It may seem odd to be looking ahead to the New Year, especially when so many of us are just trying to scrape by until Christmas, but with delayed business ambitions comes delayed hiring processes.
We speak with many businesses on a daily basis, and whilst some of the smaller SMEs who have experienced exponential growth thanks to innovation throughout this year (kudos to you!) are looking at hires this side of Christmas, many larger businesses are looking to put off recruitment in favour of a January start date.
The problem
So what is the problem with delaying recruitment?
If you are looking for the elusive January start-date and will only plan to conduct interviews after Christmas, the reality is this deadline may not be reached.
On average it can take our consultants between 20 - 30 days to fill a role, with a shorter period if you are looking for a temp or freelance worker. Even if your recruiter were to fill a role in 20 days, there is still the issue of notice periods and on boarding to negotiate, leaving little wiggle room during January to take on new hires, pushing the opportunity to expand your team (and potential profit) into the second month of Q1.
When should I start looking for January hires?
To cut it short. Now.
You may think you have a month and a half until the New-Year, but if you take into account the festive period, this leaves you with only a month.
Remember that 20-30 day filling period we alluded to? Starting your hiring process now is going to be key to meeting that period. Below we have included two example timelines of when you can expect a hire to start should you begin your recruitment process either now or in the first week of December. Of course these timelines are variable depending on how hard a role is to source and whether there are any complications at interview stage.
Our aim here is to not panic you, but to inform you about the potential barriers you may encounter when looking for a January hire, the biggest complication being notice periods if you don’t begin your hiring process in November.
