Recruitment impacts every single aspect of the company. Hiring and nurturing talent is fundamental to growth, positive results, and ultimately business success.
Zig Ziglar put it this way – “You don’t build a business. You Build People. Then People Build the Business”
Nobody ever said that attracting and engaging talent would be easy. In fact, recruitment and selection difficulties are quite common.
Here we have gathered some of the main ones, while also trying to find practical solutions that can be easily implemented.
- A lack of qualified candidates
Not having a pool of qualified candidates is perhaps the most common employee recruitment problem there is.
And there’s not much good news in the future regarding this problem either. According to McKinsey, the trend of technological and job development progress requires 16 to 18 million more qualified candidates in the job market, at least in Europe and North America.
So, what’s the solution?
These days we have to look at recruiting like marketing. The goal of the recruitment & selection process is to cast the net wide by deploying multiple recruitment strategies to market for employees in unusual ways. Promoting opportunities with your contacts like customer database, suppliers & networking contacts. Multiple job boards, calling back past team members & candidates, referral scheme for existing team members etc.
- A slow recruitment process
Hiring candidates swiftly is a painstaking process. Usually, it takes anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to hire the right candidate. But research shows that top candidates are only available on the market for 10 -14 days. This poses a serious problem for businesses that have slow and arduous hiring processes.
Solution:
- Refine your recruitment process. Recruiting new candidates for a job is an in-depth process that takes time. Take some time to reassess what is and is not working in your recruitment process.
- One of the key methods to resolve this issue is to automate processes. By automating the contact and subsequent steps of the hiring process, companies can reduce the time it takes to hire candidates.
- Invest in an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). An ATS can streamline your hiring process by making it possible for your hiring team to collaborate and keep all candidate data in one place.
- Lack of Employer Branding
You may be working to hire employees for a fantastic company. But if the candidates have never heard of the company and the company does not have a strong online presence, you are less likely to find quality candidates.
A prospective employee will do their research before taking a job with your company. If your online presence is minimal or even worse, harmful, they are less likely to be interested in working for your business.
Solution:
- Always reply (courteously) to online reviews – bad and good.
- Use social media to post your jobs or promote your company.
- Showcase your culture, benefits and employee stories on a careers page on your website to encourage more applicants.
- Attend job fairs and host recruiting events whenever possible.
- A poor candidate experience
Candidate experience isn’t only important for employer branding, but it’s also a factor when your best candidates are evaluating your job offers. The way you treat candidates during the hiring process mirrors the way you’ll treat them after hiring. If they had a bad experience, they’re less likely to accept. Conversely, positive candidate experiences can enhance your employer brand and encourage good candidates to apply and accept your job offers.
Solution:
Set expectations for communication: tell candidates when they should expect to hear from you and, if you have an ATS, set reminders and use email templates to follow through with that promise. Don’t leave them in the dark throughout the hiring process.
Coordinate well with candidates. If you’re scheduling an in-person interview, give them all the necessary information (like who to ask for and what to bring). Explain what they should expect from the interview and what the next steps are. Inform reception they’re coming and don’t let them wait in the reception.
- Losing applicants to competitors
In the recruiting world, connections were meaningful, and establishing business relationships took time. There is still truth to that, but thanks to the availability of jobs at the click of a button, applicants often interview you in the same way you are interviewing them. In other words, you may need to impress them with what the job can offer and be able to do so quickly.
Solution:
Businesses know that they need to have competitive offers for jobs that include paid time off, benefits, flexibility, and more. Your company must have offers for competitive salaries as well as flex time and room for growth.
Workers entering the job market know their worth and are likely not to settle when there could be a more competitive offer out there. Be willing to negotiate. After all, it is true that you get what you pay for, and the same is true for hiring new employees.
- Soaring Recruitment Costs
Perhaps the most prominent recruitment challenge concerns reducing your recruitment spend. Many companies look to cut back on agency costs, which is unsurprising given standard fees range between 15 – 20% of the candidate’s first annual salary. Hiring directly in-house is one of the most effective ways to reduce these costs, but hiring the right candidate is what will repay that cost several times over.
Solution:
Having the right tools, systems, and processes in place is critical to improving your in-house recruitment process and reducing overall recruitment costs.
Many fixed-price solutions are able to offer extremely good value for money when it comes to your media advertising, and some come with outstanding management systems that can help you to address many of the other challenges that recruiters face.
- Making Bad Hires
The person doing the recruitment may be under pressure to get the job filled quickly above anything else. This can lead to unsuitable candidates being selected, and bad hires being made. Bad hires can cost your business almost a third of the employee’s first-year earnings, and affect your team’s overall performance and productivity, so naturally this is something you want to avoid.
Solution:
Applying due diligence across all stages of your recruitment process is key to avoiding bad hires. This can be done in the form of candidate screening tools, such as telephone screening, structured interviews, work samples and psychometric profiling. Job matching tools like this will help closely match candidate experience, behaviour, and cultural fit to your role and business.
Implementing the most effective candidate selection practices will ensure that you will choose the right candidate for your open job position and your company culture.
When you’re looking to hire the best talent for your business, it’s inevitable that you’ll run into a few recruitment challenges along the way.
Follow the guidelines presented here and you’ll be well on your way to hiring an effective workforce and building a successful business.
