If there is one commonality we are hearing from clients, colleagues, and friends these days, it is: “We need more Recruiters!” We have literally never seen a more competitive market for recruiters and while no one knows the longevity of this hot market, we do know that companies must develop creative solutions in order to hire the talent they desperately need. Some of the solutions we are seeing are companies building internal apprenticeships to train someone for the job vs. hiring someone with prior experience (Stripe is one example), and others are acquiring recruiting firms (like Robinhood’s acquisition of Binc).

Those large scale commitments are tough for some of the smaller companies we work with, so although we have no silver bullets for this challenge, here are some ideas of things that have worked well for us in the past:

• Analyze what your team is doing and make sure that each team member is focused on the most high leverage work.  Are your recruiters scheduling? If so, redirect their focus areas to optimize for hiring. It is faster to hire and ramp a new coordinator than a recruiter.  Are your sourcers manually sending follow up emails? If so, streamline their process. A tool like Gem can take as little as a day to implement and will greatly improve sourcer efficiency.
• Create career paths for the people you do have — use the need as an opportunity to offer your team a stretch assignment. Examples could be: offering a recruiter working on more junior roles to take parts of more senior roles, or allowing a coordinator to spend 50% of their time sourcing.  Yes, it is an investment to ramp people internally, but given that it can be 4-6 months to hire and ramp an external candidate, the investment can actually be faster AND help you retain those people in case another company jumps in and offers them a more senior role.
• Activate the whole company to source. If you make a campaign around the effort to hire recruiters then everyone reaps the benefits once they join.  Have your CMO reach out to marketing recruiters; your CTO reach out to tech sourcers; do a referral drive where everyone goes through their network to source candidates; do posts on LI to highlight the amazing team you have.

Building your team is one of the hardest things to do as a leader, and why we’ve developed an entire course on it in order to support leaders in the effort. Our advice: take the time now to put together a strategy that will differentiate your company and enable you to attract the talent you need, when you need it.