Recruitment challenges

Recruitment challenges vary depending on the size of the company you work for or the sector in which you are located.If you work in HR, you probably feel that, with each passing year, recruiting good people is more challenging. First, because the majority of your candidate pool is not actively looking for a new job. According to an American survey , almost three quarters of those approved for new vacancies are professionals who were already employed, but open to new potential opportunities. In this article we will provide you the recruitment challenges and solutions.

In addition, we have 250 resumes sent, on average, for each job opening. Submitted by those candidates who are actively seeking. Since these people represent only 27% of your true candidate pool, you are actually selecting one out of 1000 professionals. In addition, the best-prepared candidates are hired, on average, within 10 days.

Given this scenario, it is impossible to manage such a process manually. Nowadays, there are many tasks involved in recruiting , from reviewing CVs to following up after the job offer. So there are also many ways that hiring a great candidate can go wrong.

Still, many recruiters continue to rely on tools almost as outdated as good old pencils and paper. Solutions like cloud-hosted emails, spreadsheets and to-do lists may be sufficient for less complex processes, but they don’t even come close to solving the difficulties faced by today’s recruiters.

HR Challenges for Recruitment and Selection

Recruitment is a process that is structurally similar for most companies, even if there are more specific elements and challenges. It is the structure itself and the more usual demands that most recruiters struggle with.

Some common obstacles are:

• Lack of standard for the hiring process: there is no continuity between filling one vacancy and the next; with each new hire it is necessary to reinvent the wheel.
• Loss of important information: As information about the hiring – a vacancy or a candidate – is passed on, some is lost.
• Poor visibility into processes: In many HR teams, those who are not part of management do not have access to how decisions are made, which causes misunderstandings and poor communication.
• Little integration between departments: often, the team responsible for hiring only exchanges information with the departments that need new employees at the time of the initial hiring request.
• Too many repetitive tasks: Team members are wasting time on manual tasks that don’t need to be manual.
• Lack of control over activities: Once a task is no longer your responsibility, it becomes impossible to keep track of what is happening, who is taking the next steps and how they are being done.
• Difficulty finding information: If you need to know something specific about a candidate or an open position, the only way is to review thousands of messages or search through multiple spreadsheets.
• Plenty of time to finalize the hiring: When everything is ready to be finally sent, many candidates have already been hired or are in other selective processes.
• Failure to communicate with candidates : When candidates do not receive updates on the status of their application, they end up dropping the process and looking for other vacancies.
• Reactive strategy for recruiting: the traditional model in which you only recruit when you have an open position causes activities to be done in a hurry and pressure makes decision-making difficult.

Each difficulty that appears in the recruitment journey, individually, may not seem all that important. But taken together, these obstacles can cause serious problems for your business.

What are the Consequences of these Challenges in the Hiring Process?

Challenges in the hiring process don’t just negatively affect your team: every obstacle hurts the department that needs the candidate and, ultimately, your company’s bottom line. They even impact the company’s ability to attract talented professionals .

1-Frustrated Candidates

In today’s job market, the candidate’s experience with the company is very important. According to a Career Builder survey , nearly 80% of candidates believe that the way a company deals with them in a selection process indicates how much they value the professionals who already work there. More than 85% believe that they, as candidates, should be treated with the same respect as employees, but only 49% feel that this is the case.

The people you want on your team are the ones who have the power to decide where they go to work. Therefore, you need to avoid as much as possible that your candidates have a bad experience with you, because they will look for other opportunities. In addition to losing the perfect candidate for a position, your company can also start to get a bad rap in the market.

2-Dissatisfied Colleagues

Think of an excellent, well-organized team you worked with. Now, search your memory for one that was not so well coordinated. You can feel the difference, right? Your team feels it too.

Even if you spend hours and hours so that all the steps of your process are aligned, if it is not really integrated, information is lost and people are frustrated. And what can happen? At worst, you’ll have to pause recruiting for the other teams and focus on finding new members for your own team.

3-High Costs for Hiring

The longer it takes you to hire someone, the greater the costs for the company. All your team members are getting paid and there is a daily expense to keep an open position on job sites. Meanwhile, the position is not filled and the revenue that would have been generated by that person is not coming in.

Also, when you hire someone in a hurry or without the information you need to make the best decision, you run the risk of making a bad hire. These bad hires can cost the company dearly , both financially and in terms of efficiency. Hiring efficiently, therefore, means having less expenses and greater gains for your company.

How to Improve the Recruitment and Selection Process?

If you didn’t have to do everything manually, you could reach those ideal candidates, be the first choice for job seekers and hire quickly and quickly. It would fill vacancies not only faster, but more efficiently, reducing the cost per hire and the turnover associated with bad hires. And if you proactively approach hiring, building a talent pool to help you when a new vacancy arises, you’ll fill positions more efficiently and increase your company’s overall revenue.

The only way to achieve this is by creating and implementing a smart and efficient workflow for your recruiting process. It is necessary to automate as much as possible, that is, to have automatic email templates and the possibility to send notifications according to your needs.

6 challenges for HR in hiring employees and how to beat them

Among the various responsibilities of the Human Resources department of a company, the one that has stood out the most in relation to the impact on organizational results is the hiring of employees.

However, this is a challenging task and must be performed by a team prepared and updated with trends and technologies. This will ensure that the recruited professionals will add positive aspects to the business environment, strengthening the culture and working to achieve the collective’s objectives.

Some factors can end up making it difficult for HR management to find the coveted best talent on the market. So, in this article, we talk about what are the common challenges of the recruitment and selection processes and what approaches you can take to overcome each of them.

To discover the 6 solutions we propose, just keep reading!

1. Attracting talent

Before hiring employees itself, and even the processes of analyzing resumes and interviews, one step needs to gain attention so that the rest of the path is successful. We’re talking about attracting talent. After all, starting with a large number of candidates is no guarantee of finding the ideal profile.

Therefore, it is necessary to create primary strategies to attract the profiles desired by the company. How to do this? Among the main solutions is the strengthening of the organization’s culture. Culture is a point of extreme market value, which has drawn the attention of professionals.

It is worth mentioning that a strong culture involves solid values, relevant purposes, a healthy environment and a quality relationship between the company and its employees.

2. Lack of qualified professionals

Another challenging aspect in hiring employees is the qualification of professionals who apply for vacancies. First, you need to analyze the company and the market to understand how desired qualifications are being rewarded in the corporate world. Is your company willing to offer what these talents are looking for?

One more point to consider is that many companies are not inclined to invest in professional development and prefer to look for people ready for the available positions. But an investment in the growth of newly graduated professionals — with internship and trainee programs, for example — can become an excellent strategy for retaining talent and valuing employees.

3. Rush to fill vacancies

Another challenge faced by Human Resources management is the rush of managers to fill vacancies. At this point, it is impossible not to remember the popular saying that haste is the enemy of perfection, right?

This is true, as a recruitment process can have much more accurate results if all steps are carried out in their appropriate time. Among the solutions for these emergency hiring that are eventually unavoidable are CV banks and internal recruitment. Thus, it is possible to guarantee that part of the process is already on track.

Another possibility is to rely on companies specializing in recruitment or headhunters. This will save the HR team time and ensure greater agility and effectiveness in hiring employees.

4. Little market vision

HR managers who want to succeed in hiring employees need to note that the corporate market and society are undergoing profound changes at a rapid pace.

One of the great transformations that directly affects the business sector is the new generation of professionals who are entering the market. They are the so-called Millennials, who bring new values ​​and aim at different work scenarios.

Because of this group of professionals, companies that adopt startup models or, even being large, try to maintain friendly work environments, with good communication, openness to creativity and innovation and a strong sense of purpose have stood out.

It is necessary to understand this scenario and seek strategic ways to manage these transformations and these conflicts between different generations and cultures that now perform together in the market.

5. Little engagement in the selection process

Engaging people has been an increasingly focused objective in companies. And we’re not just talking about employee engagement after joining the corporation. Even in the selection process, this is a challenge with the candidates.

Avoiding evasion in the selection process is essential to ensure that the organization can choose from as many talents as possible. For this, invest in a selection process that is innovative and shows the most of the company’s culture and how it values ​​candidates interested in working on the team.

Expressing clarity about work accidents with sick leave, and unpaid leave for personal matters. In the latter case, the firm may cut the employee’s salary, offering good benefits , working with new digital technologies and showing respect when giving feedback on the stages are some of the strategies to engage when hiring new employees.

6. Ineffective tools

HR can certainly benefit from having technological resources. They have become great allies in all areas of the company and, in particular, improve performance for human resources.

Digital has integrated industry practices, bringing more versatility, process optimization and intelligence. And it is precisely using artificial intelligence tools that HR can leverage the results of its employee hiring processes.

Contrary to the initial prejudice that many professionals had with smart technologies, imagining that they would replace human labor, currently the tools work in partnership, taking care of some processes so that the team can focus on more strategic ones.

Among the main tools that, nowadays, cannot be missing in a selection process, we can mention People Analytics, which uses Big Data to attract and recruit talent. HR management tools are also relevant to automate routines and centralize information, generating metrics and facilitating decisions. During the selection process, technologies such as gamification, chatbots and augmented reality can also generate more engagement and save time and staff resources.

Overcoming the challenges inherent in hiring employees mainly involves changes in the mindset of HR management and the company as a whole. After all, we live in a new context, permeated by digital , social changes and market transformations.