February 16, 2023

Recruitment Challenges: Top 7 Challenges Hiring Teams Face

Did anybody ever say hiring was easy, no, right? But only a hiring team really knows how tiring and complex it can get if the right strategies aren't put in place. Hiring the right people is essential for the future of any firm and if gone wrong, hiring solely can take a company into catastrophe.

Challenges in recruitment

Below are some of the top recruitment challenges a hiring team faces. Knowing them beforehand can be helpful in devising strategies to overcome these challenges.  

Grabbing Attention: Standing out from the crowd

There is just too much noise out there and to make an impression, a company has to be actively working on its presence and relevance. Good companies, even when they are not actively hiring, maintain a healthy presence on social media and other platforms.  

Recruitment marketing

To attract the top candidates, a company has to first be known to them. Different companies use different strategies for recruitment marketing. No matter how good a company you are running or hiring for, you lose the attention of the masses if you are not marketing the open positions.

What can be done to grab attention?

There are strategies that can be used to publicize open positions:

  • Job boards and job ads are a great way to let people know about you.
  • Going to career and job fairs can be a good way to announce yourself in the market.

Learn how you can stand out from the crowd by creating a strong employer brand.

The Obvious Competition for Limited Talent

There will always be competition for landing the best candidates because there is only a handful of them out there. Good candidates are not approached by just a single employer and they, more often than not, have multiple offers at their disposal. There is a high chance that you will lose a good candidate to some other company.  

Competition in hiring

Losing potential employees at the end doesn't sound great, right? Plenty of time and resources are utilized to source, screen, and evaluate a candidate before he is offered a position. Not doing enough to onboard a good percentage of the people who are offered a position, means that your company will always have to settle for second-tier talent.  

What can be done?

Companies use one-up techniques to lure candidates into accepting their job offers. There is competition among the companies to offer better packages, which may include health benefits, frequent raises, performance bonuses, paid time off, provident funds, etc. in their package.  

Screening: Ugghhhh!! These are too many documents

Screening

One of the major challenges in recruitment is to go through tons of applications and screen some of them for further stages. There is a lot a recruiter has to keep in mind while going through the applications. Required experience, technical skillset, and soft skills have to be there and the provided information, including the background of the applicant, has to be cross-checked. All of this demands a lot of time and effort from a recruiter.

What can be helpful for the recruiter in this case?

There are tools that can be used to automate screening to some extent. Resume parsing applications are able to extract key information and make it easier for the recruiter to select the best ones. Also, tools like Applicant Tracking System allow you to add custom questions that disqualify the candidates automatically.  

Diversifying: Overcoming the Bias

Another challenge in recruitment is overcoming any conscious or unconscious bias while evaluating candidates. Recruiters and interviewers may get biased against a certain candidate. This bias may be due to race, gender, or some other geopolitical reasons. Sometimes the bias can even be due to some past event between the two parties.  

Diversification

Any such bias is hurtful to the growth of a company. A talented candidate, regardless of what race, gender, or region s/he is associated with, should only be judged on his skillset and abilities. Keeping biases means that you may lose good prospects.

What can be done to avoid biases?

Companies may hold anti-racism and cultural diversity workshops for hiring teams (or why not the whole staff?) where they learn to empathize without discrimination.  

Another technique used by hiring teams to overcome biases is blind hiring. In blind hiring, a candidate's personal information isn't disclosed. This ensures that the recruiters aren't influenced by one's gender, race, political affiliation, etc.

Read more about diversity hiring.

Ensuring Candidate Experience

A candidate is dealing with multiple employers at once and if you lag behind in providing a soothing candidate experience, chances are that s/he may not even remember you. From applying for the job to onboarding, it is important to make it smooth for any applicant.  

No conversation

The candidate doesn't know about your hiring process and may get frustrated at times due to a lack of communication. A lot of times a candidate may have questions about the open positions and may want to connect with you.  

What can you do to avoid poor candidate experience?

It is important to keep the candidate timely informed about your process, the next steps, and any development related to that employee.

Emails are a good way to do that. Around 81% of the candidates think that communication from the employer is important. A lot of companies use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to make sure that a candidate has a remarkable experience. An ATS lets you create cool and easy registration forms, automate emails, etc. Learn more about what an ATS does.

Time is Limited: Tell me something I don't know

If you haven't heard this enough, let us tell you again, there is no such thing as unlimited time. For a company, time means money, and saving both is what matters. Companies spend huge chunks of their budget on hiring activities and if the process isn’t right, hiring never ends.  

Race against time

Although the time constraint is there for most of the things we do, for hiring it becomes even more critical to be on time. A little mismanagement of time and your company will be losing potential employees and as a result, a lot of money too. Not communicating with candidates in time, not opening positions at the right time, dragging the whole hiring process, leaving the candidate unattended, etc. are all those things that reduce your chances of hitting your target.  

How to manage time efficiently?

To overcome the biggest challenge in recruitment, i.e., saving time, most companies use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), because it takes a lot of burdens off the recruiter’s shoulders and reduces the time of hiring to around a third. That means the hiring team can spend more time doing other tasks and thus utilize the resources in the best way possible.

Hiring Proactively

Even after a lot of planning and process in place, most companies end up hiring reactively. When a company hires reactively, chances are that the quality will be compromised because the vacancy needs to be filled. A major challenge in recruitment is to hire proactively. Hiring proactively means you anticipate the arising need in time and when the need is there, a quality candidate can be onboarded.  

As good as it sounds, hiring proactively is not easy and can't be done without proper strategies in place. It's challenging for any hiring team to be able to devise strategies that let them hire proactively.  

Strategies to hire proactively

Good hiring teams have proper talent acquisition strategies that allow them to constantly take competent people on board. From sourcing to eventually taking people on board, these acquisition strategies make sure that the resources aren't wasted. Making pipelines, creating talent pools, and devising marketing strategies all fall under talent acquisition techniques. Only by implementing proper strategies will a team be able to hire proactively.  

Talent acquisition pipeline

How does an ATS help in overcoming these challenges

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can take care of most of the challenges mentioned above. It lets the hiring team publicize the open positions on different job boards. The automated resume parsing feature of an ATS saves a huge time for a recruiter. An ATS allows you to send automated and custom emails, make pipelines and talent pools, compare and evaluate candidates on different aspects, etc. Traditional hiring is becoming obsolete and it is only visionary to go for tools that save you time and money.

Thinking about using an ATS for your next hiring cycle? Have a look at Hirecinch.com and read what we offer as an ATS.  

                                               

 

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Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier