You probably know this already, but for my day gig I work for my family's janitorial service. Among many other hats that I wear, I'm responsible for the human resources function. I suppose that is logical since my professional experience and education is all human resources. Anyway, the reason I'm sharing this again is because we got some really exciting news last week. Our company was awarded a new contract. Yay!! So to get prepared we're going to need to add to staff in a very, very short period of time. That means I need to maximize my time to make sure we have candidates ready to work, trained and some back-ups just in case someone doesn't show up or otherwise doesn't work out. Because this is a super effective and efficient way to do a mass hiring effort, I thought it would be super cool to share the process with you. Just a quick disclaimer of sorts. Since I'm doing this and blogging about it in real time, there won't be a lot of how-to or alternate options on how you can customize this for various situations. But, I'll be rolling out a course soon that will teach you in detailed steps how to plan your own hiring blitz. So if you're interested in learning more that will be a great resource. Ok so here's the behind the scenes of how I'm putting together this hiring blitz. It's gonna be fun! BUT FIRST, WHAT IS A HIRING BLITZI guess it would be a good idea to first explain a hiring blitz. A hiring blitz is a mass hiring event. The goal is to choose a day and interview a large number of candidates. You may also choose to hire applicants on the spot. This is method is very helpful when you need to hire several people, especially in a short period of time. Also, this method is a great go-to for seasonal positions, or for businesses with high turnover. I choose this recruiting method when I'm short on time and I need to hire more than two people. It saves me time and hopefully will avoid having to spread interview days out over several days. DAY 1: GETTING MY RECRUITING LIFE TOGETHER Today is mostly planning. Taking some time to plan what the flow for the event always equals a more successful hiring blitz. These events can easily get out of hand if they are not well planned and organized. I'm doing myself and everyone who will assist me with this task a huge favor by working through the details. Somethings I want to work out today are
Once all that is figured out I can work out the recruiting logistics. Our event date is November 18th. That is a little more than a week. Whew. So I gotta get to work. We've decided that four people are hired. We also have a goal of having six candidates as alternates. Experience has taught us that having one and half the number of people that you need ready to hire works out well when starting up a new project.
DAY 2: GETTING THE WORD OUTAlright folks, so today my focus is on getting those applications rolling in. There can't be a hiring blitz without a blitz of applications. I usually receive about 5-10 applications per day on average. I have a goal of interviewing 50-60 people. Not every applicant will be called in for an interview so I anticipate needing over 150 new applications to make my goal. Now, before I go on you may be wondering why in the world I need to do so many interviews to find 10 hireable people. Good question. This isn't an industry standard. It is purely based on my experience with previous interviews and the results. If you want to know more about this I explain how you can figure this out for your own unique situation in a future course. Recruiting is like sales in a way. If I need to get more applicants I have to advertise the job more and make the employment offer compelling. The plan for today is to organize the marketing for the hiring blitz. I plan to advertise the hiring blitz in the following ways:
In addition to things I'm going to post frequently about the hiring blitz on our company social media pages and share on my personal pages as well. To spread the reach I'm going to use a few hashtags that will hopefully get my job posting in more peoples times lines and feeds. A few recruiting hash tags that have worked well before are:
DAY 3: REVIEW THE APPLICATIONS + SET UP INTERVIEWSThankfully the postings have caused an influx of job applications. Before I jump right into the process of how I'm going to review the application, lets recap how effective each method has been in producing applicants. So far this how each method stacks up: Facebook Ads: 97 applications Craig's List: 59 applications Employ Florida: 23 Grassroots: 14 Communicating with past applicants: 5 (that re-applied) TOTAL APPLICATIONS: 198 So by far Facebook and Craig's List have been the most effective sources of applicants. I'm pretty pleased with the number of applications received, especially given the short time period that I have to recruit. Now I have to review the applications and begin to set up applications. This is no small number of applications to review and I have like, today to get it done. Here's my plan of attack:
DAY 4: PREPARE FOR THE INTERVIEW DAYWhew, the application review and interview scheduling is finally done. At the end I have 32 confirmed interviews. That's a lot of interviews. I'm gonna need a good night sleeps and lots of good coffee to get through that day. But on to the work for today. Since I have 32 people coming to our office there has to be some set up for that. I'm doing a morning, afternoon and early evening interview sessions to limit the crowds and give me a little break as well. That means I need to make sure that we have enough seating and adequate copies of the forms that applicants fill out when they show up for their interview. We have an interview packet that we use for all interviews that I will review and prepare copies as well. I also want to hold quick meeting with my assistant to make sure she's clear on how I want things to flow. DAY 5: THE BIG DAY!All I can say is that I'm exhausted. Simply exhausted. But before I curl up on the couch, I need to share how everything turned out. So of the 32 interviews scheduled, 28 showed up. That means there were 4 no-shows. I try not to let no-shows frustrate me. I look at it as time saved in the long run. Of course those applicants are automatically rejected from further consideration. The good news is that I was able to fill all the positions and did not need to schedule a second interview session. I decided against doing on site hiring but instead informed all the applicants of when I would follow up with them and the start date. I have followed up with the applicants I wanted to hire and they all accepted. The next steps are to get them scheduled for new hire orientation and training before their start date. All in all I think the hiring blitz was a success. It certainly accomplished my hiring goals in the least amount of time. So what do you think? Do you feel this is something that could work for your businesses hiring needs?
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