How to Navigate Talent Acquisition During a Recession

In the face of a recession, companies have new hiring goals and, in turn, need to rethink their talent acquisition strategies. Here's what we can learn from the companies that are doing it right.

During a recession, companies often need to change talent recruitment strategies. Market fluctuations can bring hiring freezes and layoffs. As a result, talent directors’ goals drastically change. Daily tasks to fill numerous positions can suddenly halt. But companies still need their recruitment departments. The most resilient companies continue to invest in their brand engagement, talent pools, and recruitment regardless of staff reductions and budget cuts. In this article we will address the opportunities your talent department has during a recession and share examples of companies leading the way in their everyday efforts.

How to restructure recruitment during a recession

Companies will always need quality talent to consistently compete. During past recessions, brands such as Apple and Walmart have been known to shift focus toward their Research & Development programs or technology efficiencies. This is proof that not all budgets disappear. They get reallocated, much like your talent needs. If you find your organization in this position, address which new employees are needed to innovate your products and services. How might your careers content and targeting need to change in order to reach these new individuals?

It is critical to maintain a positive brand reputation in the marketplace regardless of recessionary forces swirling around you. Your brand’s image and visibility will affect your current engagement rates amongst talent pools and future hiring rates. Therefore, your talent acquisition department and executives should play an integral part in continuously building a company’s positive reputation.

Here are some inspiring examples from a few companies that make talent recruitment their everyday priority:

HubSpot

HubSpot, a marketing and sales software company, has grown tremendously since it was first founded in 2006. With over 5,000 employees today, they ranked as the #4 Best Place To Work in 2021 by the Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Awards. Their success in recruiting and growing such widespread positive reviews wasn’t luck, however. Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah has said, “The best companies are deliberate about culture. They design and defend it.”

In their earlier years of growth, HubSpot’s leadership made the decision that they were going to spend hours properly defining and documenting their organization’s shared beliefs, values, and practices. Their work produced the HubSpot Culture Code slide deck, a publicly published template for both employees and other companies to reference and use. This Culture Code is continuously updated and used internally, which only solidifies its purpose and strength.

Due to HubSpot’s early culture manifestation and publication, they are seen as one of the leading employers. Their company’s reputation has reached both new employees and other employers alike. And their efforts haven’t stopped there. HubSpot has continued to make their public presence known. Most recently, they’ve started the #GoodBossEnergy hashtag campaign promoting employees from any organization to share good boss experiences across channels.

Quantum Metric

Mario Ciabarra, the CEO of Quantum Metric, started his software startup in 2015 with the goal of “helping organizations align with the single version of customer-defined and quantified truth.” In the tech industry, where turnover rates historically averaged 13% prior to the global pandemic, Mario decided to run his company differently.

As he wrote recently, “Over time, as we started to scale. I began to realize that our technology is only as good as the people behind it--the people who not only build our products but also build relationships with our investors, partners, and customers.”

Remember, if you’re an organization that is reallocating efforts toward Research & Development during a down market, you’ll need the right people to help you innovate, just like Ciabarra has done.

Like HubSpot, Ciabarra and his team value employee feedback and culture. In Quantum Metric’s case, using third-party channels like Glassdoor is a great way to peer into a team’s honest reactions. As Ciabarra has written, “I regularly read our Glassdoor reviews, and I take to heart what my employees share about how they're being treated and what might need to be changed.”

Take a second to reflect on what employee review sites and recruitment channels your organization uses. Could they be better monitored or utilized as you maintain a steadfast employer image during a recession? Are you publishing content across various channels that uphold your company’s story, vision, and Employee Value Proposition (EVP)?

As a result of Quantum Metrics’ leadership actions, their employer reputation across channels remains positive and helps with their brand exposure, recruitment, and growth compared to the thousands of other tech firms.

Barstool

The history of Barstool Sports includes controversy, and the company does not shy from the public spotlight. However, if you dig deeper into the content that they produce weekly, you’ll see that they are genuinely listening to their target audience and subsequentially the type of employee they’re looking to attract.

Tune into CEO Erika Nardini’s podcast, Token CEO, for example. For years she’s brought on influential business and sports leaders to interview them on trendy business topics. As of late, she’s launched a subset of her podcast called Work Like a Girl, described as follows: “Every Tuesday morning we're dropping a 15 min (ish) radio show. Barstool CEO gives unprecedented access to our listeners, answering live calls on anything from business decisions to life advice.”

It's likely not by coincidence that she started producing career content that is more relatable to the young female audience that they are looking to brand with and hire. She even went as far as taking a call from a rejected Barstool candidate to provide corporate insight and advice.

Rather than just approaching your own audience when you need a quick job position filled, think about how you can build rapport and trust with them daily. Like Erika, you may find yourself growing a following of thousands that not-so-coincidentally align with your future talent targets. It will be easier to source applicants from a large, engaged talent pool when the time comes for your company to hire.

Amazon

As written in his 1998 shareholder letter, former CEO Jeff Bezos made talent recruitment a top business priority for Amazon: “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.” Apart from their internal hiring processes and culture initiatives, Amazon is often highlighted as a top employer due to the sheer number of people they employ. As of 2022, they are the second largest employer in the United States, right behind Walmart, with roughly 1.5+ million employees.

Amazon has become so much more than an online retailer over the years, making them a Prime (no-pun intended) example of a deeply innovative conglomerate. They encompass web service solutions, package shipping, grocery delivery, brick-and-mortar retail stores, music/movie streaming content, healthcare pharmaceuticals, and more. Their ability to acquire the right talent in a short amount of time has helped them path the way for such growth through various economic fluctuations.

Much like Amazon, if you’re looking to diversify your talent and hire in divisions that will either help you maintain revenue or innovate during a recession, you must have a strong talent acquisition strategy. Amazon’s own approach starts with data. One example is surveying new hires about the specific factors that drove them to apply and accept jobs. The most popular responses, such as “benefits” or “training programs” can then inform language or navigation changes made to their Career website.

With size and revenue come some benefits. Not every company will have billions of dollars to spend on recruitment ads like Amazon, and given the timing of a recession, your typical budgets might be cut as well. Although Amazon employs numbers on a massive scale, they aim to speak to individuals, thought. Besides investing in mass advertising, they’ve also developed several recruitment programs geared toward specific sub-sets of individuals, such as Warriors@Amazon for veterans or the CamperForce which offers seasonal warehouse jobs to migrating travel enthusiasts. Could you focus on growing similar recruitment styles in your own company?

How will recruiting look in 2023?

When widespread layoffs occur, it becomes increasingly harder to find the most highly skilled and qualified candidates out of the sea of new people looking for jobs. A few ad hoc social media posts about your company’s culture simply won’t cut it. As demonstrated by the above examples, you must integrate your talent acquisition into daily activities and involve your recruiters, human resources, executives, and employees as a whole.

During a recession, your KPI’s may shift from number of new onboards to brand exposure and talent pool growth, but if cared for, your organization will effectively compete better in both talent wars and business.

Contact IDX

IDX can help your business design and manage successful talent acquisition strategies during all economic cycles. Read more about IDX’s work with talent acquisition here. And, read our recently published The Guide to Successful Talent Acquisition.