Removing Roadblocks to Hire Your Ideal Candidates
In a candidate-driven market, there are many hiring challenges that companies face ─ especially when hiring for more senior or project-critical roles.
Your competitiveness relies on having the best people working for you – and to do this you must overcome the challenges that exist when recruiting in the post-pandemic marketplace.
What are the top hiring challenges facing your business today?
What can you do to overcome them?
Challenge #1: Attracting Talent to Your Vacant Roles
The skills shortage is no secret. Reaching out to the best candidates is difficult – because the best people are rarely those who are actively seeking a new job. Often, a company that places a job advert becomes inundated with applicants who are under-qualified or inexperienced.
Solution:
First, connect with potential candidates who are perfect for future positions. Use social media, your website, employee referral schemes, and remain connected to previous applicants who narrowly missed out on a job offer. Remember, too, that your perfect candidate might already work for the company.
Second, focus on the qualities you need. When composing a job description, target your words to these qualities, and ensure your job post includes:
- Common tasks or duties
- Key responsibilities
- Must-have skills
- Nice-to-haves
Make the post as informative as possible, covering work environment, career progression, reporting structure and expectations.
Challenge #2: Engaging the Most Talented
The most talented people tend to be contacted by recruiters often. To grab their attention, you’ve got to stand out. Any employer can try to outjump their competition by offering a higher salary – but this isn’t what will make you different and appealing. Top talent wants more than money. They desire:
- Learning and development opportunities
- Career progression
- Challenging work
- Great leadership
Solution:
At every touch point, highlight your unique culture. Speak about how your employees are part of your ‘family’, and describe how your current employees have enhanced their careers with you. Listen to the candidate – then sell your role (and your organization) to their wants and needs.
Challenge #3: Building a Diverse Organization
There are many benefits of diversity within an organization. These include new perspectives, greater insight, and the development of a meritocratic approach that helps to improve leadership and team performance. However, attracting and engaging a more diverse set of applicants can be challenging.
Solution:
When recruiting for diversity, tips include:
- Ensuring that your job posts are gender-neutral
- Use specialist staffing agencies (they know their market and have deep pools of candidates to contact)
- Never hire yourself!
Remember, diversity and inclusion start with how your hire.
Challenge #4: Poor Interviews That Deliver Poor Candidates
Unfortunately, few managers are trained to interview effectively. Poor interviews can deter the best candidates, or lead to poor hiring decisions.
Solution:
Good preparation is the key to effective interviews. Hiring managers should:
- Prepare interview questions for all candidates
- Maintain notes during the interview
- Use a scoring system that ensures consistent appraisal of candidates
- Understand their inherent unconscious biases
- Practice candidate interviews before ‘going live’
Challenge #5: The Need to Hire Fast
Vacant roles cost money. Your team is a person short. It may lack the skills it needs. The remaining team members are under increasing pressure. How long will it be before another leaves, and the situation becomes worse?
Solution:
Evaluate each step of your recruitment process, then streamline and refine it as much as you can. Consider investing in recruitment data software which will enable you to analyze the metrics and see what is working and what isn’t for your hiring team.
Given the time constraints and the challenges involved, you may want to consider outsourcing your hiring needs. There are several options available including employing the services of a staffing agency. This will provide you with access to a wide and varied talent pool and access to professional recruitment knowledge of your labor market.
Challenge #6: Delivering an Engaging Candidate Experience
One of the biggest reasons for candidates turning down a job offer is their experience during the hiring process. How you treat candidates becomes their reference point for what it would be like to work for you. A bad experience leaves a sour taste in the mouth that stops a great candidate from accepting an otherwise great job offer.
Solution:
There are some simple keys to delivering a positive candidate journey. You should ensure that you:
- Communicate regularly and effectively
- Manage the candidate’s expectations
- Keep your promises
- Coordinate with candidates
- Interview candidates effectively
Hire Talent Successfully with TECHEAD
The process of hiring the right person can be long and involved — from sourcing candidates, reviewing piles of resumes, conducting interviews and assessments, and making an irresistible job offer.
Many recruitment tasks are repetitive and time-consuming. Coordinating members of your recruitment team (who have other responsibilities) can be challenging. Each candidate must be monitored and managed at every step, and the immediate needs of the business often distract the people who are key in the interview process.
At TECHEAD, we are dedicated to finding the best talent available to fill your vacant roles. We help you to navigate hiring challenges, and offer comprehensive staffing solutions.
We take the hassle out of recruitment and can work alongside your hiring team, providing support and expertise as required or as a completely autonomous service. For more information, contact TECHEAD today.