What I'm Hearing in May for TA Leaders

Hi there,

It’s been a busy month of economic changes, and I’ve seen how it’s affected other TA teams and our own business (more on that later).

However, in light of returning from Cuba and taking a minimalist approach to life and work—I’m going to take attempted positive approach to everything. You’ll see, let’s jump in.

🗞️ Headlines

• Canada added 90,000 jobs in April. Unexpectedly, it exceeded forecasts by 20,000. However, most jobs were in the professional, scientific and technical services industries. Unemployment rate remains unchanged at 6.1%.
  

• U.S. job growth slowed more than expected in April. Unemployment rate rises to 3.9% from 3.8%. Job losses were seen in professional and business services whereas retailers, construction and government saw slight increases. Interesting how the U.S. and Canada swapped roles this month.
  

• Hiring Paused: Unfortunately, I’m also seeing a depressed hiring market in the past month. I expect it may continue into the summer as a number of TA teams I’ve been talking to have paused hiring.

• Of the pockets of industries that are hiring, skilled talent sourcing is still the biggest challenge. Part of the solution is to proactively build a responsive talent pool since the candidate pool for these positions are much smaller (airport technicians, train conductors, healthcare professionals, etc).
  

  I’ve talked about it a lot last month so I’ll share more tips here instead.

✅ TA Exercise — go dark for a quarter.

I want to share one exercise we did at Mindfield during a slower hiring period, that has helped us increase efficiency two-fold—we went dark.

What does that mean? We paused what we were doing day-to-day and focused solely on what’s in front of us. We stopped implementing new processes and tools, taking on new every new business, and ruthlessly evaluated everything we did. The results were astounding:

• We identified tech we weren’t using sufficiently or were no longer necessary. This saved software costs.

• We also learned new ways to do things with our current tech stack

• We streamlined a number of processes and cross-departmental work across the entire recruitment process. This reduced time-to-hire and increased the quality of candidates we were getting for clients. It also saved a number of hours for our hiring managers.

• By giving our team more space to breathe and evaluate their day-to-day function, everyone came out of it refreshed and happier (who doesn’t like that?)

All in all, the slower hiring period may be a downer, but it doesn’t mean we have to react to it that way. TA leaders, consider “going dark” with your team when the time is right and you’ll be surprised at the result!

I’ll end here this month with one little plug, I’ll be speaking at HR.com’s State of High Volume and Hourly Hiring event. I’ll be sharing quick wins to fill your open roles. Check it out here