Guest PostThe primary purpose of human resources is to assist firms in meeting strategic goals by locating qualified people and then effectively managing them. It accomplishes this by:
- Developing into a key business partner within the organization
- Acting as a change agent
- Being an advocate for employees
- Taking on a major administrative responsibility
In today’s business environment, the challenge is for HR departments to be strategically proactive partners operating on behalf of management or business owners. Previously the role was mostly reactive, but nowadays things have taken a 360-degree turn making it way hard and competitive to find and retain leading talent.
Especially after the pandemic, things have become more twisted for recruiters. The employment market has yet to recover from the pandemic’s impact, and we’re already at the end of 2022 and readily planning for another year.
So, to help you prepare better for the coming year, we have listed the top recruitment challenges in 2022 and we’ll discuss how to overcome them.
1. Talent & Skill Shortage
The skill shortage has been one of the most contentious recruitment challenges in recent years. Many businesses are struggling to fill unfilled positions, resulting in revenue loss.
According to Korn Ferry’s extensive estimate, more than 85 million jobs could be unfilled by 2030. And it isn’t due to automation or the replacement of those jobs by robots. Because there will not be enough qualified candidates to fill the vacancies. This is one of the most significant recruiting issues that businesses confront.
????Solution: Employers must make an effort to attract and retain the top individuals. You must concentrate on what makes your organization special to overcome this challenge. What do you have to offer that other companies don’t? It could be a good work/life balance, flexible hours, or working from home. Make sure you sell it to candidates, whatever it is!
2. Recruiting The Right Candidate
Another widely faced challenge is to target the right candidates. If you’ve ever tried to find the appropriate applicant in a field of unqualified candidates, you’ll understand how limited your options are. You’ll pick the best individual available at the time, not the best match for the position.
However, it is not always about the volume of applicants; often, the greatest method to hire the appropriate individuals is from a smaller pipeline of better-qualified talent.
????Solution: Be specific about the requirements in your job postings and provide a concise overview of the role. To address your primary concerns directly, use an application form with ‘knock-out’ questions. Need someone with SQL knowledge, for example? Include a yes/no question asking if the candidates have the required skill. It’s a quick way to filter out candidates who are not fit.
3. Increasing Recruiting Efficiency
The majority of a recruiter’s time is consumed by inefficient administration processes and duplication of effort. Sourcing potential applicants and analyzing CVs and profiles, for example, can take hours, if not days.
When a lot of time is wasted on recruitment administration, it can cost your company a lot of money. However, many organizations fail to account for the time and resources spent on these types of jobs when computing the cost-per-hire statistic.
????Solution: Improving your recruitment efficiency requires a good recruiting management system. Recruitment management systems allow you to coordinate all of your activities from a single platform, where you can readily see which jobs take the most time, as well as many other features that automate and streamline the recruitment process. By automating administrative tasks, you can save your business a great deal of time and money in the long run and head off recruitment challenges.
4. Workload Management
According to Deloitte’s 2022 survey, 75% of CEOs believe recruiting and retaining people to be their company’s most difficult challenge.
But, the recruitment team has a myriad of essential functions and has a lot on its plate to manage. Overseeing new employee interviews, inducting and training employees, evaluating how employees perform, and dealing with employee and management grievances are some of the regular duties that must be performed properly and repetitively.
To focus on the most critical tasks—recruiting and retaining talent, HR professionals should avoid wasting time on repetitive procedures, divide responsibilities and workload effectively, and streamline their work processes to avoid burnout. And to get all things right it is imperative to have a proper workload management strategy.
????Solution: Use project management platforms to organize and streamline the work of your recruiting team. Tools like SmartTask or Asana can help you keep track of your recruiting projects as well as manage your team tasks.
Furthermore, the streamlined procedures and workflows lead to a robust process that is easy to understand and implement by everyone on the team. Your team will be ready to take on recruitment challenges without breaking down the workflow.
5. Reducing Hiring Time
Boosting time-to-hire is a growing recruitment challenge. With 81% of candidates expecting the hiring process to take two weeks at most, it is important to avoid a delayed process. This is because candidates are significantly more likely to abandon the application process if it is taking too long, or to get hired by another organization if it is taking too long.
????Solution: Be sure to move swiftly through the hiring process. Use the time-to-offer metric instead of the time-to-hire metric. This is a better metric to evaluate your effectiveness because elements like the applicant notice period are beyond the recruiter’s control.
If your time-to-offer remains too long, you should begin searching for solutions to speed up your recruitment process so you don’t miss out on talented individuals.
6. Maintaining a Good Brand
According to LinkedIn, most job applicants (75% to be precise) examine an employer’s brand before applying for a position. If they don’t like what they see, they will not apply for or accept your employment offer. According to Corporate Responsibility Magazine, 75% of people would refuse to work for a company with a terrible image, even if they were unemployed!
All of this makes maintaining your organization’s brand very important to attracting and engaging better candidates. Employer branding increases the likelihood of hiring quality of employees by three times.
????Solution: Develop and put into action an effective employer branding strategy. You must create a captivating message about your organization, demonstrate your company culture, and entice applicants to join your team.
Create a visually appealing, responsive, and branded employment site and a career blog or social media page where you can promote your employer brand and demonstrate to candidates why your organization is a fantastic place to work.
7. Targeting Passive Candidates
In spite of the market, if current trends continue, there will be no unemployed people left, only passive prospects. According to LinkedIn data, 70% of the worldwide workforce is a passive talent who isn’t actively looking for work, while the remaining 30% are active job hunters. Statistics that are frightening?
According to LinkedIn, the majority (up to 90%) of these passive applicants are interested in hearing about new job possibilities. Because passive candidates aren’t actively hunting for work, you won’t find them on your career site or job boards.
????Solution: To overcome sourcing recruitment challenges, you must go where they are, which is on social media. According to a LinkedIn survey, 49% of all professionals follow organizations on social media to stay up to date on their jobs. You must harness the power of social media and begin promoting your employer’s brand on it.
This does not imply simply publishing your job opportunities on various social media networks. You should also post tales, photos, and videos that showcase your company as an excellent place to work. You should also host various recruiting activities (such as meetups, workshops, and so on) and invite possible applicants to participate.
8. Improving Candidate Experience
Almost 60% of job seekers have experienced a negative applicant experience. As a result of this, the job offer is rejected by 63% of these candidates and another 66% of these candidates share their negative experiences with others, either online or in person.
Also, candidates like that companies continually sending status updates to them would considerably improve their entire candidate experience. To summarize, if you do not improve the applicant experience, you risk losing not only your top candidates, but also your reputation, customers, and money.
????Solution: First, you should assess your present employee experience. Then you must take the appropriate actions to enhance the candidate’s experience. Improving your communication with candidates is one of the most effective ways to improve their experience and protect your brand.
This can be readily accomplished by sending personalized automated email and SMS responses at each level of the application process, acknowledging applications, and providing extra information about your job opportunity to keep them interested.
Finally…
We must all recognize that in business, everything has a cost, including recruitment. As a result, you need to be careful of what you’re doing. You must ensure that you hire the greatest professional for the position and that they fit within your organization so that you don’t have to replace them all the time.
Things will go more smoothly when you have a set protocol for how to carry out the recruiting task. Spend some time reevaluating what is and is not working for your recruiting team.
Maintain an open mind to change and the ability to make adjustments as needed. Being willing and ready to improve your recruiting process will provide you access to the top candidates available. And that’s it, you are all set to take on recruitment challenges in the new year!
Featured Guest Expert – Shyamal Parikh
Shyamal Parikh is the Founder of SmartTask, an online work management/automation software that helps teams streamline their processes, whether sales, hiring, customer success, or projects. He actively shares strategies and techniques that improve a team’s productivity.
Josh Tolan
