The job market is always marked by intense levels of competitiveness. Job seekers have access to a wide variety of employment opportunities, businesses must strive to outcompete their competitors to attract and hire top individuals. As a result, many businesses are finding it difficult to fill open positions and are pondering what they can do to move closer to the top of candidates’ priority lists when seeking employment.
In this article, we will cover why many companies fail to hire the right talents. We talked to many businesses of different sizes who are using various technologies and tools, they all mentioned that hiring is the most difficult problem they deal with!
Is it really that hard? Actually, Yes! Any wrong step results in a propagated failure along the process.
Let’s dig-dive into why companies really struggle in the war of talent.
Table of Contents
Unsuitable job boards
Depending on the size of the business, most of small companies directly use job boards to post their job ads without using recruitment software. Larger ones with recruitment applications in place may use the built-in integrations with public job boards.
In both cases, job ads are posted on job boards, and the main weakness here is that job boards in most of the situations fall short of accessing the right talents and maybe overwhelm Hiring Managers with many useless applications, let’s dig-down more on what can go wrong.
Geography
A Hiring Manager may post a job ad on a free or paid job board that attracts the wrong type of traffic geographically. For example, a job vacancy in Canada should be posted on a job board that hires Canadians, if it’s posted elsewhere it won’t be efficient. Recruitment software may advertise that job ads can be posted for free on hundreds of boards automatically, this is usually very inefficient metric as the vast majority of these boards will not help getting to the right talent in many situations.
Quality
Another important aspect to consider, the type or the quality of candidates that the job board attracts.
It is always a matter of quality, a job vacancy may have hundreds of applicants but in many cases these candidates are not qualified enough for the job, in other words, 20 qualified candidates are better than 100 who are not fit for the position.
Technology used
The vast majority of job boards claim success by the number of candidates the post can reach. This metric is also a luring one, if a post has thousands of impressions with the wrong type of applicants, this is a useless reach, and actually harmful. The smartest boards are the ones that offer high, well defined, and efficient reach to the right candidates, which can not only be achieved by the boards that have no advanced matching technology.
Vetting failure
In today’s job market, employers only want to hire best candidates. For that, companies need to put smart vetting processes in place, where each candidate is correctly evaluated over many areas like work experience, skills, achievements and many other points. The problem is that vetting in many occasions fail to mirror the true ability of candidates.
Technical vetting, what can go wrong?
Technical vetting can go wrong in many ways! A lot of tools are in the market, most of them claim that they measure the true technical ability of candidates. This might be true in development jobs, or clear technical jobs where the tasks are well-defined and the output is measurable! Assuming that there is no way to cheat on or trick these exams, which is not always the case either!
Also, in many situations, vetting software fall-short in measuring the technical abilities of candidates on many enterprise technologies or technologies that are not very popular.
Our advice here is to treat each skill differently and adopt a specific process each time in order to accurately measure the true abilities of each candidate, implementing in-house exams is a must in 90% of cases.
Background checks and merits
A background check is usually the most straightforward part of the process! A systematic track of criminal records, identity documents, and academic and professional credentials are common in the background screening process. Drug testing, social media verification, and medical examinations are all options. The position being filled will determine how extensive of an investigation is necessary.
The problem is that many companies treat having credentials and merits as a pivotal aspect to judge on the eligibility for a job, hiring based on merits is very common, but also more frequent that this way does not measure the true actual level of a candidate.
Internal disconnect along the hiring process
Internal company process
A common problem -especially in large businesses- is a lack of proper communication between stakeholders along the hiring process.
HR and recruitment is often operating independently from other departments. Struggling to understand and match what each Hiring Manager is looking for in a candidate.
The decision to hire comes from many places in the company: recruitment teams, budgeting teams, and compliance teams, etc. they all have a say on the hiring plan.
All will need to talk and discuss everything first before getting into the process of recruitment. Any internal disconnect during the process creates incredible latency and results a time-consuming hiring process and a long hiring process will push great candidates away.
Is the recruitment software inclusive?
A recruitment software should have an inclusive design; by this, we mean that the management process, screening, and vetting ought to be made visible to everyone along the hiring process.
Blind integrations
Some important questions to ask before the hiring process: Is your company’s recruitment software integrates well with other components? Is the process automated? What kind of information is missed when multiple software applications are integrated? answering these questions will make things clearer and you may discover that your company needs to up-level or redesign its recruitment process.
No clear KPIs
With the right hiring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), a business can understand where any problem lies, examine its past mistakes and take corrective actions. Many companies do not have the right KPIs in place, thus leaving the process stranded and painful to measure or correct.
Time to send out offers, conduct interviews and the clarity of the process to candidates are some of important KPIs that should be measured and be clear to all hiring stakeholders.
Unrealistic expectations
Many businesses fail to hire qualified individuals because they are searching for the “ideal candidate” There are many instances where job descriptions are overly idealistic. It is a marketplace at the end, looking for perfection may be your true problem.
As a hiring manager, you should put the word “perfect” out of your mind and concentrate on finding people who have the potential to develop into outstanding employees in the near future if they have specific realistic qualities.
Unattractive corporate branding
Reality is, a weak company brand will never attract top candidates. Trading this with high-pay can work on the short-term, however, companies main goal to attract the right candidates is always to invest in corporate branding. This should be the real goal.
This is one of the hardest and most expensive goals a company can work on, the overall health of the company and its public image are main contributors to its hiring branding. Top candidates do not only look for attractive compensations, they also want to work for successful businesses, be in great working cultures, enjoy solid benefits and beautiful workplaces…all of these and more are areas of investments that every company should pursue to win in the hiring arena!
Not targeting passive applicants
An employee who is settled in their current role and not actively seeking other employment might be reliable and long-term team member. Those who aren’t actively looking for new jobs can always bring knowledge they’ve gained from their current position to a new employer.
However, the priority should be always to the job applicants you have, nevertheless, not exploring other passive candidates may present a missed opportunity to hiring the best candidates.
A passive job seeker isn’t under the same type of pressure as an active one, they can be great but they will not always be fit. They should pass through the same vetting process as active applicants. A common mistake we see in the market is that recruiters see passive candidates as more qualified than the current applicants they have, which results many wrong hiring decisions due to this perception.
Finally, we found that successful hiring is all about having the right process in place rather than anything else. A well-designed process should be clear, time-efficient, and fair, having the right technology to achieve that is crucial.
SupporFinity’s unique technology has made remarkable changes for structuring and streamlining the hiring process, it helps both startups and large corporations to find and hire the best candidates, thanks to its patented technology and years of experience with the hiring process across many customer segments.
The global community at SupportFinity is one of the largest and most growing communities worldwide, this guarantees a way better experience in finding the right talent than any hiring platform.
With its Job board and applicant tracking system (ATS), the platform is the only one of its kind to meet the hiring needs of both small businesses and large corporations. As a Hiring Manager, you can hire a global team from scratch or post job ads, and either way you will enjoy a high-quality experience at higher speed, and an impressive span of control across multiple departments in your business.
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