Navigating obstacles in the recruitment process

Published: November 20, 2024 | by Victoria Kelleher, Lead Survey Specialist at Brightmine

As the earliest stages in the employee lifecycle, talent attraction and recruitment lay the foundations for an organization’s outcomes. An effective recruitment process ensures that employers match the right talent with the right roles.

Although some companies recruit more effectively than others, most employers encounter obstacles at some point in the recruitment process. These can range from difficulty attracting qualified candidates to difficulty filtering out the applicants that are best qualified.

A recent recruitment and acquisition survey from Brightmine, formerly XpertHR, identified some of the most common problems employers face during the recruitment process:

Employers who struggle with any or all of these problems should reevaluate the methods they use in recruitment and make sure that they are aligned with today’s leading practices.

Enhancing talent attraction

Most employers have trouble attracting applications from qualified candidates. Either they do not get enough applicants in general, or the applications they receive are not from candidates that have the qualifications necessary for the job.

Companies tend to involve multiple people in the recruitment process, but it is most often delegated to managers or internal recruitment specialists. To successfully attract talent, job listings need to appear wherever they are most likely to be seen by the target applicant pool they seek.

These days, most job seekers use social media to facilitate a job search, and many prefer to apply online. To accommodate this, employers can list open jobs across a variety of websites, such as Indeed and LinkedIn. Companies that struggle to generate applications across the board should also make sure that the company brand is clear and accessible for applicants that may research the company online before deciding to apply.

Sometimes, companies receive many applications in response to a job posting, but none of the applicants appear to meet the requested qualifications. This can especially be the case for roles that require more complex skills and experience. Sometimes companies can address this problem by seeking candidates on more specific forums, such as specialist or trade association job boards.

Employers should do everything they can to make sure their company’s brand is well-presented in the marketplace, and that job listings are formatted in an appealing way. To be successful, companies can follow guidelines for writing effective job listings, so that the listing stands out to prospective applicants and is more likely to elicit responses from well-qualified talent.

Employers can also gather valuable insight from new hires about the hiring process, identifying any pain points they encountered during the application process to decide how the company’s approach can be enhanced. This practice is followed at about two in five organizations.

Narrowing down candidates

Even if a company can attract a subset of qualified candidates, recruitment efforts can sometimes result in an abundance of unqualified applicants mixed in with only a few top applicants. Some companies struggle to sort through so many applications manually, which can cause costly delays or even result in talented candidates being snatched up by competitors.

Companies that struggle to filter out too many unqualified candidates may want to invest in tools to automate parts of the selection process. Software such as an Applicant Tracking System can greatly increase the organization of the selection process, allowing those responsible for hiring to manage applications with less of a headache. Some of these are also designed to alleviate the manual work involved in sifting out candidates, since they have algorithms to grade the content of resumes relative to skills and qualifications highlighted in job descriptions.

Employers should also take care to clearly delineate between the subset of skills that are necessary and those that can be trained after a candidate is hired. Effectively signaling the distinction within the job description can help clarify to a candidate whether or not they are qualified an application gets submitted, and the list can also be used as a reference to narrow in on top applicants.

Following these guidelines can streamline the efficiency of hiring, ultimately reducing the amount of time and money that employers need to dedicate to the recruitment process.

Takeaway

Although it may not be possible to avoid every obstacle in recruitment, employers can benefit if they make the procedures used to attract and select candidates more efficient. Employers should therefore review the systems they follow to identify whether there are opportunities to reduce the costs associated with recruitment.

Employers should not forget to build a system that allows them to gauge the success of recruitment. Feedback from new hires and hiring managers on the recruitment process may expose problems that employers can target to improve the experience on all ends. Building organized procedures to collect feedback at various steps from recruitment to hiring can give companies a competitive edge, since only about half of all organizations solicit employee feedback about the process. Direct feedback is the best way to identify your company’s weaknesses and prioritize ways to improve your procedures.