linkedin.com/in/Vedangi Shukla 
Hiring ideal candidates for your company roles is a strenuous task. Hiring the right professionals is the first step and can be the foundation for your company’s success. Despite employing new-emerging techniques and best-employed strategies, HR professionals find it difficult to hire ideal candidates and sometimes, fail drastically.
If you have to tell us about your biggest hiring challenge, what would it be? Your answer might vary depending upon various factors like the size of your company, the need, or the types of roles you are looking for. I wanted to know what difficulties HR professionals face while recruiting employees, and so I conducted extensive research. I conversed with our clients, CEOs, recruiters, and other HR professionals, and asked them about their talent acquisition challenges and their techniques.
I didn’t stop there! I also wanted to dig out the solutions of how successful HR professionals plan to tackle these challenges. What were their best tips and best practices? I listened to them, learned from their experiences, and implemented them. I also did some cavernous brainstorming and came up with some out-of-the-box solutions to common recruitment challenges.
Check out this list of common tech hiring problems and expert insights as well as practical tips on taking them. Let’s Get Started!
1. Building a Powerful Employer Brand
According to LinkedIn,
- 72 % of recruiting leaders worldwide agreed that the employer brand has a significant impact on hiring.
- 75 % of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job.
- 59 % of recruiting leaders worldwide are investing more in their employer brand.
Hence, if they don’t like what they see, they simply won’t apply or accept your enterprise’s job offerings. A poor employer brand greatly impacts it’s recruitment strategy and this is the most common hiring mistake I found. HR personnel often try hard in getting the best candidates but neglect or indulge limited time in building a remarkable employer brand.
According to Glassdoor,
- 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation, even for a pay increase.
- A strong employer brand can reduce the cost per hire by as much as 50%, and a negative reputation can cost a company as much as 10% more per hire.
Solution
If you want to build a powerful employer brand, you need to implement a robust employer branding strategy. You need to portray a compelling story about your enterprise, reflect company culture, and excite the candidates to join your team.
You can build a responsive, alluring, and branded career page and blogs, where you can exactly show your company culture while presenting the photos of your office, employees, showing interesting projects, new opportunities, employee testimonials, etc.
2. Lack of Skilled Resources
The talent shortage is one of the top hiring challenges in the world today. Reputed companies fail to hire skilled resources that would perfectly fit their open positions and roles. An extensive new Korn Ferry report finds that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them. Talent shortage could result in about $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues.
The situation is worsening day by day. According to research, 54% of companies globally reported talent shortages, the highest in over a decade during 2020. In such a scenario, finding pearls out of an ocean is extremely difficult. There are a lot more enterprises aiming for quality fish with similar fishing rods and new techniques.
Solution
Your only choice is to jump in this race of talent war and compete with other organizations to snatch the best candidates. 92% of people would consider changing jobs if offered a role with a company with an excellent corporate reputation. The topmost challenges? All your competitors are bombarding the same qualified candidates while saying they are the best employer. How to stand out and leave your impression? The answer is through Employee Referrals! Word of mouth from friends lays a deep impact on the candidates. They trust their friends more than your recruiters.
3. Targeting Passive Candidates
The techno-clad world is rapidly moving and soon there will be no or limited job seekers – only passive candidates. 73% of the global workforce are passive job seekers and the remaining 27% are actual job seekers. Isn’t it scary? There are only a few candidates who are actually looking for jobs and in such situations, all enterprises strive hard to drag them within the blink of an eye.
The good news? According to LinkedIn, almost 90% of the passive candidates are interested in knowing about new & exciting job opportunities. It’s time to craft smart recruiting strategies that can easily target passive candidates who may like to join your company.
Solution
You won’t find passive candidates on career-related sites or job boards because they aren’t actively looking for jobs. Instead, you target them where they actually are – on social media. As per LinkedIn, 49% of all the employees are following companies on social media with the intent to stay aware of their job offerings. You need to fully utilize the power of social media by promoting your company on social media. This doesn’t mean just posting about job openings but also about company achievements, success stories, people, projects, online events, workshops, and much more.
4. Attracting Right Candidates
According to Glassdoor, 76% percent of hiring managers admit attracting the right job candidates is their greatest challenge. Also, 72% of employers are having a hard time finding skilled candidates. Recruiters are just wasting valuable time in surfing tons of applications and resumes from candidates that don’t match the preferred jobs. Hence, they go through piles of digital data, and even after the candidates are shortlisted, there is no guarantee that they are going to join the company.
Hence, strategizing correctly to target ideal candidates has become mandatory. If fit-to-role candidates are targeted, there are more chances of them joining the company and recruiters can save a lot of time and effort.
Solution
There is a very simple solution to this one. You just need to refine your hiring process from the start to attract the right candidates. Start off by stating clear and precise job requirements in your job posting and job descriptions. You can also use a career blog to help candidates know about your company culture and day-to-day office life. You can also add a qualifying question or minimum criteria to the application form. This is one of the effective ways to weed out candidates that are not fit for your job openings.
5. Eliminating bias
Various enterprises struggle to attract and hire diverse candidates and sometimes even take biased decisions unconsciously. Unbiased hiring should be done. Major of the time, biased hiring snatches away the opportunity from a deserving candidate. And it may prove to be a bad hire in the worst scenarios. Hiring objectively is great for your enterprise because it enables you to hire the best candidate for the role without the interference of stereotypes.
According to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, resumes with white-sounding names receive 50% more calls for interviews than identical resumes with black-sounding names.
Solution
You can implement different strategies and techniques to eliminate bias from your recruitment process. This can be achieved by standardizing your interviewing process. Make sure to ask the same questions to all the candidates. In that manner, you can compare them on the same criteria and choose the best one out of them. You can also offer diverse training to your Hr professionals and recruiters to avoid bias.
6. Fast Hiring
Recruiters and HR want to hire candidates as fast as possible because vacant positions for a longer period of time can cost money, increase operations and delay deadlines. Hiring vacancies can take much longer and sometimes frustrate the recruiters as well. Delayed hiring may be the result of a talent shortage or lack of qualified professionals.
But if you want to hire top candidates, you need to hire fast. But how fast? According to research, top candidates stay available on the job market for 10 days only. It also showed that a whopping 57% of candidates lose interest in a job if there is a lengthy hiring process. According to LinkedIn, 70% of companies take anywhere between 1 to 4 months to make a new hire.
Solution
The solution is very simple. You need to drastically shorten your hiring process. You need to stop wasting your time on ineffective administrative tasks and lengthy processes. You need to strategize smartly in order to get the best candidates as soon as possible. Eliminate manual time-consuming tasks such as sourcing candidates, reviewing resumes, interview scheduling, and timely communication can be automated.
Takeaways
Recruiting was simple back then, but has evolved drastically. New techniques and strategies are emerging every single day. Every enterprise is trying its best to gain the advantage of these strategies to gain the most out of their company. And sometimes common mistakes can ruin everything while adding on expenses. It is important to lay a strong recruitment strategy before searching tons of resumes and hiring candidates blindly. So are you ready to overcome your biggest recruitment challenge? Webential can help you in this journey with our robust staffing services.
