Hiring Challenges

Employees create or destroy businesses. The team members you hire now may have the drive and ideas that will help you take the business to the next level. They may also alienate you from your customers, cause conflict and reduce your profits. If only it were easier to tell what kind of employee you'll be hiring. Even if you can't predict the future, you can design your hiring process to make it easier to find the right candidates for your team. It all boils down to avoiding some common recruitment problems.

Reaching the right candidates

It doesn't matter how smooth and efficient your recruitment process is if your candidate pool is small. Reaching out to job seekers who are right for you is perhaps the biggest challenge for recruitment firms. Ideally, by the end of the recruitment process, you will have a group of candidates who possess all the skills and attributes required to succeed in your open positions. This cannot happen if you do not involve these people in the process from the beginning.

So how do you reach the candidates who could thrive in your team? Look at how you advertise vacancies. First, critically review the way you formulate job descriptions in your job postings. You want candidates to read these descriptions and be able to judge whether the job is right for them in everyday life. Jobs should be described honestly and not be overlooked to highlight the most attractive aspects of the job. If someone is already in a position you want to fill, work with them to create a list that accurately reflects the job.

Also be aware of any non-negotiable requirements to distinguish candidates who will not progress through your recruitment process. If you do not wish to hire a candidate who does not have, for example, a bachelor's degree or reliable transportation, the job offer should state that these are absolute requirements and that other candidates will not be considered. At the same time, make sure that you do not require skills or characteristics that are not really important for the job. For example, does the person in this role really need to be able to regularly lift 50 pounds? Do not indicate this if it is not really true, as it may discourage qualified candidates with physical disabilities from applying.

Finally, look where your vacancies are advertised. If you only post them on traditional job sites like Indeed, you'll miss out on a huge group of candidates - including workers who may not be looking for a job but would be willing to change for the right opportunity. Use social media, contact candidates who have gone through the final stage of your recruitment process in the past, make sure that job postings are advertised internally so that you can promote from within and encourage employees to make recommendations.

Streamlining of the process

You can't make good hiring decisions in a hurry. The process can take months, from developing the perfect job offer to negotiating the salary with the final candidate. It takes time to select your best candidates, interview them and get everyone's opinion on who you should hire. All steps are important, but your team could lose a lot of time if the process is inefficient. Can you implement a new candidate tracking system that takes care of some of the administrative tasks involved in finding candidates? Can you reduce the list of decision-makers who need to be involved in the hiring process? Do you use standardized assessments that allow you to quickly compare candidates?

If you have not already done so, consider creating a talent pool that includes the best past candidates, current employees seeking promotion, and top performers employed by competitors. When a position becomes available, contact these individuals directly to assess their interest. You may be able to avoid the early stages of the recruiting process by contacting candidates you already know directly.

Assessing the suitability of employees

You can learn a lot from the way a candidate answers the interview questions, but not everything. Depending on the type of job available, candidates' answers may say very little about how they will perform their daily tasks.

Some companies offer candidates comprehensive aptitude assessments during interviews to test personality, attitude, cognitive speed, etc. However, there are less formal ways to conduct these assessments. Include job suitability questions in your interview process. Does the candidate expect to make friends with colleagues? What kind of role is the person more likely to play when working as part of a team? What are the key factors that determine whether the candidate is happy or unhappy in the workplace? Also look for ways to assess how the employee approaches and completes work projects. Depending on the position, you can assign typical tasks during the interview process.

Some companies also ask their current employees to interview the best candidates informally, assuming that these employees know better than anyone else what it takes to succeed in the company and can answer the candidates' questions honestly. This strategy is, of course, based on employee job satisfaction; disgruntled employees will do little to attract candidates to your team.

Hiring is hard work, even for experienced HR professionals. Your recruiting process may need to evolve to ensure that your organization can attract the best talent.

Among the many challenges facing recruiters, there are three major obstacles to overcome in today's competitive labor market. One of the challenges is that of timing. Demand outstrips supply, which means there is less talent available than employers need. So when you've found the right candidate, don't wait! The longer the application procedure and the longer the offer, the more likely it is that the desired person will accept another job offer. Recruiters need to act fast and hire fast!

Secondly, talent acquisition faces the challenge of employer branding. Your competitors are not only competing with your product or solution, they are also competing for the same pool of candidates. Companies need to focus on their employer brand. What is different and distinguishes your corporate culture? Why is your company a better place to work beyond compensation?

Third, recruiters need access to data and metrics about their talent acquisition efforts. How do your recruiting resources and efforts benefit your organization? Are there opportunities for improvement? Key indicators include your team's knowledge of your cost per hire, time to hire, candidate engagement (such as opinions and shares), and employee evaluations and appraisals (how is your culture perceived by outsiders?).

Video job postings overcome current recruitment challenges

Text job offers are old school, it's true. Reading a long job ad takes time. Imagine reading 100 of them during an active job search! Candidates often scan the text to save time.

A 60-second video tells a better story than the text alone. You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? According to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, 60 seconds of video is worth 1.8 million words when it comes to influencing an audience. For recruitment professionals, video simply makes sense.

Video job postings contain several elements: voiceover, text graphics, music and images. When these elements are combined, it's not just an explanation of the role, but also an overview of the company. Candidates learn and retain more than 60% more information from the video than from the text alone.

Thanks to a better understanding of the position and the company culture, candidates can decide for or against the application procedure, depending on their suitability. Recruiters need to save time in selecting qualified candidates, so better self-selection is essential. This saves time and money in talent acquisition!

Follow the job ads on video and succeed in recruitment

With the right technology partner, you should have up-to-date data and metrics on views and applications by source, location, time of day, etc. Tracking your recruiting efforts gives you insight into what works and what doesn't when you start an active search for the right talent. Analyzing this data shows how your team can better understand the right strategy for recruiting for niche positions and industries around the world.

If you’re looking for an automated Recruitment Management system, we suggest you IceHrm which is one of the best HRIS systems which has so many HR functions automated into one system.

IceHrm is a Human resource management system for small and medium-sized organizations. This HRM software centralizes employee data and allows only one authorized person to access it, providing a high level of security. The presence module monitors employee time based on information about insertion and perforation. It covers all the basic HRM needs of a company such as Time Management, Training, and Development, Attendance Management, Expense management, leave management, Recruitment management and handling employee information.