5 Biggest Recruitment Challenges and Tips on Overcoming Them

Hiring the right employees carries significant importance to ensure business success. A core team of quality employees empowers organizations to stand apart, establish a brand, and create unique experiences that enable you to build healthy communities of satisfied clients.

Unfortunately, finding the right people is easier said than done. Hiring managers face many recruitment challenges ranging from the lack of local talent and inefficient talent sourcing to their inability to engage qualified candidates and slow hiring process.

That said, businesses must develop a good recruitment plan to expedite searching, interviewing, and hiring the right personnel for the job.

In this article, we will take an in-depth look at the most prominent recruiting challenges organizations face and provide you with a solution to overcome them so you can streamline processes and make your search for viable candidates much more efficient.

1. Attracting the Right Candidates

Attracting top candidates is getting more complex and challenging, especially in this evolving candidate-driven market where multiple recruiters approach talented applicants. A bad hire’s cost can be incredibly damaging to an organization because they plummet your productivity. Once you realize they are not competent, you will have to start your recruiting process again from scratch.

Hence, you must define and establish a robust employer branding strategy to provide potential candidates with a compelling story about your organization and culture to make them excited to join your team. You can tackle challenges in hiring employees by creating a responsive career page to display employer brand and persuade candidates why your company is an excellent place for them. Also, check employee reviews and feedback so you can make the necessary adjustments to get the attention of the best talent.

Manual and tedious tasks result in a slow hiring process, which eventually leads to candidates dropping out of your process because they are receiving offers elsewhere. Why is effective recruiting a challenge for many employers? More often than not, the main reason is that they have narrowly-defined needs, inefficient interviewing, and lack decision-making skills.

2. Slow Hiring Process

A slow hiring process usually leads to lost productivity and revenues because vacant positions are open for too many weeks. An excellent way to speed up hiring is to use modern technology such as an applicant tracking software (ATS) to standardize interview guidelines, streamline processes, and boost recruiter productivity. With an ATS, you can gather candidate information and filter applicants based on experience, skill, and other key metrics to identify the best candidates for the position quickly.

3. Building Proactive Talent Pools

Talent pools help organizations reduce time and cost to hire, not to mention enhance the quality of hire. However, building talent pools can be challenging, especially if your talent acquisition team lacks visibility into the organizational pipeline. This makes it even harder to predict time to hire and restricts the talent acquisition team from being perceived as a strategic partner.

To address this issue, you can set up central repositories where your talent acquisition teams can collaborate and share their collective insights in finding "talent pool-worthy" candidates. You can also include a simple application form for your talent network on your website to reach potential candidates.

What makes proactive talent pools relatively effective in speeding up the hiring process is that they provide you with quick access to the right talent and inform members of your current openings so that they can express their interest immediately.

4. Utilizing Hiring Analytics

Hiring analytics can bring recruitment problems and solutions depending on how you handle it. While implementing a data-driven recruitment process can get a deluge of benefits to your organization, collecting and processing candidate data can be a hassle, especially if you are stuck with spreadsheets. Often, manually tracking hiring analytics can be time-consuming and prone to errors, making it even more challenging for businesses to organize data in an efficient and streamlined manner.

This is why you must opt for ATS systems that allow you to store data and export useful reports plus benchmark and forecast hiring to determine how many applicants you typically need to make one hire. Statistics indicate that organizations that invest in software to improve branding are three times more likely to make a quality hire.

An excellent start to finding the right platform for your operations is going through an applicant tracking software list for some ideas on how you can incorporate data into your hiring process. Furthermore, leveraging an ATS platform allows you to concentrate more on the candidates and what they could bring into your company since you will no longer be preoccupied with manual data entry and assessments.

5. Failure to Provide Good Candidate Experience

Candidate experience isn't only crucial for establishing a strong brand presence, but it also spells the difference when your applicants are evaluating job offers. In most cases, hiring managers make the mistake of sending delayed email responses, poorly-worded job descriptions, and long waiting times for interviews, which could discourage candidates from ever considering your offer.

Conversely, offering positive candidate experiences enhance your brand and motivate talented candidates to apply and accept your offer. You can begin creating good candidate experiences by letting your applicants know when they should expect to hear from you or explain what they should bring for the interview. This process ensures that you not only secure top talent but also shape your employer branding, giving you the upper hand in the fierce competition with other companies.

Achieving Recruitment Efficiency

With organizations seeking opportunities for growth and job markets heating up, the competition and demand for qualified talents are at an all-time high, which is why the need for speed in hiring is more pressing than ever before. Taking steps to centralize the process and following the tips above will help you cut out inefficiencies to capture the best talent and stay ahead of your competitors.

100Hires is a free and easy-to-use applicant tracking system that empowers businesses to attract, interview quickly, and hire the most talented candidates. It provides powerful functionalities and features such as employee database, onboarding, resume screening, vendor management, job board integrations, and recruitment management. While 100Hires is free forever, users can also opt to upgrade to its paid plans, including the Start, Pro, and Enterprise packages.

Olivia Powell Recruiting expert at 100Hires https://100hires.com/