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How do you turn a competitive hiring market into not a source of potential burnout, but the ground from which you can thrive and become an even better recruiter? This is the question that anyone in recruiting faced with a tough hiring market — whether they’re leading a team or operating solo — should ask themselves. Today, we are going to answer it.
Avoiding recruiting burnout is not only about identifying the signs and taking action to mitigate it, but also understanding why those symptoms appeared in the first place. Burnout is often due to an inordinate workload, a perceived lack of autonomy, and malfunctions in the reward, community and value dynamics in the workplace. These factors can all be exacerbated when you’re also facing a tough hiring market.
If a hiring market is perceived as tough on the recruiter and employer’s side, that’s because there aren’t enough sufficiently qualified applicants to meet the job openings available. This creates a ripple effect where the best candidates in the talent pool are highly sought-after. Hence, they have more negotiating power and hiring processes can become trickier and lengthier.
By the same token, if positions take longer to fill, this is likely to create a sense of urgency about each hire. Their future teammates might be understaffed and overwhelmed by the disproportionate workload, which in turn can cause more stress and pressure to those responsible for recruiting. Naturally, in the worst-case scenario, this is effectively a negative feedback loop, which can lead to burnout if it’s not halted.
Anyone facing a scenario like described above could start feeling exhausted and apathetic about the situation. Understandably, this can also lead to feelings of inadequacy about the very job they’re in; and questioning whether there’s any point in continuing.
What’s it like to work with a person experiencing this? This hypothetical colleague could suddenly appear more irritable, less open to new ideas, less prone to step out of their normal routine to help a colleague, and much less willing to engage in culture-oriented activities in the workplace.
Then, like with any negative feedback loop that starts in the brain, you start to see physical signs. Psychologists point out that, beyond the initial exhaustion, people on their way to burnout may experience chronic headaches, heartburn, gastrointestinal symptoms and other ailments without a clear physical explanation.
Are we depressing you yet? Well, I’m glad to say that the gloomy part is over. Now that we’ve taken a stroll amid all that darkness, here’s the light that I can offer. The solution summed up in this header might seem obvious right? Here’s another obvious one; the first bit of advice that world-renowned psychologists offer to combat burnout is, “Take a break”.
While this may seem like a slap in the face for someone experiencing burnout, there are times when that’s just what they need. Those words are the tip of an iceberg, and underneath them, the message is that a person at risk of burnout needs to substantially alter the way they relate to their work.
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