Several factors, such as talent scarcity, finding qualified candidates, tight deadlines, and changing expectations of candidates and employers, have made recruitment and hiring more difficult in recent years. Hence, recruiters face a variety of recruiting and hiring challenges, such as attracting top talent, mitigating candidate dropouts, and meeting quick recruitment deadlines.
However, a method to overcome recruiting and hiring challenges is to first have a refined recruitment plan that aligns recruitment efforts with company goals. Formulating a viable recruitment strategy requires assessing current corporate processes, reviewing internal documents, gathering feedback, implementing technologies, evaluating workforce needs, and defining the company’s brand and culture. If you ask any leader in any company today, they will tell you that the goal of the company is to achieve better results with a leaner and meaner budgeted team, and one of the most challenging things is to find such fine talent, especially with the world of work moving towards a more globalized environment.
Hence, when it comes to overcoming recruiting and hiring challenges, recruiters tend to focus on a few common issues. This boils down to various factors such as a tight job market, evolving candidate expectations, changing technology, etc.
So, let’s take a deep dive into some of this recruiting and hiring challenges and discover how to overcome them:
Attracting Top Talent:
Take into account advertising on social media channels and adding a career page. The most effective way to hire would also be to headhunt from a smaller network of qualified candidates. This could be done by using employee referrals, niche forums, job drives, events, groups, online jobsites like Naukri, etc. Because top talent is most sought after, they often value the work environment and experience equally along with the role and pay.
The first thing recruiters should do is ask themselves if they are able to create an employer brand that is appealing to top talent. In addition, they should ask themselves if they have strategies for showcasing the company culture, values, and mission better. Recruiters should also focus on creating a positive candidate experience by identifying and incorporating some effective industry practices that will attract top talent.
The recruitment process must focus unwaveringly on improving communication and feedback. Recruiters can seek potential candidates who are not actively applying for a new position using a proactive approach. Contacting professionals in their network to find leads and researching employees in competing companies to ask them to apply are two other ways to do this.
Also read: SHL’s Six Shifts that Will Influence Innovations In Candidate Experience
Avoid Candidate Dropouts:
One of the biggest challenges to recruiting and hiring is candidate dropouts. A long or complex recruitment process, a negative candidate experience, or a better offer from another company may cause candidates to drop out of the recruitment process.
Recruiters should start to mitigate this by deploying effective communication strategies that can help keep candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process. Don’t underestimate the power of keeping candidates informed about the status of their applications and what to expect next.
The recruitment process should be oriented toward ensuring a positive candidate experience. Recruiters should try creating interactive and multimedia job descriptions that help candidates visualize the job and understand the role’s requirements. You can use videos, podcasts, interactive quizzes, etc. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can be used by recruiters to share company news, wins, updates, etc. with candidates. Candidates also go on company review websites like AmbitionBox to read up on comments left behind by existing and ex-employees. Having good ratings on these websites can work as good word-of-mouth branding for companies.
Also read: Goldman Sachs’ Deepika Banerjee Suggests Differentiated Employee Experience Strategy for 2023
Meeting Unrealistic Hiring Deadlines Quickly:
In business, and in particular within the tech industry, one is always in a hurry to finish a project. This is why there is always a need for qualified talent at lightning speed on the team. However, the issue is hiring deadlines are often unrealistic and can be very challenging to meet.
However, recruiters can meet these deadlines by simplifying and streamlining the recruitment process to ensure that candidates move through the hiring pipeline quickly. They can do this by investigating to find out if there are any steps in the process that can be eliminated or combined to speed up the process.
Hiring quickly can sometimes be a problem, especially if one is in a rush to fill a position. Skipping steps in the hiring process such as background checks, reference checks, skills assessments, etc. can result in problems down the road since they are essential to ensuring that the right candidate is hired.
It would be beneficial for recruiters to write Job Descriptions that clearly describe expectations to eliminate unnecessary applicants. Quickly & poorly drafted job descriptions can lead to misunderstandings and mismatches between the candidate and the position, which in turn wastes both the candidates’ and recruiters’ time. To ensure that a new hire will integrate well into the company culture and work well with the existing team, it is crucial to hire for cultural fit. Showcase some of the culture fit values on the job description as well.
To improve the candidate experience and answer questions quickly, recruiters should improve communication and response times. It is wise for recruiters to consider automating and speeding up certain aspects of the hiring process, like resume screening and interview scheduling, using technology. They should identify and utilize tools, and platforms that will help them manage recruitment more efficiently.
Additionally, recruiters should focus on understanding and optimizing the interview process while still gathering all the information they need to make a hiring decision. They should find and deploy interviewing techniques that make it possible to assess candidates more quickly without sacrificing quality. When making a hiring decision, they can evaluate factors to consider and how to ensure that a timely decision is made. Rushing through the process can lead to incompetent hires and high turnover.
