The most common recruiting challenges and how to overcome them.

“Remember, problems come along with solutions. Identically we will discuss recruitment problems and solutions as well”.

Amit Ghodasara

What is Recruitment Challenges?

“As we know, recruiting is not an easy task, and it takes a village to hire the right candidate for the job as well as to avoid the bad hire. A recruitment team faces lots of challenges throughout the hiring process. And as a good recruiter, and to enhance the employer branding, the recruiter had to fill the open position within minimum time” (Ghodasara, 2022).

5 Common Recruitment Challenges Faced by Recruiters (Yoh, 2021)

Being a recruiter is an exciting yet challenging career. Your goal as a recruiter is to find the best candidate for the position by streamlining the hiring process. However what happens when you hit a rut and realize that you cannot find employees who are qualified for the jobs you are searching to fill? It may be that the process you have been using to recruit new hires wants an update.

The workforce is a fluid environment that is constantly changing due to technological advances and fresh jobs being developed frequently. As a recruiter, you want to stay up to date on the career world changes and be prepared to face the challenges that are bound to happen during the recruitment process. Staying ahead of the game and being willing to make adjustments along the way helps ensure that you can find the best applicants for the job.

1.   A wide pool of applicants without the right qualifications

2.   Losing applicants to competitors

3.   Providing an insignificant interview experience

4.   A delayed hiring process

5.   Lack of branding   

Here are the 8 common recruiting challenges we hear most often, and solutions to overcome them to make hiring more effective: (Bika. 2022)

1. Attracting the right candidates

2. Engaging qualified candidates

3. Hiring fast

4. Using data-driven recruitment

5. Building a strong employer brand

6. Ensuring a good candidate experience

7. Recruiting fairly

8. Creating an efficient recruiting process

The best recruitment methods to overcome common challenges (Bika. 2022)

Build a talent pool

Talent pipelines are groups of candidates you’ve already engaged who will fill future positions in your company. This will help you reduce time to hire and recruiting costs, because you’ll already have qualified, pre-screened candidates in line when a role opens. To build talent pipelines:

·       Examine past hiring processes for candidates who advanced to the final stages or source new candidates. Past candidates are obviously qualified, while new ones can help you build a more comprehensive and diverse candidate database. You might also consider candidates who reached out to your company by sending their resumes. When applicants are EU residents, make sure you follow the data protection laws like GDPR.

·       Engage past and passive candidates. Your pipelines are stronger if applicants know you’re considering them and if you’re staying in touch. Let them determine how often you’ll communicate with them, either via in-person meetings or by sending them valuable content and information.

 Train hiring teams

Even experienced hiring managers and interviewers might want to level up their hiring skills. Combating biases is a common reason to train hiring teams, however coaching them on interview questions to ask or how to build rapport with candidates are also important. Here are a some ideas to train hiring teams:

·       Instruct interviewers on how to prepare for interviews. Giving them a checklist can be helpful.

·       Encourage them to take Harvard’s Implicit Association Test to identify their unseen biases. Educating them on how biases work is also a decent idea.

·       Arrange mock interviews. This can be especially useful for inexperienced interviewers.

·       Disseminate recruiting resources. Ask each hiring team member whether they will be interested in receiving interesting articles or videos with hiring advice. Set expectations of the amount they’ll need to read, for example, send an article monthly.

Diversify your recruiting strategies

It is good to advertise on a job board that you know brings good applicants. However leaving it at that is a missed opportunity to create a truly powerful hiring process. Consider: 

·       Using social media to post your jobs or promote your organization.

·       Showcasing your culture, benefits and employee stories in your careers site to encourage more candidates.

·       Attending job fairs and host hiring events whenever possible.

·       Using tools like People Search to source applicants based on location, skills and other job-related criteria.

 Invest in an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

An ATS will streamline your hiring process by making it possible for your hiring team to collaborate and keep all candidate data in one place. A good ATS also has:

·       Reporting capabilities, which will help you extract useful insight from your past processes to improve the future ones.

·       Scheduling tools and calendar integrations, which will help you schedule phone screens and interviews fast and minimize back-and-forth communications.

·       Built-in templates, which help you post job ads and send emails to applicants fast, without writing the text from scratch every time.

·       Interview scorecards, which will make the shift towards structured interviews smoother.

·       Assessment integrations, which help you evaluate applicants more objectively.

All these features (and more) power up your hiring and support you make faster and better hiring decisions.

 

 References 

Hudson, K. (2021) what is an applicant tracking system [Online] Available at: https://www.jobvite.com/blog/recruiting-process/what-is-an-applicant-tracking-system/ [Accessed on 8th April, 2022]

Yoh. (2021) 5 common recruitment challenges faced by recruiters [Online] Available at: https://www.yoh.com/blog/5-common-recruitment-challenges-faced-by-recruiters [Accessed on 8th April, 2022]

Boland, C. (2019) 5 key challenges impacting recruiting and retention in [Online] Available at: https://aarchertalent.com/2019/07/18/5-key-challenges-impacting-recruiting-and-retention-in-2019/ [Accessed on 8th April, 2022]

Ghodasara, A. (2022) the 8 biggest recruitment challenges faced by recruiters [Online] Available at: https://www.ismartrecruit.com/blog-the-8-biggest-recruitment-challenges-faced-by-recruiters [Accessed on 8th April, 2022]

Hsu, Y. (1999) Recruitment and Selection and Human Resource Management in the Taiwanese Cultural Context. Business School University of Plymouth [Online] Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/29818879.pdf Accessed on 4th April, 2022.