By Simon Parkin

One of the continuing challenges facing the Recruitment function is moving from a reactive and primarily transactional focus to a proactive and enhanced recruitment model. The best time to build proactive pipelines of external talent is during hiring slowdowns which many of us are currently faced with. Recruiters usually aren’t that busy with hiring during a recession and need to constantly justify their roles. This is the perfect time to work with your business leaders and start planning for when hiring will be the priority again.

Think about when you first sat down with your hiring leaders to scope the position details and you asked the hiring leaders for a proposed start date, how many of them responded with “ASAP” or “yesterday”? How many of your hiring leaders complained about the time it takes to recruit talent externally? And how many of us recruiters continue to get frustrated with the pressure from hiring leaders? We know that for the most part, top external talent just doesn’t fall into our laps. Effective sourcing can take time especially for tougher and more specialized positions to fill.