There’s no shortage of sustainability metrics across the more tangible parts of business. More than 80% of companies today report how much power we’re saving, plastic we’re recycling, paper we’re not using. But a recent survey revealed only 5% of recruiters use redeployment rate as a metric.
None of this compares to the significance of environmental impact vs. workforce resources. But it does highlight an opportunity in how we think about sustainability in the workplace.
Many recruiting teams and staffing businesses overlook redeployment rates in favor of sourcing stats. Let’s walk through why redeployment is a mindset shift essential for today’s employment environment.
Redeployment, a form of talent mobility, is the purposeful movement of talent from one spot to another — be it across roles, teams, locations, projects or clients.
In other other words, it’s taking those candidates you’ve already invested the time to source, vet and place, and keeping them employed within your business or among your staffing clients.
Communication unlocks redeployment opportunities
Redeployment, similar to other phases of the candidate experience, rises and falls with communication.
Within companies, talent mobility can be an effective retention strategy, empowering workers to pursue paths within the business. It not only engages employees in the process of plotting the trail they want to blaze, through career pathing or feedback cycles, but helps retain institutional knowledge, shrink employee churn and bolster company culture.
Talent mobility challenges both management and the employee to get clear (and stay clear) on the employee’s career objectives and the business’ goals. Here, both constant communication and transparency are paramount. Redeployment, in the staffing setting, faces a similar scenario.
For staffing agencies, redeployment relies on the maintenance of a relationship with candidates you’ve already placed, understanding their career objectives, over the long term, as much as knowing their strengths and what opportunities lie around the corner. Like anything worthwhile, this type of relationship requires work. And, again, plenty of communication.
These kinds of relationships aren’t automatic
Maintaining that kind of relationship sounds straightforward enough. Until you do the math.
More than half of staffing and recruiting leaders said they expected hiring volume to grow over the next year, according to a recent survey. Meanwhile, most of those leaders also said the size of their recruiting teams would either contract or stay the same.
Pile onto that equation the current state of the U.S. job market (i.e., there are still more open jobs than there are people to fill them).
So, there’s neither the time or the human beings available to meet the demand staffing and recruiting experts see coming your way. Certain doom? No, just some automation.
It’s no secret we’re proponents of responsible automation. When you take the time to design your hiring process with a candidate-first mindset, you’ll understand what candidates need to know and when — not to mention where they want to take their careers.
Automating elements of candidate engagement on that foundation helps recruiters create the time and space they need to keep tabs on whose career objectives map up to a client’s well-timed opportunity.
How engagement automation supports redeployment
Successful redeployment strategies don’t rely on last-minute calls to see what a candidate is up to next. Regular check-ins can be automated throughout a worker’s current work engagement to help the recruiter know how to prepare for possible next steps in redeployment.
But workflows aren’t the only efficiency perking up a recruiter’s productivity. Redeployment, at its core, is a smart and sustainable use of resources, too.
Recruiters today tend to prioritize metrics, like resumes screened, calls made, interviews done, that put sourcing and vetting new candidates above nurturing current relationships — or even digging into your talent database.
What if you reframed your recruiting metrics with a sustainability state of mind? Consider the time, money, attention, brain power it takes to recruit new candidates Now, add up the resources you save when you maintain relationships, automate ongoing engagements and know how, when and where you’ll place a candidate once this job is done.
Three small steps toward sustainability
Similar to environmental sustainability, it’ll take time to shift and naturally prefer methods of more sustainable recruiting models and business practices. But here are three ways you can start small.
1. Build redeployment into your recruiting life cycle.
2. Add ongoing check-ins to your candidate engagement workflows.
3. Create a redeployment metric to report on your next dashboard and iterate.
Put these steps into practice for at least a quarter and then tweet what you’ve learned (or how your business has changed) to @workllama.