Top 13 Hiring Challenges Faced by Recruiters
Hiring is not a simple job, and recruiting the right candidate gets trickier every year. Many challenges are faced by a hiring team throughout the whole process. If you are about to start a recruiting process, it is advised that you find out and be prepared to face certain hiring challenges. We have listed some below.
1. Attracting the right candidates
It can be challenging to find the best candidates for the job. The chances of finding the right person in a pool of skilled people from extremely diverse backgrounds are limited, and you end up choosing applicants who seem to be comparative better among the ones you come across. He or she might not be the best person for the role. You can prevent such scenarios by getting access to specialized talent pools, which offer you better chances of perfect matches.
2. Engaging with skilled candidates
It is necessary to employ the right engagement styles with the shortlisted candidates. The candidates you shortlist and reach out to make impressions based on your emails, communication style, and the tone in which interactions are carried out. The applications shortlisted by you might have been approached by several recruiters. You need to strategically plan your engagement techniques, particularly so for passive applicants, to attract and persuade the right candidates.
3. Time-consuming recruitment cycles
Employers like to fill vacant positions as fast as possible because a vacancy costs them money, and slows certain business functions. but in certain industries hiring timeframes are bigger. The explanation for a longer recruiting cycle can also be due to a shortage of qualified applicants that contribute to an actual battle to conclude the hiring faster. And such scenarios increase pressure on recruiters.
4. Building a solid employer brand
It is difficult to build a strong employer brand, as every recruiting experience leaves a specific impression in the minds of the candidates who applied and interacted with you or the ex-employees who have written reviews about you. Employer presentations and recruitment-related social media activities could come very helpful in employer brand management. Try to avoid branding mistakes to reduce the negative impact.
5. Creating an effective hiring process
It is also important to frame an intelligent recruiting process with regards to the positions and roles. Recruiting teams must communicate competently and quickly so that applicants can be easily evaluated. The applicants should also be aware of all process steps. Administrative activities often take too much time and create situations that frustrate applicants.
6. Attracting passive candidates
These are the candidates who are not actively seeking new employment opportunities. According to research by LinkedIn, more than 65% of the world’s workforce consists of inactive, non-activated talent, and 30% are active job seekers. Statistics are scary, aren’t they? The challenge is to identify and reach out to these potential hires.
7. Developing talent pools
When you invest in campaigns or partner with the right agencies, you are able to get quick access to certain talent pools. Such initiatives help you to significantly cut down on talent search timeframes across positions.
8. Updating and improving fair hiring policies
A company must provide all applicants with fair opportunities. It is also a legal obligation and a good way to employ a person without stereotypes affecting the talent acquisition process. Most businesses fail to understand all that is involved in equal opportunity employment practices, diversity practices, etc., and as a result, their hiring practices might inadvertently affect their reputation negatively.
9. Removing bias
Bias is often misinterpreted. A company can be practicing equal employment opportunity practices, but still be vulnerable to many biases, such as gender bias related to compensation and social backgrounds. Weeding out such bias helps you gain a better workforce.
10. Ensuring a good experience for candidates
It is beneficial to have good applicant experience during the selection process as this increases the likelihood that the candidates accept the offer and decreases the possibility of refusing the position due to bad experience. Good experience for candidates often enhances the employer brand and serves as a significant factor in attracting talent each time you post vacancies.
11. Developing team collaboration
In recent years, talent creation has moved from conventional recruiting models to collaborative ones. Modern hiring practices are focused on the successful collaboration between administrators, hiring managers, hiring specialists, IT experts, etc. Such cohesive practices positively impact hiring experience and outcomes.
12. Lapsed skills and increased training requirements
Numerous roles require in-depth on-job training to make a new hire understand and perform activities per existing rules, standards, and set of practices. In such scenarios, in-house and cross-functional hiring methods could come very helpful. Instead of finding external applicants, efforts are made to discover potential talent in-house.
13. Data-driven hiring
Making recruitment processes data-driven could mean a hundred things to a hundred companies. Finding the right techniques and improving hiring practices based on historical data analysis could enhance employee hiring metrics and performance metrics. However, developing such hiring practices requires a lot of time, investment, and having on board the right team of hiring data scientists.
Hiring practices can hardly be perfected in one go. It needs a consistent focus on fine-tuning strategies, approaches, techniques, and overall resource employment.