Recruitment Management Difficulties Nowadays

If you had to name one thing as your biggest problem with hiring, what would it be? It's true that your answers may vary depending on the size of the company you work with or the type of functions you hire. But most recruiters would be attracted to some common recruitment challenges.

Here are the 8 most common recruitment challenges we hear most often and solutions to overcome them to make your recruitment more effective:

Recruiting the right candidates

If you have ever tried to find the right candidate in a pool of unqualified talent, you will know that your options are limited. You will choose the best person you can find at the time - not the best person best suited for the job. But it's not always about the number of candidates applying; the best way to hire the right people is often from a smaller pipeline of more qualified talent.

Advice: Make the requirements clear in your job advertisements and give a brief overview of the role. Use an application form with "knock-out" questions to respond directly to your most important concerns. For example, do you need someone with a clean driving licence? Include a yes/no question for candidates asking if they have a driver's license. This way you can quickly sort out people who are not suitable for the job.

Recruiting qualified candidates

Good candidates are often contacted regularly by recruiters, making it harder for your own email to stand out. In addition, candidates with hard-to-find skills often consider several job offers at once. You need to make extra efforts to convince passive candidates to prefer your company over your competitors.

Tip: Before you contact a passive candidate, research what motivates him or her and what makes them happy in their job. With this knowledge, personalize your sourcing emails to describe what you can offer them instead of describing what they can do for your company.

Quick adjustment

Recruitment teams want to hire as quickly as possible, because vacancies cost money and delay operations. However, depending on your industry, hiring can take several months, which puts pressure on recruiters and frustrates hiring teams. A long hiring period can be a by-product of a lack of qualified candidates. The hiring process may take too long or the hiring teams may have difficulty reaching a consensus, resulting in the best candidates finding work elsewhere.

Advice 1: Look at your recruitment process and ask yourself: Are all stages of recruitment really necessary? Are we looking in the right places to fill our candidate pipeline? Do we communicate quickly with the candidates and with each other? All these questions can be answered with the help of recruitment metrics from your Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Advice 2: Sometimes a long recruitment period is a matter of course when you hire for hard-to-fill vacancies. Explain this to the hiring teams and set expectations early. Let them know what a realistic timeframe is, and stress the importance of careful recruitment for jobs where a bad hire could cost a lot of money.

Use data-driven recruitment

Companies can use recruitment data and metrics to continuously improve their recruitment process and make more informed decisions. But collecting and processing data can be a problem. Spreadsheets are one way to track recruitment data, but they require manual work, are prone to human error-and they're not compliant. This makes it difficult to track data and trends accurately. Recruitment teams need ways to compile and organize data in an efficient and rational way.

Advice: You can store data and export helpful reports using systems such as ATS, Google Analytics, or personnel marketing software. You don't have to track every recruitment metric that exists. Have a conversation with management to agree on a few metrics that make sense for you and your company.

Building a strong employer brand

A good employer brand helps you attract and engage better candidates. Companies that invest in employer branding are three times more likely to hire high quality employees. Yet this is a complex process, from ensuring a positive candidate experience to promoting your culture in social media. It is an ongoing, collective effort that requires you to step out of your usual duties and secure the approval of your employees.

Advice: Always answer (politely) to online evaluations - bad and good. Give your employees the opportunity to tell their story about their work and what they like (for example through blogs and videos). And above all: Be a good employer and it will show.

Ensure a good candidate experience

The experience of the candidates is not only important for employer branding, but also a factor when your best candidates evaluate your vacancies. The way you treat candidates during the hiring process reflects the way you will treat them after they are hired. If they have had a bad experience, they will be less inclined to accept the offer. Conversely, positive experiences of candidates can strengthen your employer brand and encourage good candidates to apply and accept your job offers.

Advice 1: Set communication expectations: Tell candidates when they can expect to hear from you, and if you have an ATS, set reminders and use email templates to keep that promise. Do not keep them in the dark during the hiring process.

Advice 2: Coordinate well with the candidates. If you are planning a personal interview, give them all the necessary information (e.g. who to ask for and what to bring). Explain to them what they can expect from the interview and what the next steps are. Inform the reception that they are coming and do not make them wait in the lobby.

Fair recruitment

Many companies have difficulty attracting and hiring different candidates, and unconscious prejudices are often the reason for this. Apart from your legal obligations to ensure equal opportunities, an objective attitude is good for business because it helps you hire the best person for the job without stereotypes getting in the way. The result is an inclusive workplace that shows potential candidates that you are a meritocracy and allows you to benefit from the positive effects of diversity.

Advice: Implement objective hiring techniques such as structured interviews and "blind" hiring software like IceHrm.

Creating an efficient recruitment process

Recruitment teams need to communicate quickly, evaluate candidates easily and know what is going on every step of the way. Recruiters have the task of coordinating all this communication, and it's not always a piece of cake. Especially when the relationship between recruiters and recruiters is strained. In addition, administrative tasks (such as interview planning) often take up valuable time that recruiters could have used to coordinate the recruitment process and ensure a good candidate experience.

Advice: Consider investing in an ATS that will help your team coordinate the hiring process and see the status of the hiring process at a glance. With this system, your team can leave ratings and see the comments of others. And it will facilitate some of the administrative tasks via integrated email templates, calendar integration and more.

The best recruitment methods to address common challenges

Building a talent pool

Talent pipelines are groups of candidates that you have already hired and who can fill future positions in your company. This can help you reduce recruitment time and costs by keeping qualified, pre-selected candidates in the queue when a position becomes available.

To build talent pipelines:

• Review past hiring procedures for candidates that have entered the final phase or search for new candidates. Previous candidates are naturally qualified, while new candidates will help you build a more comprehensive and diverse candidate database. You might also consider candidates who have reached your company by sending in their CVs. If candidates are based in the EU, make sure you comply with data protection laws such as GDPR.
• Employ former and passive candidates. Your pipelines are stronger when candidates know you are considering them and when you stay in touch with them. Let them determine how often you will communicate with them, either through face-to-face meetings or by providing them with useful content and information.

Read More... New Recruitment Methods You can Follow

Train hiring teams

Even experienced recruiters and interviewers may need to improve their recruitment skills. Combating bias is a common reason to train recruitment teams, but it is also important to coach them on the interview questions to be asked or on building a relationship with candidates.

Here are some ideas for training recruitment teams:

• Instruct interviewers how to prepare for interviews. It will be helpful to give them a checklist
• Encourage them to take the Harvard test of implicit association to discover their hidden prejudices. It is also a good idea to educate them about how bias works
• Set up mock interviews. This is especially useful for inexperienced interviewers
• Spread recruitment resources. Ask each member of the recruitment team if they are interested in receiving interesting articles or videos with recruitment advice. Set expectations on the amount they will read, e.g., send an article once a month

Diversify your recruiting strategies

It is good to advertise on a job board that you know will bring good candidates. But to leave it at that is a missed opportunity to create a truly effective recruitment process.

Consider this:

• Use social media to advertise your jobs or promote your company
• Present your culture, your achievements and the stories of your employees on your career page to encourage more applicants
• Attend job fairs and organise recruitment events whenever possible
• Use tools like People Search to find candidates based on location, skills and other job-related criteria

Invest in an ATS

An ATS can streamline your hiring process by allowing your hiring team to collaborate and store all applicant data in one place. A good ATS has too:

• Reporting capabilities that can help you gain useful insights from your past processes to improve future processes
• Planning tools and calendar integrations that can help you quickly plan phone screens and job interviews and minimize back and forth communication
• Integrated templates that allow you to quickly place job ads and send emails to candidates without having to rewrite the text each time
• Interview scorecards that can help ease the transition to structured interviews
• Assessment integrations that help you assess candidates more objectively

All of these features (and more) will help you with your hiring process and help you make faster and better hiring decisions.

Read More... What features should be there on an effective recruitment system?