Beating the Rush: Keep Your Productivity High Until the End of the Year

With the holidays in full swing on top of year-end hiring deadlines, it can be easy to get sidetracked. The following are some suggestions on how to cap off the year right

With a little more than a month remaining in 2019, you are likely in the midst of a laundry list of work that seemingly doesn’t get shorter despite each day flying by so quickly. This is quite understandable given its the time of the year where there are both plenty of year-end deadlines to meet, such as hiring new people so that they are able to join your team at the beginning of the next year.

Then there is also the matter of holiday stress which, on a personal level can already be overwhelming. But when you are also a human resources professional, then there is also the matter of experiencing the same stress at work, as you’re also likely dealing with having to organize holiday-related office events, ensuring year-end bonuses and even gifts for employees are complete, and also dealing with some of them resigning as the year ends, among others.

With that said, it can be easy to get sidetracked from all you have to do, and just “leave it for next year.” However, you’d likely want to have a fresh start for 2020, and to make sure little to no tasks carry over to the next year, the following are some suggestions that help you remain productive until the end of this year.

Get the difficult conversations over with

When having plenty of work to do, it is often recommended to start with the hard tasks first. In the world of human resources and recruitment, among the considerably hardest is having difficult conversations.

So whether it is having to have discussions with subordinates or other employees concerning work or performance, or having to communicate with applicants and deliver that they didn’t quite make the cut and won’t be hired for now, it’s best to get these over sooner rather than later.

It’s most helpful to parties involved, as you will have more time and more mental space to address all your other work, while both the current employees and applicants that you spook with will have the opportunity to reflect on the discussion you had and use it to better prepare for the upcoming year.

Break down the work you have left

There is a belief that success generates further success. But when the work is sizable, it can be difficult to create that kind of momentum because we often feel like we’ve only accomplished little because the task is far from done.

However, when work is broken down is smaller sub-tasks, it not only makes them easier to start on, It also allows one to better monitor the progress of everything that needs to be done overall. Breaking down work into smaller tasks also makes the “successes”– albeit smaller– considerably more visible, which in turn helps produce the momentum for further success.

Say, you have to hire a team of ten before the year ends so that they join you as the next begins, but you barely have two months to find them. Instead of viewing it as one big job, you can approach it as a series of smaller jobs or milestones, where successfully posting the job openings on Kalibrr is the first, receiving quality applications is the second, and inviting qualified candidates for interviews is the third, and so on.

Track your progress

Research suggests that keeping track of progress is helpful in managing goals and maintaining the accountability of people involved in a job or project. So in line with breaking down the work you have left for the last few weeks of the year, and ensure that you indeed are able to finish and not miss any of sub-tasks you’ve set for yourself, it is recommended that you also keep score of what you do.

If your company or department has yet to lean on technology to monitor projects, keep employees focused, and measure key performance indicators, among others, then now may be the time. This won’t only be beneficial to everyone as they move forward with meeting their year-end deadlines, but will also be useful for work next year and in general.

For human resources and recruitment professionals, a significant example of this is the Kalibrr platform. From the hiring end, you can easily keep track and/or move candidates from between stages of the hiring process. On the applicant’s end, they are also always aware when they advance in the hiring process or not, as any changes you make to their application status and messages you send through the platform includes corresponding system generated emails and texts that will notify them of the changes.

Indeed, even if the end of the year is typically centered on the holidays, it doesn’t have to be an unproductive time. Help yourself, employees, and job candidates set and track goals to finish out the year strong.

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Kalibrr is a technology company that aims to transform how candidates find jobs and how companies hire talent. Placing the candidate experience at the center of everything it does, the company continues to attract the best talent from all over, with over 2.5 million professionals and counting. Kalibrr ultimately connects these talents to companies in search of their next generation of leaders.

The only end-to-end recruitment solutions provider in Southeast Asia, Kalibrr is headquartered in Makati, Philippines, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Established in 2012, it has served over 18,000 clients and is backed by some of the world’s most powerful start-up incubators and venture capitalists. These include Y Combinator, Omidyar Network, Patamar Capital, Wavemaker Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

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