By Cade Krueger

When the economy becomes such a challenge it become ever more important to think intelligently and not get emotional about sourcing job candidates during this environment. If you invest wisely you can actually jump far ahead of your competition by intelligent marketing and planning whether that is your co-worker or a peer in another company.

Probably one of the best things you can do is take the time to put in a 80/20 rule for your employees if you are a manager. Keep on the top 20% of your most productive recruiters and extend their contracts to show faith during challenging times. Then you will need to look to trim the excess with the bottom 10% and look to even take more out if necessary.

With the middle 70% you are going to have to be intelligent and look at each situation by an individual basis to find out exactly what works and what doesn't work during a challenging economy. Effort is so important with each person and often they just need time to prove themselves.

Even if you are not a manager these same rules apply and you have to be smart with analyzing how to spend your time and focus on the 20% that is going to pay off the most. Find areas that suck your time and don't create productivity in finding ideal candidates.

Look to train and make improvements in your strategies and look for ways to train out of the box during non work hours. If your are a front line recruiter then be smart about your efforts and use your day time to really focus on phone calls and evening on emails and training.

You need to also start planning your hiring needs by the quarter for all of your major positions that you need to fill. If you do this then it will be a good example for all of the line managers who can implement similar tactics by updating their quarterly agenda and follow that up with quarterly tracking.

The most important thing is that you need to find time to use online advertising tools like Entice Labs and Jobs2Web to attract your ideal customers. The more you do this the better chance you will have of finding the ideal candidates and decrease your cost per hire in a difficult marketing period.

These are going to be wise avenues for you to create a lot of money during this time that will save cost per hire and improve your time per hire. All of this can lead to a huge boom when we come out of this economic downfall. - 18098

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