Recruiting Challenges: Four tips to modernize your hiring process

recruiting challenges

Recruiting Challenges: Four tips to modernize your hiring process

1999 1335 Brenda Akinyi

Hiring managers face recruiting challenges that make their job tough. At any given time, the average recruiter will be handling 5 to 15 jobs at once, managing an average of 200 applications per role (but sometimes more than a thousand!). Knowing how critical talent is to their company’s success, it is up to them to hone in on the best candidates and manage a multi-step process from end to end. On top of this, they also need to safeguard the company’s employer brand at every step! This has been verified even further by our recent survey on the 2020 Talent Acquisition Trends.

If this sounds familiar to you, you may be facing some of the most common recruiting challenges. Manual processes that are slowing you down, not attracting the top talent and lacking an intuitive candidate management system. Below are four tips to combat these recruiting challenges and streamline your hiring process in 2020!

How do you increase hiring efficiency?

Challenge #1 –Traditional methods of recruiting tend to be highly manual and untargeted.  Candidates sending in applications to a generic email address and recruiters sifting through hundreds of bland CVs are two scenarios that come to mind. Relying on these 19th-century methods of recruiting makes it nearly impossible to hone in on the right candidate for a role. Additionally, this old-school process does nothing to engage and impress your most promising candidates.

Tip #1: Get to know what other methods are available to enable you to filter through the noise and discover the best-fit talent from your pool of applications. For example, a simple Google form with questions that highlight your must-have requirements might help you get started in improving the way you sift through applications. You will then be able to easily filter candidates based on those requirements.

How do you attract top talent?

Challenge #2 – In our recent survey of 150+ HR professionals, it was evident that a company’s ability to attract the right candidates remains a major recruiting challenge for many organizations.  Enhancing your employer brand is the first step to attracting top candidates in the market. In-demand talent can afford to select companies based on factors including compensation, mission, and also the company’s culture and values. Organizations that do not communicate these elements of their value proposition may have a disadvantage with recruitment. Creating compelling job descriptions that clearly showcase your brand and give adequate information about the role is vital.

Tip #2: Customize your careers page and job descriptions to give more information about what it’s like to work at your company. How your culture stands out, and any other unique value propositions, like remote work opportunities. You want to give as much information as possible to an applicant to enable them to make a decision about whether they would be a fit for the role and culture. Check out this blog post for a complete guide to revamping your job descriptions for more tips.

How do you make sure applicants are not falling through the cracks?

Challenge #3 – A great candidate experience is an integral part of the recruitment process.  The majority of job seekers say that a negative candidate experience (meaning slow response times or unfair evaluation) would lead them to never apply to that company again or to eventually turn down an offer at the end of the process. Additionally,  nearly 70% would share a bad experience online or tell others not to apply. Some would go so far as to boycott the company’s products or services, thereby affecting your bottom line.

Tip #3: Be clear on the hiring process and estimated timelines and communicate the same to candidates. Some roles are hard to fill and may require a lengthier process. Open-communication with the candidates in your pipeline keeps them warm and improves their experience with your brand.

How can I leverage data to overcome recruiting challenges?

Challenge #4 – Some key metrics you need to keep tabs on include; the number of applications you received per job and how many candidates progressed to the next stages of your recruitment process. Additionally, sources where your best candidates came from and time to hire are some of the other key metrics you need to know.

A majority of recruiting strategies do not take into account the importance of data management. Companies miss out on valuable information with the lack of appropriate tools to manage and store applicant data. Data privacy issues may also come up whenever candidates submit applications through some generic channels.

 Tip #4: On average, the best candidates stay in the market for about 10 days. Keeping tabs on key metrics such as your time and cost to hire will help you improve your process and save you time and money.  

We hope these tips for addressing recruiting challenges were helpful and make it easy for you to get started! Perhaps you may be looking for a longer-term solution. An all in one integrated software that helps you manage your end-to-end recruitment process more efficiently.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have become increasingly popular today and are considered a must-have in modern-day recruitment. With the goal of increasing efficiency and employing a data-driven approach to recruitment, they offer a wide range of solutions to some of the challenges mentioned above.

Team collaboration:

An ATS makes it easy for your internal teams to collaborate on projects as well.  You can manage a pipeline and prioritize candidates based on how they fit the profile you’re looking to find.

You can easily move candidates through different stages of your process.

Assessment Integration & Structured interviews:

Assessment integrations to ATS’s also help you evaluate applicants more objectively.  Additionally, an ATS enables you to run a fair recruitment process through the use of a structured interview process. Moreover, you can also monitor the time it takes for candidates to go to each application process. As a result, you find ways to improve the efficiency of the process in the future.

All these features help you make faster and better hiring decisions despite the recruiting challenges.

Interested in learning more? Talk to us about Shortlist Connect – A recruitment Management tool to help you increase efficiency in your recruitment process. It’s everything you need from an ATS without all the bells and whistles. We deliver features customers will actually use on a daily basis.

If You Are Hiring,Let us Help You