Not only are you dealing with competition, but there is also more time pressure and more technology to deal with for something that used to be a simple and straightforward process.
If you don’t enact smart ways to overcome these challenges, you might miss out on key talent acquisitions that will cost your company money and time.
To help you do your job more effectively, here are 5 ways to overcome common recruiting challenges:
Reaching the Right Candidates
The first step in recruiting is to make sure you find the right people. You can hire as many people as you want, but if they aren’t a good fit for your organization, your productivity will suffer.
In fact, hiring the wrong people can become a liability. As employees, they might show poor work ethic or lack crucial skills, and they can cost you an arm and a leg with training and onboarding.
It helps to have an “avatar” of the kind of model employee you want to hire. What are the personality qualities they must have? What kind of questions do they ask in interviews? What skills should they have?
If you don’t already have this in place, it might be because you simply don’t know what you want in your organization. This is a conversation to have with key leaders. What is your mission? What do you stand for? This is the starting point for hiring great people. If you wish to scale globally there are localization issues as well and that is why many turn to recruitment agency China when expanding to that region.
Writing a Great Job Description
Writing a great job description is both an art and a science. You need to include all the relevant information to give candidates an accurate picture of what to expect from their new workplace.
At the same time, you don’t want to give too much away. Some questions and information are best left for the interview itself. For instance, the salary range that you offer might seem low compared to competitors.
If this is the case, your job is to tease out this information and then explain your company’s value to the candidate during the interview. Some people need more details before they can see the real opportunity.
Furthermore, think of creative ways to sell your company to potential talent. What is it that truly sets you apart? Why should someone work for you instead of the competition?
Dealing with Irrelevant Applications
If you work for a great company and you’ve created a great job description that reflects this, then be prepared. You are going to get a lot of applications. This might seem like a goldmine at first, but it can be a problem in disguise.
You will have to go through all of these applications and sift through them to determine who is a genuinely good fit. A lot of people will apply for a job even when they know they are not qualified.
Come up with shorthand metrics that determine if you can eliminate someone right away — that way, you can focus on the few that really matter.
Slow Processes and Losing Talent to Competitors
The right hiring process is key to success. You want to achieve the proper balance of your due diligence with time efficiency. If you spend all your time finding the “perfect” candidate when simply “good enough” would do, you could miss out.
You might interview 10 people, only to find out that most of them already have a job offer and go to the competition. Determine what set of skills and personalities are acceptable and hire as quickly as you can to retain the best talent.
Managing Technology
One of the biggest challenges you will face with online recruiting is that of technology. You need to foresee the potential issues with using technology to recruit. Sharing sensitive data represents one of them.
You might have information about someone’s past, their social security number, and other sensitive information. If you were to lose that information, it would cause a break in trust with your potential hires as well as the industry at large.
Not to mention that there could be enormous legal consequences that are time-consuming and costly—even deadly — to your business.
As a consequence, there are technologies with built-in encryption. They will help prevent the information from falling into the wrong hands.
Still, every plan works great until it doesn’t. That’s why you need to have a recovery plan in place. By understanding the issues that could arise and how to handle them in advance, you will be more prepared to save your reputation—and your productivity!
Conclusion
Long gone are the days when an applicant might only send a resume to 3 or 4 companies. Today, they are sending them out to as much as 10x that many potential employers. And there’s a good reason for it: the job marketplace has become more competitive thanks to the pandemic.
However, the job of a recruiter has become even more complex. In addition to dealing with people, you need to be a salesperson, a technology-savvy individual, and a consistent communicator with various stakeholders.
To stay on top of your obligations, use the 5 tips above. They will help you deal with challenges faster and more effectively. That way, you can hire the best and brightest for your team consistently.
Author: Ashley Wilson is a digital nomad and writer for hire, specializing in business and tech topics. In her self-care time, she practices yoga via Youtube. She has been known to reference movies in casual conversation and enjoys trying out new food. You can get in touch with Ashley via Twitter.
