile!)

Meeting Marathons

Meetings are important, there’s no questioning that, but only if they are done effectively. If not, meetings can become a big distraction to individuals and teams.

While we’re not saying to stop your necessary meetings, we are going to tell you to evaluate what needs to be a meeting and what doesn’t. Oftentimes meetings are scheduled without a clear outcome or “what’s next” discussion. Other times they are to share information.

The way we’ve resolved the unnecessary meetings is by building functional, fast, and relevant reporting features. One of the biggest benchmarks for teams and for having meetings is to see where are we now and what are we missing? Trackers Reporting is robust and allows for quick access and analysis from all data within our system pulled into easy-to-read reports whenever you need them.

Rather than spend time distracted in a meeting, spend it sharing relevant reporting with those on the team who need them.

“TrackerRMS has a personalized dashboard. Each employee comes in every morning and ready to start my day.” – Diana G., Tracker User

Tracker has a variety of reporting features from scheduled and commission reporting to customized reporting and KPI tracking. Any data input into our system can be reported on quickly and analyzed to save you and your team time. 

Remove Excess

One of the biggest distractions within a recruitment team is the necessary, tedious tasks that take up a lot of time. While not difficult, these tasks, such as building candidate profiles and scanning job boards, can become cumbersome which can lead to distractions.

At Tracker, we want people to work smarter, not harder. Our software was designed to enhance a recruiter’s job to give more time back for building better relationships with candidates and clients.

Recently, we’ve developed features like Watchdogs, Resume Parsing, and Automation that tackle productivity head on.

These features specifically save recruiter’s time by taking the above-mentioned tasks off their plates (and even working while you’re sleeping)!

Removing excess to focus on the human parts of the job are what Tracker does best, without compromising any of the details or quality.

Other Distractions

While technology like Tracker can support streamlining your processes and eliminating the tedious tasks that drive distractions, other distractions still linger that need to be addressed from a company culture and policy perspective.

According to a Care.com Business study, these are the top 10 summer distractions employees deal with: 

1. The Weather.
2. FOMO. People are constantly checking their phone for fear of missing out on a spontaneous lake trip coordinated in the group chat.
3. The Thermostat. According to Grasshopper, 46% of people don’t like the temperature in the office. Too much (or not enough) air conditioning in the office can affect productivity. via
4. Vacation. Planning it. Taking it. Recovering from it. Oh the myriad ways vacation can be a summertime distraction.
5. Child Care. Now that the kids are on summer break, many parents struggle to piece together child care plans that won’t break the bank.
6. Water Breaks. Staying hydrated can actually help with remaining alert, but it’s easy to get pulled into conversation and distracted from work when you step away from your desk to grab a drink.
7. Cookouts.
8. Chatty Co-workers. They just have to tell you about their trip to the beach last weekend.
9. Summer traffic. Who wants to stick around at work only to sit in traffic in a hot car?
10. The Pool.

We live in a highly stimulated environment with immediate access to distractions. While you can’t avoid all of these, it’s important to understand how much of this is taking place in your teams.

This also means understanding how best each recruiter works. The benefit of Tracker is that our cloud-based software works anywhere. It works for anyone, from those who prefer the work-from-home option away from noisy offices to those who thrive around others.

Like onboarding a new client, it’s important to onboard new recruiters to your team with set expectations on flexibility and productivity to assure distractions don’t take over and you can avoid the summer slump.

Set policies and expectations through onboarding combined with Tracker’s industry leading ATS, you’re sure to see high productivity and success all summer long, eliminating distractions and elevating results.

Keeping Candidates & Clients Committed

It’s important to note, if your recruiters are experiencing these distractions, it is very likely your highly valued candidates are, too.

Just like your internal recruiting and staffing teams, candidates and your clients can become quiet and disengaged during the summer months as distractions stack up.

While you may not be able to forecast all these distractions, you can keep up your momentum throughout the summer to stay ahead (or on top of) the ever-challenging summer schedule.

Candidate Engagement

Keeping candidates engaged may be your tougher challenge. As more activities consume their schedule, they may put job-hunting on the back burner, especially if they are passive candidates, which accounts for most of the qualified candidates on the market.

In fact, many passive candidates are even more active during the summer months when their current workplace environment is slower, which allows them more time to search job boards and seek out new opportunities.

Summer is a great time to cut through the clutter and grab their attention. It’s just going to have to look a little different.

1. One of the first and simplest steps you can take is to simplify your application process. Review your whole process and see if there are any steps you can eliminate or edit down to save them time. They don’t want to jump through a million hoops when they could be outside watching their favorite baseball team. Make it simple and cut out all the “extra and unnecessary.”
2. Personalize your communications! According to a Campaign Monitor report, the average open rate for email is between 20-40%. Personalizing communications can increase that open rate by up to 26%. Tracker’s Automation features allow you to not only personalize and send out communications via email and text, but also send them based on specific actions or “triggers” to assure you’re not missing out on important timing for communications.  
3. Be flexible! Summer schedules are busy and the last thing an interested candidate wants is to have to change plans for an interview or screening. This is one of the reasons clients love our video interviewing feature. There’s no need to schedule anything and candidates can send in a video interview directly from their phone. You just have to set up the questions.  

Tip: Make sure you’re not asking for the same information more than once. This frustrates candidates and is viewed as a huge waste of time.

Client Collaboration

Clients, just like candidates and your team members, are not immune from the summer slump. From vacation to flexible schedules, you can still support, communicate, and move their needle forward, even if you’re getting their out of the office message more often.

1. Work from a plan! While client’s will surely have shifting targets, an overall plan with benchmarked goals offers your team the ability to work without as many meetings and interactions. Annual plans and quarterly check-ins are a great way to project what’s needed and get ahead of the game. Even if they’re in and out, you already have a good idea of what they need (or want filled in their funnel). 
2. Create short and long lists. These are great tools to fill the funnel and have on-hand for when a specific position may open. If you know from your reporting that you typically need X number of positions, you can use Tracker to source candidates that would fit those and create these lists to pull from immediately.  Consider this your internal talent pool you’re filling over the summer to jump into as soon as the need emerges, whenever it emerges. 
3. Automate what you can! With clients and your team members in and out, using tech and automation are a must. One way to ensure you’re not missing out on ANY opportunities for your client is to set up Watchdogs through Tracker. This feature scans job boards based on your specifications for any new, qualified candidates. On top of that, it will auto-parse and auto-engage to begin communications immediately.  
4. Anytime access. While summer is a time when people don’t want to be reached, we also know that emergencies arise as well as the fact that tech can allow us to be away, but still connected. Tracker allows for easy and simple access for everyone, including candidates and clients. No waiting until they’re back in the office for a reply or to watch a video interview. They can enjoy their vacation and you can get the feedback you need. Anytime, anywhere, with our single sign-on platform and mobile app. 

In Summary

If you’re ready to ensure you don’t dive into distractions with your recruitment team, candidates, and clients this summer, connect with us to schedule a free consult of how our recruitment software makes you and your team more efficient all year long. Even summer.