We’ve heard the term a thousand times by now: “workplace culture”. However, when was the last time you stopped to truly evaluate yours? Whether you’re a startup CEO establishing it at your own business or a first day new-hire getting a feel for it at your company, it’s important to consider workplace culture and modify it as times and employee needs progress. Healthy culture plays a crucial role in employee satisfaction, productivity, and longevity. With so many employees working remotely since 2020, the typical office structure has been turned on its head. Whether your company is returning to the office, continuing remotely, or adapting a hybrid model, here are four tips to upgrade your workplace culture this year:

The other day I was driving down the street and I saw a national pizza shop chain offering iPhones to new hires. I’ve seen signs in windows offering $500 to new hires. I was in a meeting with my boss talking about his niece who was considering signing a contract as a nurse for unlimited hours because the pay was too good to refuse. Everywhere you look—there’s a shortage of candidates and hires. What’s the best offering to get them in your pipeline?

This past year has been weird. Back in March of 2020, hiring slowed way down, and we lost a lot of colleagues because none of us knew what was next. How could anybody accurately predict how the economy would react in the short or long term in light of everything? A year and some months later, and we’ve flipped to clamoring for candidates to staff back up as quickly as possible—and truth be told, it is proving hard to find enough!

I’m sure you’re all doing your due diligence—posting those jobs, offering signing bonuses, sending out text campaigns, giving your current employees raised incentives to bring in their friends and connections.

But what have we not considered?

Corporate culture is the lifeblood of a company, it’s who you are. Crafting a strong corporate culture can be the difference in a company’s survival. An employee will work harder and fight for a company if they believe that that company will fight for them and if they believe in the organization as a whole. But where does corporate culture begin? That answer is simpler than most companies make it, recruiting. Recruiting is the seed from which your corporate culture grows and that includes how you treat candidates throughout the hiring process.

We’re coming out of an unprecedented (yes, it’s overused, but there’s a reason for that, it’s a perfect way to describe the last 15 months) time, and now we’re in the new normal. And that new normal includes more passive candidates than anyone anticipated. Many industries are struggling to fill positions and maybe it’s because there’s a higher health risk, some people need to be home to care for loved ones, and some are re-evaluating their career paths and moving into recession (and pandemic) proof industries. Regardless of why employers across the country are seeing a decline in engagement on their jobs, there are some recruitment solutions that might help you evade some of those performance issues when it comes to getting your jobs and hiring messages in front of the right audience.

The current US economy has been up and down this past year and it’s unclear how much or when the economy will fully recover, but with the CDC changing guidelines on masks, we seem to be on our way. This affects all aspects of business in this country which includes recruiting. Every business has to roll with the punches of the economy and adjusting your hiring practices to the economy can be an important step in weathering any economic storm.

It's been more than a year since the world changed, but as we're beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel, are job seekers and employers ready to get back out into the world? At Nexxt we’ve been checking in with job seekers to understand how their behavior over the course of 2020 into 2021 has changed when it comes to searching for jobs, their priorities, and their confidence levels.  Download the pdf.