Common challenges recruiters face and how to overcome them

In this fast-changing and hyper-competitive world, challenges for recruiters requiring the best efforts.

Does it often happen that a candidate selected according to all the rules is unsuitable? Or are you wasting time searching for candidates, and the cost of closing a vacancy is growing? Challenges recruiters face are of incremental importance. If you have any trouble with recruitment, this blog post will be helpful! 

Here we’ll tell you about the main challenges in the recruiting work and tips for solving them!

Top challenges and how to overcome them?

1. Attracting the best-fit candidate

Finding the most qualified candidates is the primary recruiter’s task. There can be dozens of responses to the vacancies but, of course, not all job seekers are relevant and you have to spend much time sorting all the CVs. But don't rush to get upset. 

Sometimes the reason for this can be a specific vacancy requiring more time for filling or, in contrast, there are too many open vacancies for general positions (f.e., office manager), and candidates have plenty of options to choose from. 

However, the bad-formulated requirements or the lengthy interview period may be other reasons. Such drawbacks discourage potential employees from even applying to your job postings. To see how well-structured job requirements can attract top talent, check out our article on the Data Project Manager Job Description.

Tips:

Determine what kind of specialist you need. First, you need to realize for what duties and responsibilities you need an employee. The key to success is the perfect mix of responsibilities, work experience, skills, work style, and character. If a new employee has to work in a team, think about the qualities required to fit into the teamwork.

When you define the detailed requirements and the scope of tasks the candidate has to do, you’ll get a better understanding of your ideal candidate. Also, consider what concessions you can make when hiring - what experience or skills are desirable, but not required. This will allow you to create a portrait of not only the ideal candidate but also the optimal one. Usually, problems faced by recruiters are striving for perfectionism and, therefore, lengthy recruitment process. But this does not always make sense.

Then, discuss with the hiring manager the necessary interview stages and test tasks. This will help you to design an optimal job pipeline so that suitable candidates are not weeded out after many interviews lasting several weeks. 

2. Hiring fast

Challenges faced by recruiters are diverse. However, the primary task and challenge is hiring fast.

Closing vacancies quickly is not as difficult as it seems. If you have trouble with it, perhaps you are working with the same sources of candidate flow without restructuring your work for different vacancies. 

Often recruiters follow the stereotype: if suitable candidates came from this site yesterday, they would come this time. But unfortunately, while they are waiting, time is wasted, and vacancies are empty.

Tips:

First, expand your understanding of the sources of the search for candidates and gradually master additional search methods. Then, don’t be afraid to experiment and evaluate the effectiveness of various job postings.

Find here 12 recruitment methods that will increase your efficiency! 

Constantly maintain feedback with attractive candidates to create a talent pool. Even if they didn’t become your employees, holding their CVs in the hot reserve for related vacancies is rational. In addition, this kind of feedback will not only help keep them interested in the job, but it will also raise the reputation of your employer’s brand in their eyes. 

Also, you can use special software to set up reminders on when to contact the candidates in the talent pool. For example, if the candidate said they'll start looking for a job after the New Year, you can set a reminder and write to them first!  

3. Keeping candidates engaged

Recruiters often stumble on situations when candidates, after several stages of interviews, refuse the vacancy. Sometimes job applicants themselves understand that they are not suitable for this position. But it still costs the company money and time. It would help if you engaged candidates in working in your company by offering attractive competitive advantages.

Tips:

To predict and guess what this specialist might need in your company, you must determine their motivation. This is a complex but doable task. Don't perceive this as recruitment challenges. You can learn this during the first interview with suggestive questions. In addition, try to step into the candidate’s shoes (but there is a chance not to guess).

Learn best-fit interview questions to uncover the candidate!

Also, compose a job description in such a way as to interest job seekers. To do this, use the specific motivation of previously employed staff and prescribe the company's functionality, requirements, and promises in this vein. In addition, compose the vacancy text following corporate standards but in a language that is close and understandable to the candidate.

4. Managing job pipeline

This point is related to the previous problems recruiters face. When you integrate too many stages in your job pipeline, job applicants don’t keep engaged or find another job faster. 

Everyone understands that interviews, as a rule, are multi-stage, and it will take time to coordinate all the responsible managers. However, remember that candidates who find themselves actively searching are not always ready to wait and understand your organizational difficulties.

Tips:

First of all, think about the recruitment stages and challenges faced in talent acquisition. For example, you can avoid extra managerial interviews and replace them with test tasks that will better show the candidate’s skills. If the corporate rules and hiring procedures are strict, try to make the job pipeline well-organized and smooth. You can automate the process with special recruitment software to track and manage the job pipeline in order to avoid delays and hire faster. 

5. Analyzing KPIs

Key performance indicators are often challenges for recruiters but they should be an integral part of the recruitment work. Such metrics assist recruiters and HR specialists in deepening the understanding of their companies and identifying the weaknesses or problem areas before they bring extra costs or time spent. 

The must-have KPIs in recruitment include hiring time, cost per hire, employee turnover rate, employee retention, etc.

Tips:

You should not only measure the main indicators at the end of the year to include them in the reports but to analyze them and use the results in further work. For example, you can track the hiring time for different job positions and initially lay this time for hiring or analyze how to reduce it. Use employee turnover rate to find weak job positions, in which you can modify requirements or offer candidates some additional bonuses to increase their engagement.

6. Hiring diverse candidates

Unfortunately, there are cases when diversity hiring isn’t a business priority for the company. Usually, this isn’t even an intended discrimination issue since the main point in recruitment is hiring qualified candidates fast (without regard to diversity). Nevertheless, noticing and identifying any unconscious discrimination in time is essential to its elimination. Recruitment challenges 2023 will require to boost diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Tips:

Effective diversity hiring needs to be personalized to the target diverse groups. First, determine all the diverse groups eligible to apply to your company’s vacancies and include this point in your recruitment strategy. Next, you must develop a long-term plan to support employee diversity initiatives. For instance, Airbnb recently wholly overhauled the recruiting process to make it more transparent and fair. Today, interviews are conducted according to a standardized scenario, and recruiters evaluate candidates on a single scale.

7. Building a powerful employer branding

Challenges faced by recruiters include difficulties in employer branding. The company’s employer brand development is the most promising and low-cost option for attracting job seekers. Therefore, in the recruiting process, you must strictly adhere to the company's strategy and be as sincere as possible. 

Tips:

Firstly, match reality. A common mistake in employer branding is creating a delusion. Lies will not help achieve the desired goals: the candidate, believing in a glossy picture, will come to the company, quickly get disappointed and quit.

Also, if you want to renew the company’s image, don't be afraid to tackle recruitment challenges and demonstrate the changes to the public. It is best to show new promising areas and debunk myths using interesting examples and cases.

How can Axterior help you to tackle challenges?

Challenges for recruiters are inevitable. Axterior is an online recruitment software that simplifies recruitment from sourcing to hiring. With this convenient tool, you can automate the job pipeline and find the best-fit candidates in a few clicks. In addition, it provides an all-in-one talent pools where you can keep great candidates for the future vacancies with similar requirements.

Also, Axterior facilitates collaboration with a team in a corporate structure with intricate processes and a complex chain of command. You can set up different reminders and customize follow-up letters. This recruitment platform allows you to source candidates more efficiently and hire faster. Moreover, Axterior improves the accuracy of your data by identifying inaccurate or incomplete records and the cleanup process.

Conclusion

Recruitment challenges 2023 dictate many new changes to the HR world.

Hiring a new employee is a time-consuming and responsible task. To be successful in recruiting, you must learn how to hire so that your company always wins. You can achieve this by creating accurate and understandable ads, communicating systematically with candidates, and using tools that can simplify your work.