How Recruiters Can Amend These 3 Staffing Challenges

The job market in today’s economy is competitive. Businesses are competing with one another to attract top talent and technology is evolving alongside the changing job market. This means that recruiting teams have to constantly readjust their strategies.

These constant changes can present unique staffing challenges. This article explores a few of the most common obstacles to staffing success, and how recruiting professionals can leverage a wide variety of digital tools and tricks in order to overcome these challenges.

Challenge 1: attracting candidates

It requires a lot of time and effort to source and attract candidates. Most recruiters report that it takes between three to six weeks to guide candidates through the hiring process to a final offer. Conversely, many candidates say they are rarely willing to wait longer than two weeks to receive an offer. This discrepancy means that timing is of the essence when pursuing top-tier talent. Recruiting teams must place a greater focus on mitigating bottlenecks in the hiring process and making time-to-hire a priority metric.

In order to do this, many recruiting teams employ the assistance of outside experts. Staffing firms today offer a broad spectrum of comprehensive hiring services, spanning temporary, permanent and executive recruiting. These services aren’t intended to replace the need for HR and recruiting departments within an organization. Rather, they offer up more bandwidth for those teams to focus on internal strategies such as strengthening an employment brand or filling less-specialized roles. In this way, a company can streamline its hiring process to cut down on the chances of a candidate becoming disengaged or taking a competing offer.

Challenge 2: properly utilizing data

There is an increasing focus on analytics in HR and recruiting. Recruiting professionals are responsible for managing a vast amount of information. All that number-crunching can be overwhelming. However, internal hiring teams should be able to accurately collect and extrapolate insights from hiring data. This is one of the only ways that companies can identify strengths and weaknesses in the hiring process and make better recruitment decisions. The process of managing and optimizing a workforce falls under the umbrella of human capital management (HCM). This strategic framework encompasses all aspects of hiring and people management, from sourcing an initial candidate pool to developing an engaging professional development program. HCM software tools can help centralize data collection and automate certain reporting aspects, but it’s ultimately down to your HR team to piece together a story from the data and convert it into results.

Consider putting together a list of the priority metrics to track towards specific hiring objectives. These data points can be plugged into your recruiting software and mapped out over time, and even used to make hiring projections. In a hiring environment where many recruiters are focused on the present, data can help teams develop a forward-thinking strategy that places them ahead of the curve.

Challenge 3: achieving long-term retention

According to HR Reporter, Canada ranks 4th globally for the highest levels of employee turnover, coming in just behind France, Australia, and the UK. Voluntary turnover can be attributed to a broad spectrum of factors, but perhaps more significantly, 36% of global workers stated workplace culture as their primary reason for seeking other opportunities.

In today’s job market, candidates have options. Organizations must think critically about their total compensation package and make a concerted effort to identify the needs of current and incoming employees. Consider looking to industry practice to establish a benchmark for compensation and work-life balance. Many organizations have begun to adopt flexible working arrangements, health benefits, career development, and corporate social responsibility programs as standard offerings. Today’s candidates, especially those newly entering the workforce, are looking for purpose and engagement in their roles beyond compensation. Companies that can provide this stand with a better chance of achieving long-term retention.

Many organizations rely on outdated technology and an equally historic understanding of the needs of their candidates. Recruiting teams need to adopt modern processes in order to keep up. Change is inevitable. How recruiting teams leverage solutions to overcome challenges presented by the evolving candidate market signifies how successful they’ll be at hiring as compared to their competitors.