The 6 challenges facing talent acquisition

As an organization if you are looking to hire qualified candidates for a job, you already know the efforts it takes to recruit one candidate for a position. There are so many steps associated with recruitment that can cost organizations tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars on just a single hire. Improve your recruitment strategy and candidate quality to mitigate the common talent acquisition challenges that come your way while recruiting.

Efficient recruitment in this age is challenging as things are going leaner in terms of budgets and interview arrangements. In today’s competitive job market, finding and retaining talents is the most critical task. As per the iCIMS 2022 Workforce Report (https://www.icims.com/2022-workforce-report/), more than 90% of business leaders accept that the organization would not meet the set goals without the right talent. They also accepted that hiring and retaining talent would be the biggest challenge in the year 2022. Candidates hold all of the cards in today’s job market. They can find a job easily and, at the same time, can deny an offer if they don’t find their career path growing. To cater to the fluctuating mindset of candidates, employers need to redo their approach to talent acquisition, retention, and employee engagement to keep the workforce competitive.

What are Recruitment Challenges

Recruitment is a business function that requires business objectives, perspective, expertise, and the ability to find the right match that fits the running position. Any organization’s hiring manager’s role is to convince the prospect with diplomacy and marketing skills and align the recruitment procedure to benefit the organization for a longer period. During the recruitment process, when HR professionals face challenges in finding a candidate or any other problem related to the interview process is termed as recruitment challenges.

In the already saturated job market, practices such as poaching and raiding are not new. Hiring consultants and HR professionals continuously face different challenges in their most crucial function – recruitment. Various challenges prevent them from finding the best candidates for their organizations.

You will read about the most common challenges in talent acquisition in our blog.

Top 6 Challenges in Talent Acquisition

1. It is hard to grab the ideal candidate’s attention

With so much competition in the market and automation in every sector, it becomes difficult for recruitment managers to figure out which path to follow and which source to trust for recruitment. The practice of poaching involves various procedures of identifying the right person in rival companies and offering them better terms to join.

Reaching out to appropriate candidates or grabbing their attention on the recruitment posting is a big challenge in the current situation as the recruitment industry is continuously evolving.

2. The good ones are getting multiple offers simultaneously

While it can be exciting for the candidate, it can be troublesome for the hiring manager to deal with the attrition level when the most deserving candidate gets job offers from different companies. Dealing with multiple job offers received by the candidate can be confusing too, as selecting the best job cannot be done before joining any company. At the same time, companies should also be ready to deal with such a situation when an ideal candidate makes up their mind to leave the company and take up another job. To avoid such situations, it is imperative for a company to use effective communication with the candidate after they join the firm and always sort out the problems being faced by them post-joining.

3. There is a shortage of qualified candidates

As per the study by the National Federation of Independent Business, 87% of HR professionals claimed very “few or no qualified applicants” are there for the open positions that need to be filled. As per the McKinsey Global Institute study, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/the-world-at-work companies in Europe and North America will need 16 to 18 million more educated employees.

There will be no other choice for hiring managers than to enter the war to find appropriate talents and compete with competitor companies.

4. There is no system to track the recruitment success rate

Even though recruitment systems have gone online, some companies don’t keep track of job postings and are unaware of how to manage the received applications. Managing received applications have become a daunting task for the HR manager. The common problem related to this could be that the job ads are not reaching the right person at the right time. The second could be recruiters are failed to keep track of job ads they post and how people entertain the ads. The third reason for online job postings is that recruiters do not know if the job ads are working appropriately.

5. Slow and multiple stages of the selection process

To attract excellent prospects, try to employ candidates quickly by reducing multiple hiring steps. To speed up the recruitment process, it is not mandatory to find an exact match for the open position. Develop a plan that defines the skill sets required by ignoring some aspects that are not mandatory for the job and still allowing the candidate to be considered for the position. Multiple stages of screening make it difficult for employers to close the position. Screenings should depend on how much time and resources are being utilized and what is the final outcome of the recruitment procedure.

6. Using data-driven recruitment

Developing a data-driven mindset for hiring for various positions is a major challenge faced in talent acquisition. To have a clear picture of the entire recruiting process, track and measure key recruiting metrics. Only focusing on data can make you a better and more informed decision-maker who can lead to improved productivity and success in your company. Define your targeted recruitment metrics and track them regularly. Measuring every step of the hiring process makes it tedious and time-consuming. It can also result in missing valuable insights and hinder making strategic decisions based on real data.

Conclusion

As a recruitment company, providing a recruitment experience to candidates that helps to shape the company’s culture by assembling the right candidates in one place. The process should be a driving force that shapes a company by overcoming the above-mentioned recruitment challenges by setting up the exact standards your company requires.

With the above pointers, we can boil it down to this piece of advice if and when you are planning recruitment strategies, keep candidate psychology at the priority and forefront. Sometimes, what has worked for others might not suit your organization’s work pattern, and so it might not gel with the candidates you are hiring for. Keep a close eye on the distinctiveness of your company and its requirements to compete in the market.

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