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Recruiters Be Calm and Carry On During #Shutdown2013

Frustration, anxiety and uncertainty. Yes, we all have it! What to do next?

As recruiters in the federal government community, we are also confronted with a large community of job seekers who are flooding you with resumes and applications. When the ball gets rolling again, you will need to hire -and fast- qualified cleared talent. What do you do while at a standstill?

Here are some recommendations on maintaining your employer brand and keeping your talent pipeline flowing while we wait out the shutdown: 1. Communicate, 2. Evaluate, 3. Initiate.

Communicate: Be sure to communicate with your talent community as to what you are doing with current applications and how you will be handling future applications.

• If you are furloughed, be sure your “out of office message” communicates what you are doing with current applications and your best advice for jobseekers applying for your current posted positions, such as customized, targeted applications rather than having applicants apply for every position.

• Update your LinkedIn status update again with a clear message of how you are reviewing current and future applications.

• Leverage your ATS – if you can, send out a message to your talent community via your ATS to share with your applicants the steps you are or will be taking to review submitted applications.

Evaluate: Be sure to keep an eye on your social media channels as frustrated job seekers may be trying to reach out to you for more information about submitted applications.

• If you have social media channels, be sure you are monitoring them through free web applications such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, so you can see whenever someone makes a comment about your company.

• We are monitoring many of the social media channels within our community and will try to alert as many as we can when we see any comments that might need addressing.

Initiate: You can leverage current tools to make sure you have the shortest ramp up time possible once you are back to hiring.

• Resume agents can help you keep track of resumes that are posted on your job boards. Resume agents only take a few minutes to set up.

• Job Descriptions are the first stop for many job seekers applying to your company, but if the formatting is off, there are misspellings or unclear descriptions; you may receive applications that do not meet your needs, or worse, you may not get any applications at all.

Finally, educate: if you have any tips you would like to share with the security cleared community on how to weather this storm, share them, just like one of our Best Recruiters did recently.