Your company might be doing great on the revenue and branding front, it may have your recruiting strategy and job adverts sorted, and it might be the best place to work, but still, you may be unable to hire the perfect candidate for the job opening. Additionally, open positions for a long duration are harming your company’s goodwill and employee productivity.

Whether you are an MNC or a local SMB, these situations are worrying. 

The recruitment process carries the maximum profundity and priority for every organization. However, recruiting and hiring candidates in today’s candidate-driven market isn’t an easy feat.

Recruiting professionals and hiring managers face a slew of challenges during the hiring process.  

5 recruiting challenges recruiters face and how they can solve them

#1 Attracting the right candidate

A ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage study found that 3 out of every 4 recruiters reported talent shortage as their biggest challenge. A similar percentage of hiring managers admitted that attracting the right talent was an equivalent hurdle in recruiting. 

Ambra Benjamin, Global Leadership Recruiting Leader at Facebook, says, “In my opinion, the greatest obstacle for recruiters is connecting with candidates through the noise of all the other 2,000 recruiters trying to reach out to the same candidates.”

Only 30% of global jobseekers actively seek a job opportunity, while the remaining 70% remain passive seekers.

Selecting a qualified candidate from a vast talent pool of candidates with various capabilities is more difficult than choosing one from a limited talent pipeline. 

A Mckinsey Global Institute report stated that companies in Europe and North America would require 16-18 million additional workers in the coming years. Consequently, choosing a candidate that is the right fit for the job can become tedious and difficult for recruiters, given the already short supply of qualified candidates.  

Solution

There can be several solutions and tips to tackle this challenge. 

Smaller Talent Pipeline

The number of criteria for screening candidates can be increased to shorten the talent pipeline and filter more qualified candidates. 

In-depth job advert

The job advert should have sufficient details about the position requirement. The specifications should be precise and may include a questionnaire to filter out the unqualified ones. 

Optimize your Google Ads for SEO

70% of the candidates use Google to search for jobs and open positions. Recruiters should prioritize optimizing their job ads for SEO to rank them higher and get noticed by perspectives. 

Use Social media

With 70% of the workforce passive seekers and 80% of the same active on social media, social media can naturally serve as a platform for brands to get noticed.  

#2 Engaging qualified candidates

Most candidates pursue multiple job opportunities simultaneously; recruiters contact qualified candidates regularly. Making your email stand out and persuading the candidate to choose your company over others becomes an additional task for recruiters. 

75% of recruiters confirmed seeing a candidate change their mind after accepting the offer letter. Engaging candidates during the recruitment process or once they have signed the offer letter is a huge challenge, which, if overcome, can help recruiters save substantial effort and resources spent in hiring. 

A good candidate experience can be crucial in determining how the candidates feel about your company during recruitment. 67% of the American workforce agrees that experience during an interview would make or break their decision about taking the job. 

Solution 

Personalize candidate experience

Research what motivates the candidate, and make efforts to know them before you plan the engagement strategy ahead. Let the candidate know what they will get instead of what they must do. Candidate experience should be taken care of during the entire recruitment process continuously. 

Shorten the recruitment cycle.

Instead of having multiple phases, interviews, and screening tests to sift qualified candidates, design a recruitment strategy that is well-focused and customized to suit the specific job requirements.   

Develop a pre-onboarding engagement strategy.

A pre-onboarding engagement strategy is essential to make the new candidate feel at home in the new role and ensure retention. The candidate should be introduced to their team members, immediate superiors, and training platforms,  invited to informal meetups, and become accustomed to the work culture and environment so that when D-day arrives, the candidate may not feel overwhelmed or alienated. 

Strengthen communication channels

Keep the candidates in the loop during the recruitment process – inform them of the important dates, their roles and responsibilities, compensation and benefits, and other information beforehand. Use an ATS to keep track of the emails sent and have a hiring budding allotted to each candidate to solve their queries related to the new role. 

#3 Testing candidate skills fairly and quickly 

The best candidates are selected and off the job market in as few as 10 days. 60% of the candidates, on the other hand, quit online job applications midway owing to the length and complexity of the recruitment process.   

“My number one all-time biggest challenge — figuring out how to test and interview candidates to determine if they can actually do the job before we hire them,” says Eric Scott, product and project manager at HappyFunCorp. 

Recruiters face the dual challenge of scarcity of candidates and managing fair candidate screening for hundreds of resumes for a single job role. An average hiring process lasts for 42 days, as per SHRM. 

Also, screening out the finest candidates from the massive volume of applications depends on the reliability and favorability of conventional screening tests. These tests may bring bias and inefficiency in the recruitment process.   

Solution

Prefer data-oriented hiring

Recruiters should use recruitment data and metrics, such as candidate per hire, time-to-hire, referrals per call, email conversion rate, etc.,  to constantly improve and upscale their hiring process. The data should be compiled and organized to be useful, particularly in HRIS solutions like ATS. The recruiting team should consult the senior management and settle down on a few metrics that may work best for the company. 

Use interviews

Recruiters should prefer interviewing candidates to gauge their abilities, understand the candidate’s mindset, and determine whether the candidate will fit the company’s work culture.  

Select valid tests

Select tests that yield optimum results and are fully compliant. Such screening practices should be built over time by continuously earmarking the flaws using questionnaires or workflow reports. The managers should have complete clarity on the job role they are hiring for to ensure screening is done fairly and efficiently. 

Shorten the recruitment cycle.

Hiring managers should remove the unnecessary bumps and pauses in the recruitment cycle to shorten the duration and keep candidates engaged. Unnecessary screening tests and assessments should replace a single skill-based assessment test. Also, using automation and AI, recruiters can streamline and automate their workflow and recruitment processes, making the process more efficient.  

#4 Building a strong employer brand 

A CR Magazine survey finds that 92% of professionals would consider a switch if offered a position from a firm with a small employer brand. With talent wars being on for the same qualified candidates, competition between employer brands can get more fierce, and the need for recruiters to differentiate themselves from the other brands becomes higher.  

96% of the companies believe that brand and reputation directly impact revenue. 

Companies often lack the right strategy to build a well-diversified workforce based on inclusivity and equality, negatively impacting the brand image. Challenges also arise when firms aren’t sure where and how to begin their employer branding initiatives. 

Solution 

Build a social media presence

68% of millennials confirmed checking the company’s social media pages to evaluate the employer’s brand. Conversely, 47% of recruiters feel social media can help build the employer brand.

And truly so, social media can be the best tool to build a strong employer brand if used rightly, and for that, companies should have an appropriate social media marketing strategy in place. 

Build a robust company website

21% of recruiters find investing in a company website directly impacts the company’s brand. Prospects also visit the company website and check reviews about the company on sites like Glassdoor.

The firms must design their website to display the brand and what makes it stand out, including employee testimonials, media coverage, and other things that excite a candidate to join the company.    

Use employee testimonials

40% of candidates prefer seeing employee testimonials when trying to learn more about the company during a job search. Keeping the employees satisfied and caring for their well-being may be a long-term game, but they come in handy when building the brand image and for word-of-mouth publicity and referrals. 

Conduct internal surveys

Interviewing employees to gauge their strengths and growth opportunities can be a good starting point for determining a branding strategy.

Using content, video, and other visually appealing mediums to convey a compelling tale about the company can be a fantastic way to tell prospective candidates to become a part of the company.   

Check – A Detailed Guide on Employer Branding

#5 Making the recruitment process efficient 

Talent acquisition professionals spend 1/3rd of their workweek sifting resumes and sourcing candidates for a single role. When recruiters understand how to optimize the job recruitment process, they can shorten the hiring cycle by 60% while improving quality. 

The average cost of a single bad hire may go as high as $15,000! Also, a bad hire can significantly reduce the firm’s chances to leverage its resources productively. 

Inefficient recruitment processes result in bad hires, which can lower employee morale and productivity in the long run.

Solution

Improve manager-recruiter relationship

If recruiters’ relationship with their hiring manager is strained, the recruitment process’s communication and overall efficiency get impacted. Companies should consider investing in ATS or communication apps that help the teams to communicate and coordinate in real-time. Feedback should be made an integral part of the company culture and meetings. 

Automate workflow

The manual recruitment tasks take up valuable time for the recruiters. Instead, firms can opt for in-house or cloud-based recruitment software to intelligently automate, manage, and streamline the workflows and recruitment processes. Extensive and appropriate use of AI enabled chatbots to handle recurring tasks as well as improve responsiveness to candidate queries helps recruiter efficacy.   

Build a talent pool

Recruiters can build a talent pool consisting of candidates who were great but couldn’t make it through the last rounds or who applied, were the right fit, and there was no job vacancy available for them then. Recruiters can use this talent pool in a jiffy to secure the right talent. 

Train hiring teams

Besides leveling up the recruitment process to keep it up-to-date, recruiters must also focus on training the hiring team to combat biases, build rapport with candidates, and coach them to skillfully and empathetically interview the candidates.  

Check – Strategies to improve Recruitment Process

Wrap-up

Recruitment challenges aren’t a mere byproduct of the economy or the employment market not doing good. Most of the time, these challenges are driven by internal factors, and a review in the retrospective followed by a remedial strategy can go a long way in solving such issues. 

The use of AI-driven automation tools and software, training recruitment teams, and diversifying recruitment channels and talent pool can be great ways to improve the overall efficiency of the recruitment process in the long run. 

FAQs on recruitment challenges