Hiring in the New Normal: Recruiting Challenges
Wilson Cole | September 4, 2022
What happens to the job market when a global pandemic occurs right after the country's longest economic boom cycle? Organizations of all sizes struggle to make sense of employee retention and hiring conditions as chaos and confusion reign rampant. Of course, small-to-midsize companies are more vulnerable to workforce shortages because they have fewer human resources teams, but most American-based companies have similar worries.
As we now live in an era dubbed the new normal, what are the most common hiring problems with recruiters or without? Let's take a look below.
Hiring Challenges Before COVID
The hiring process is a dynamic, multidimensional process that calls for coherence, organization, and ongoing improvement. As a result, new difficulties present themselves at each stage. These hiring difficulties center on finding the ideal candidate for a given position, igniting their interest in the organization, and keeping them on board.
Making sure that hiring a certain professional will result in a strong return on investment for the business is another urgent concern, along with these:
1. Talent shortage
Due to the lack of suitable people applying for open positions, recruiters must find unconventional ways to find prospects. One strategy is to draw from the enormous pool of passive candidates.
Growing your database is a wise move toward successfully filling your hiring funnel. Building connections with professionals who might not be a fit for a position today but might be one tomorrow also aids these professionals in developing a favorable impression of the employer's brand.
2. Competitive hiring landscape
Also, businesses must emphasize building their employer brands and communicating their values effectively. That includes addressing any reputational problems that can jeopardize recruitment attempts. Morale is crucial because employees will also talk to their coworkers about their experiences.
A professional's experience throughout the recruitment process can significantly impact whether or not they apply for other positions with your firm in the future; therefore, recruiters must pay special attention to it.
3. Changing demands and trends
The practical abilities today are losing their value more quickly as technology advances, and in ten years, they will probably be utterly useless. Therefore, recruiters must stay in touch with the demands of their organization and work with operational managers.
These elements will be considered by a well-thought-out talent acquisition strategy assisted by technology, making it easier to find the ideal talent for an employer's requirements.
4. Inefficient and dated hiring process
Traditional manual screening technologies or outdated recruiting software might prolong the hiring process, leading to qualified candidates withdrawing from consideration. As a result, the brightest talent may easily slip through the cracks, or first-year attrition rates may increase due to these old approaches.
5. Backdoor hiring
If not for outdated recruiting strategies, hiring managers lose job seekers to backdoor hiring. This method—usually done by delinquent companies who wish to forego the staffing firm’s placement fees—significantly costs recruiters. What’s even alarming is that without a reliable applicant tracking system in place, recruiters may never know their candidates have been poached by their supposed clients.
The Pandemic’s Impact on Hiring
The pandemic is fueling numerous fears about one's career.
One of the most essential of them is the awareness that, given the uncertainty surrounding the consequences of the pandemic on local possibilities and job openings, timing advancement opportunities is more crucial than ever.
Many professionals are less likely to take their time and more willing to leave their current employment when they see an opportunity for career growth. The likelihood of quitting a company now is lower than it would be if the pandemic had not occurred for those with job security, work-from-home options, and childcare advantages.
1. Working from home is here to stay
When the pandemic first hit, everybody was advised to social distance and stay home. To comply, companies mandated their employees to work from the comforts of their own homes.
What was once a temporary solution became a new way of life. Even before the pandemic, remote work was becoming more popular. Now many top performers across all industries anticipate doing so for the rest of their lives.
2. A totally virtual hiring process
COVID-19 has further amplified the trend of working remotely, and virtual job interviews are now more common. And with it are problems with recruiters and their ability to gauge a candidate.
The interviewer's limited ability to assess body language presents one of the main obstacles to conducting job interviews virtually. However, body language may reveal a lot about a candidate's personality, self-assurance, attentiveness, attitude, and other characteristics. These might be crucial in determining whether they are the proper organizational fit.
The applicant must visit the workplace in person to get a sense of the atmosphere and company cultures there. Candidates for in-person interviews arrive at the workplace, are welcomed by employees, and have the opportunity to look around and get to know them. Virtual job interviews are not a viable option for this.
3. An equally virtual onboarding process
Similarly, an equally virtual onboarding process can be challenging for both recruiters and new hires.
Human interactions characterize an onboarding process. It is when questions are asked, expectations are laid down, and anxieties are assuaged. It is a personal experience aiming to help the new hire feel at home and welcomed in the company.
Recreating this feeling and experience is not impossible, but it poses a challenge.
4. Technical difficulties
Lastly, technical difficulties may hamper a successful virtual job interview. In-person interviews are common; the only challenge might be finding the office where it will be placed. While for online interviews, a lack of clear guidelines regarding the format and timing of the interview may cause some uncertainty.
Addressing the Challenges: Recruitment Marketing
Now that we've laid down all the challenges and problems recruiters face with our without equating a pandemic, what's next? Solutions, of course. Enter recruitment marketing.
In a nutshell, recruitment marketing is the mix of tactics used by a company to attract and engage job seekers during the pre-application stage of hiring.
To draw in recruits, it seeks to build a corporate culture or brand and market the benefits of working for the company. Social media platforms, multichannel communication, recruiting metrics analytics, hyper-targeted messaging, and automation are just a few examples of digital marketing techniques used in recruitment marketing.
Why is it important?
Like shoppers, job seekers frequently look for employment prospects by browsing online resources and reading customer reviews. Many applicants are inactive job seekers who are not actively seeking new employment. Their choice to apply for a job or accept a position may be influenced by the facts they learn about working for a company. Recruitment marketers' job is to support recruiters by sharing the brand narrative with the job description.
Increased brand awareness, a more qualified talent pool, quicker hires, and a better candidate experience are the outcomes of effective recruitment marketing.
To Wrap It Up
The two essential elements that distinguish a successful firm from a mediocre one are hiring and keeping the appropriate candidates. Long-term unfilled positions hurt a company's reputation and frequently cause issues with hiring. If you are part of a recruiting team and have encountered problems with your organization's recruitment strategy, it's time to work with experts.
Wilson Cole is the founder and CEO of Adams, Evens & Ross, the nations largest credit and collection agency design exclusively for the staffing and recruiting industry. In 2008 he was inducted into INC Magazines, "INC 500" for being the CEO of Adams, Evens & Ross, the 307th fastest growing privately held company in America. This exclusive group of other INC 500 CEOs includes Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry Ellison of Oracle.In 2007 Recruiting & Staffing Solutions Magazine's Editorial Staff named him " The Billion Dollar Man" due to the fact that he had collected or helped his clients collect more than 1 Billion dollars in past due debt over his career of almost 20 years as CEO of Adams, Evens & Ross.