“Fortune favors the prepared mind.” It’s a quote many of us have heard before. Now more than ever, developing a plan is the most important factor for future success.

Broadleaf Results recently connected with Carl Kutsmode, Senior Vice President of Talent Consulting at our sister company TalentRise, to outline five tips to help you create a plan to overcome disruption and strengthen your company’s workforce strategy.

1. Assess and embrace changes that may be working better than before

Businesses had to react quickly to adapt to a nearly 100% virtual world overnight. Talent acquisition and HR leaders should be assessing the operational and technological changes they had to make and think about whether those changes will negatively or positively impact their ability to recruit talent moving forward.

A few helpful items to consider:

• Should video interviews be the norm for all levels of talent? Or should they only be used for certain levels to minimize travel costs and shorten timelines for the future hiring process?
• Can hiring managers be removed from hourly, high-volume hiring processes that are now working well with talent assessments and tech-enabled recruiter screening and hiring decisions?
• What parts of future new-hire onboarding can remain virtual and be facilitated through video and expanded use of existing technologies?
• Can streamlined I9 processes be adopted as the new standard versus the prior mandates for in-person validation of identification?

2. Cultivate your candidate pipeline for critical, high-demand skillsets

Employers previously struggling to recruit for high-demand skills should be reaching out to newly available talent in the market to build relationships strengthen your candidate pipeline.

• Connect with hard-to-recruit talent who may be furloughed or laid off and willing to talk. This will keep your company top of mind when things turn the corner.
• Stay in touch with furloughed employees you want to retain and re-recruit in the future.
• Inform current employees of high-need openings and ask for referrals. This keeps your current workers engaged, and it helps you locate available top talent.

3. Innovate, don’t stagnate

Use this time to assess your technology and processes to identify areas for innovation. Discover opportunities to improve and make necessary technology changes or investments you have been putting off.

• Ask tech vendors if they are offering deferred or discounted billing terms to close business now.
• Pilot new tools and technologies that you previously didn’t have time to try.
• Think creatively to offer your services in new ways that differentiate your brand amongst customers and employees.

4. Live your values, culture, and brand

How you communicate your brand, culture, and values is more important now than it ever has been. Values matter to employees and customers during a crisis, and they will remember how you communicated, acted, and reacted when this crisis passes.

Questions you can ask yourself to maintain a positive brand and culture are:

• How did you handle your layoff and furlough communications?
• How are you keeping furloughed and employed workers informed?
• Are you communicating with empathy, or only from a financial, bottom-line perspective?

5. Plan for extended uncertainty

Many businesses will have a lot of uncertainty for months and years to come, so accurate workforce planning decisions will be critically important.

Some questions to consider:

• Do you have effective analytics tools to manage contingent and full-time workforce related costs and minimize costly staff planning mistakes?
• Is your talent acquisition delivery model scalable to support unplanned hiring spikes, or should you engage a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider to deliver additional talent acquisition support?
• Will you be engaging a higher amount of contingent labor moving forward? If so, consider engaging a managed service program (MSP) partner to manage third-party contract vendor spend and independent contractors. This will help you minimize costs and cultivate efficiencies.

We hope these tips and insights help you prepare to succeed now and in the future. We’re here to help, and if you want to learn more about our solutions that can enhance your workforce planning or reduce labor costs, you can visit the pages for our RPO and MSP solutions. You can also view this free Recruitment Practices Self-Diagnostic created by TalentRise to see how your organization stacks up in its ability to compete for talent.

Have questions about how we can assist in your planning efforts? Contact us to learn more!

You can also find more information on talent management best practices on our Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages.