The Great Resignation describes a phenomenon like no other. Starting around the spring of 2021, a mass number of workers quit their jobs. In fact, this period achieved the nation’s highest quit rate in 20 years (Pew Research Center).

There have been many speculations as to why the Great Resignation happened (COVID-19’s effect on the flexibility of work, industries hit hard initially by the pandemic left with vacancies, a large-scale impact on mental health, i.e.). It’s safe to conclude a variety of factors are at play, but businesses are left with an intimidating question: How to fill roles and continue expanding business in such a volatile time.  

We’ve asked an expert, Salelytics VP of Client Operations Matt Gargo, how Salelytics persists, and in fact surpasses expectations in its hiring efforts.

“The virtual environment has allowed us to transform our entire talent strategy with the future tied to a national model for talent. The old days regarded the location of brick and mortar as paramount. The pandemic has accelerated the desire to work from home and forced companies to confront this as a viable option to a degree ever before seen. Where we were tethered to the geography and its inhabitants, having the flexibility to pull the best talent for the price point has been transformational to delivering both quantity and quality. Due to this change in our approach, we’re in the middle of a labor crisis yet have onboarded more associates over the past 2 years than pre-pandemic. If it weren’t for our embrace of this new mode, we would not have been able to deliver upon our growth objectives over the last two years.

While we stayed primarily within 50 miles of our brick and mortar sites when recruiting in ’20-’21, we shifted dramatically in ’22 and are now sourcing regionally. We find we are getting better quality than before and are now seeing that 1 in 5 hires live 50+ miles away from our nearest site. Many of these employees live just outside the radius of a larger metro in a more rural location where the overall job opportunities are more limited. They are, however, talented individuals who are great fits for our positions and do very well when they come aboard.”

“Our best-engaged candidates are really coming from the “remote” bucket, or those living in smaller markets and likely 50+ miles away from our sites. The largest challenge we face with candidate engagement is still the high volume and ease of applying for jobs in each job-seeking session. It’s not unusual for a candidate to apply to 25+ jobs in even a single job-seeking session. A candidate could easily have 50-100 applications out in a week’s time. That leads to a candidate who is then inundated with recruiter outreach and is oftentimes confused about the positions for which they applied. Our goal has been to leverage speed to market and channel of choice (email, phone, SMS) to help connect the candidate as efficiently as possible to our opportunities and begin the screening process. We aim to contact every applicant within 48 business hours to move them through the interview process and to offer in under a week’s time.”

“As we’ve gone virtual, we have redesigned our onboarding processes including the addition of prestart engagement activities, nurturing/warming until Orientation Day, and post-hire activities within both the training and operational teams to ensure we’re minimizing any pain points as the employee is onboarded. To measure this, we’ve implemented a four survey series that goes from week one to day sixty. This process measures company NPS at each point in the employee’s journey and the efficacy of our recruiting, onboarding, training, and transition to production. These results are reviewed on a weekly basis and action plans updated to further iterate our processes to the goal of reducing the anxiety curve for new talent as much as possible.”

“Our challenge in ’20 and ’21 was not having the right amount of qualified applicants for the positions we needed to fill.  While we had used social and other advertising in the past to great impact, we saw those efforts wain during the pandemic. In order to stay whole, we augmented the hiring of our direct team with outside vendor support and diversified across multiple outside relationships. That proved to be successful in helping us put more feelers in the field and garner the right talent needed.  In ’22, the situation is very different. 

We now have more applicants than we can realistically vet in a timely manner. Through the first months of the year, we’ve had more candidates than in all of ’21. Our focus now is on automating portions of the screening and interviewing process so we can better mine for the candidates we have.  We are also piloting the use of targeted skill-based assessments that have shown a high correlation to the top 20% success among existing members of our employee base.  Having these insights helps our recruiters invest in the best candidates available.  This automation will also free up the valuable time needed to source passive candidates and dig deep for hard to fill roles through more traditional resume mining.”

If there was a main theme for the inside sales world in the last few years, it would be that adaptability is crucial. Tomorrow is met with unpredictable obstacles to progress, such as the Great Resignation's long-term effects. Something more certain is that Salelytics will continue to evolve and change with our Client Partners' needs.