Companies that recognize the significant role talent acquisition plays in their organization have a better chance of withstanding ongoing economic climate changes.

This is guest blog post from Jason David.

Many of us have seen the predictions: office culture as we know it is never coming back. The effects of COVID-19, and the accompanying diaspora that have left so many workers performing their functions remotely, have many of us wondering if the strictures of 9-to-5 physical office presence makes as much sense as it seems to have made for so long. It even has employers wondering if offering prospective hires the option to work from home will be necessary to remain competitive in the labor market. My answer to that possibility is: it’s simply too early to say.

It would be an understatement to say that healthcare workers are busy. For instance, nurses typically work 12-hour shifts and if they're open to changing jobs, the last thing they want to do is update their resume and search for a new opportunity at the end of a long day.

These demanding schedules that healthcare workers face is one of the many reasons why it can be challenging to hire and recruit in the healthcare industry. Traditional hiring strategies can fail to fill these positions on their own, but when paired with more effective practices—it’s now easier than ever to find qualified candidates and get in touch with them.

Sorting through a large pool of candidates for one job opening can be exhaustive for hiring managers. It’s easy to just skim over resumes and latch onto familiar industry terms or verbiage that perfectly aligns with the role you’re hiring for. But when you sift through your list of candidates, try to look past what they’ve already done and towards what they are capable of achieving instead. Too often, hiring managers find themselves paying more attention to the prior achievements that candidates outline on their resume or cover letters. In doing this, they miss out on opportunities to connect with applicants from a more dynamic background; ones that can add value to their organization.

At Nexxt we surveyed our job seeker audience in May 2020 to understand how they were initiating or continuing on their job search journey and we have recently polled our job seeker audience again to understand how the job search job continues to change.

With the priorities of companies, employees, and job seekers changing so rapidly, we wanted to go back to the source to understand how job seekers are searching for jobs at the moment.

My first job out of college was at a startup. We had a carnival style popcorn maker in the kitchen, a fire pole connecting the 1^st and 2^nd floor, kegs on Fridays, yoga classes every Tuesday and Thursday, and a softball team, and if you’re thinking, “Wow none of this can happen right now!”—you’re not wrong.

Shared food? Germs.

Fire pole with a bunch of hands? Ew.

Close spaces with a lot of people exhaling while “finding their breath”? NOPE.

We know our employees spend 40+ hours a week in their home away from home aka at work, and we know that the more they enjoy the time they spend working with us, the more productive time we get from them. But now, we can’t provide the same environment, and we can’t provide the same perks. Sorry team, we’re going to have to get creative and come up with some new incentives.

Nexxt recently launched its Resume Database Solutions to help companies and staffing firms enhance and enrich their talent databases with fresh candidates. Nexxt’s Resume Database Solutions are designed to help companies make connections with both active and passive job seekers. According to a recent survey, 3 out of 4 of job seekers said they’d like companies to have their resume on file so they are considered for opportunities that become available in the future. For that reason, it doesn’t matter if an organization is in the midst of a big hiring push or one is on the horizon—companies in all states of the recruitment process benefit from making those connections.

Nobody was quite prepared to scale down on the fly in March, and our HR and infrastructure teams did a great job quickly reacting when the world went home for a few months. While we are all waiting for us to get back to a {new} normal, we have an opportunity to be thoughtfully preparing to bravely re-enter this ever-changing world. When the switch gets flipped, and all systems are go—will your recruitment tools have a pipeline of candidates waiting for you? How can you make sure your tools are working for you in the background so when the time is here, you’re ready?

My office knows me as the open-air office evangelist. I saw our group go from a team-derived clique system to a cohesive family unit over the first month we acclimated to our open-air office, after years of being in cubes, separated by department. It was the eavesdropper in me, I couldn’t help myself but involve myself in conversations being had in front of my face, and that, in turn, became team synergy, camaraderie, and a fair amount of heckling.

I do miss the heckling, to be honest, but we’ve all been rightfully grateful to have the ability to stay healthy and keep working apart these past few months. As states move from yellow to green, and from phase to phase, we are starting to think about how the office will change—and what, if anything, can stay the same?

While we are working from home week in and week out, the lines between personal and professional time blur together like the days of the week. In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking “Oh great it’s Monday” only, surprise! it’s actually Thursday! (this has happened more than once). I find myself logging in earlier, and sending emails later, and checking my inbox when I’m walking the dog, reading the chats from my Microsoft Teams app on my phone while making a meal, and overall just obsessing about work way more than I should.

Now, like most Americans, I have nowhere to be at the moment. The only place I can be is home. But after overthinking if I should ask for a day off while simultaneously thinking about what I would even do with the time, I logged 8 hours of paid time off (PTO). Let me tell you, dear reader, it was a well allocated resource, and I hope I can inspire you to put your time off to good use too.