New technologies are proliferating at a rapid pace. Unemployment is dropping. The demand for tech talent is increasing day by day. These two factors, along with others, make it tough for the recruiters in tech companies to attract and hire new talent.
When a low unemployment rate gets coupled with the ever-changing needs of the job market, the skilled candidates are the real kings, and the ultimate power rests in their hands. Candidates have the upper hand in selecting the organization they want to work for as they have multiple options to choose from.
In this war of talent, many organizations are guilty of using conventional recruitment strategies. The outdated strategies, when combined with their inability to understand the challenges and changing needs of the candidates, make the hiring process even more difficult. Gone are the days when companies could place a job opening on job portals and hope that the position will be filled quickly and easily. Today, they need to extremely active in searching and interacting with talent.
In this candidate-driven market, hundreds of recruiters and hiring managers contact and connect with a variety of candidates. It is hard to keep the right candidates engaged. The top candidate may not be available when companies finally decide to extend the offer after several weeks of interviews. The delay in the hiring process severely hampers the candidate experience, and companies eventually lose on the top talents. On the other hand, reducing the time-to-hire is also tricky as the recruiters are juggling multiple positions, talking to multiple candidates at the same time, and are busy with follow-ups. That apart, it is also essential to critically evaluate the candidates’ technical as well as other skills before hiring them.
The lack of understanding between the recruiters and hiring managers is the root cause of recruitment challenges. The miscommunication contributes to the inability to identify the right skill set in the prospective candidates and even obstruct in deciding the best channels for sourcing the right talent. Over 50% of recruiters expect hiring managers to do a better job of communication and provide relatable examples of what they are looking for in a candidate. On the other hand, many hiring managers consider the screening of candidates by the recruiters as inadequate.
A vast majority of the recruiters are very well-versed with the latest technology tools and their advantages, but not all use data effectively and efficiently. Today’s recruiters need to employ data and analysis to make better recruitment decisions and enhance their hiring process. They need to use data to know the hiring ratio, what skills are in demand, which skills are lacking in the organization, which tests are more effective, etc. It is surprising to note that only 7% of HR professionals have analytics capabilities in their functions and are optimizing their usage of analytics.
Balancing the speed of hire with the quality of hire is one of the biggest challenges that recruiters face throughout their process. They want to recruit a candidate as early as possible, and there is always an urge to get the best possible talent, which generally takes time. There are multiple steps involved in the process, such as validating the technical skills of the candidate, evaluating the candidate’s behavioral and aptitude skills, ensuring that the hiring managers don’t end up spending a lot of time in interviewing non-relevant candidates, etc. To increase their speed of hire without losing on the quality of candidates, modern recruiters have started using pre-employment testing and recruiting software to evaluate the technical and non-technical skills of the candidates.
The recruitment teams of companies might end up wasting a significant amount of time due to less accountability. They may focus more on less critical tasks like reviewing the candidate’s resumes, again and again, sourcing potentially talented candidates can take hours. That apart, companies spend a lot of time, energy, and costs in traditional processes like written tests. Today, with the proliferation of technology, all these things can be streamlined and made more efficient using the latest tools and technologies.
A sub-optimal candidate experience during the hiring process could create an adverse impact on the overall corporate branding of the organization. Today’s digitally savvy candidates expect organizations to offer a highly digital and smooth hiring experience. The age-old and lengthy hiring methods lead to candidate dissatisfaction.
Many employers are struggling to find a candidate with the right skill sets. The skills required to work on new technologies are hard to find and measure. Besides, these new technical skills are challenging to quantify and qualify. The subject matter expertise needed to evaluate and interview for such modern skills may not exist within the company.
The goal of companies is to select and hire the best possible candidate. They want to ensure workforce diversity as it enhances employee experiences and is also beneficial to the business. A diverse workforce strengthens a company’s reputation as a great place to work and attracts job seekers providing a full pool of talent for future hires. However, recruitment decisions can get influenced by unconscious biases. These biases can be challenging to uncover and can contribute to imbalances in the hiring process. It also results in uniformity in the workplace instead of diversity.
Successful recruitment validates every business. By adopting a hiring process that is time and cost-effective, companies can find qualified and suitable candidates by letting away the recruitment challenges. While these challenges are only a snapshot of a few barriers to mitigate in 2019, finding a creative strategy to tackle these obstacles may be a secret sauce in reaching the recruiters’ goals.