Each year around this time, I’m reminded of healthy suggestions to avoid the flu virus from entering my home. Fortunately, at Yoh, we take much pride in Safety, its one of our core values, and our team meetings start with a safety messages. I’ve already heard many tips for staying healthy – wash your hands and sing the Happy Birthday song, is one common tip.

Additionally, this time of year, many of us are about to elect our 2014 health benefits. We can all feel how important preventative care is to managing our overall healthcare costs.

For our home, we do some simple, common precautions to avoid the flu. They include,

• The kids get their flu vaccine
• We all boost up on extra Vitamin C
• We aim to get good sleep
• And focus on healthy eating

This time of year, also challenges me professionally to consider preventative care methods to ensure our RPO service delivery is safeguarded. It’s the perfect time to identify inefficiencies and prepare our client group for more recruitment optimization.

Some tactical recommendations to consider are….

• What is the industry saying? What are the trends and best practices? How does your metrics measure up? Think about what you can change. For example, most companies drive in 30% employee referrals as part of their total source of hire metrics. Where is your client at?
• Where is your team’s capacity at? How is this compromising the process and the candidate experience? Are there tools you can implement to create more capacity, automate, or eliminate all together?
• Where are the bottlenecks? Is the data there to tell the story? Have you considered a pilot, to encourage a carefully monitored and tracked shift?

More strategically, consider whether you need more experienced resources to fill in any skill gaps, whether your ATS is able to produce the data you need to affect change within the business, or whether you need to consider an outsourced Recruitment Process Outsourcing model.

The more safe guarding and protecting you do, the better your service delivery metrics will be. The outcome makes for a healthy, continued recruitment partnership.

Take care and stay well.