Are You Fit For Hiring Season?

Snow Cover Up for Slow Hiring?

For those of you living in the northern mid-west and eastern seaboard, sub-zero temperatures, freezing pipes & heavy snow through winter snow through February can disrupt your firm’s normal operations. It’s possible that weather may have contributed to altering some of your candidate interview schedules. But is snowfall a cover up for your firm’s recruiting efforts that have been idle, sluggish, or not yielding any tangible results since the winter holidays? Why wait for spring? We think it’s time to raise your recruiting thermostat. Now.

Spring Training Camp for Hiring Season

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
Roger Hornsby, Major League Baseball Player, Coach & Manager
2nd Highest Career Batting Avg after Ty Cobb

Waiting for spring is not an option for your critical engineering hiring. Figuratively speaking, move your recruiting team south (picture yourself in Fort Meyers FL, or Phoenix AZ), where the weather is warmer to loosen up for the hiring season ahead. It works for Major League Baseball, with their Grapefruit & Cactus League practices. It should work for us as well.

In February, Both of us once again flew down Florida for our semi-annual session with Mike Gionta, our recruiting coach. Some fellow recruiters had traveled from up north from Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and Ohio where there there were as many as  50 degrees (that’s Fahrenheit) of separation from Bonita Springs Florida weather, along the Gulf coast. There, we each shared recruiting tips as well as recruiting obstacles that were confounding our recruitment processes. Guess what. We all have, or have previously confronted the same recruiting issues. What was (once again) great is that we all received excellent feedback and suggestions that were immediately actionable.

Group recruiting exercises included recognizing at what point we step out of our recruiting comfort zone, identifying precisely what is causing us to flinch. It’s may be those curve balls that candidates throw at us. By adjusting our perspective in the ‘batter’s box’, and by keeping our focus on our committed objects, we improve our hiring swing….with practice. How is your practice coming along?

Time To Deliver a Higher Hiring Average

Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll share exercises designed to warm up your recruiting effort and close the degrees of separation with well-qualified candidates. True, we don’t have the abilities of a Rogers Hornsby, able to let our skills remain idle until spring, before resuming a terror run. We need to keep our skills active. Our companies also can’t wait. They need action and results now.

Best wishes hiring exceptional candidates this winter!
Minda & Alfredo