Recruiting is hard work. The competition for talent is high, making it difficult to win top-tier talent. On top of that, reactive hiring means you can’t focus on more strategic initiatives, like candidate experience and team collaboration. All of these things can wreak havoc on a hiring plan. As we begin thinking about 2019, let’s take the time to consider what we can do now to address these things before they continue to be problematic. Read on for the top five recruiting challenges we’re seeing—and what you can do to get ahead of them in 2019.
Top Recruiting Challenges
1. The Competition for Talent
The challenge:
Job openings are at a 17 year high, and the unemployment rate is a low 3.9 percent. It’s no surprise that the competition for talent is fierce. You’re not getting the applicant quality you need to make a hire, and your sourced candidates aren’t responding.
The solution:
The best candidates aren’t always looking, so you need to proactively source the candidates you need. Shopify has found that following up with candidates has doubled their candidate response rate to cold outreach. Since rolling out automated, personalized email campaigns through Lever Nurture, they’ve seen their candidate response rate increase from 21 percent to 42 percent.
2. Slow time to hire
The challenge:
Manual and tedious tasks slow down your hiring process and increase your time to hire. Candidates are dropping out of your process because it takes too long and they’re accepting offers elsewhere.
The solution:
Streamline your recruitment process, and utilize modern technology to boost recruiter productivity. Through standardizing interview guidelines via Lever templates and centralizing candidate communication within the platform, Medallia has built a more organized process and eliminated back and forth questions about candidates. As a result, they’ve seen a 2x decrease in time spent per task, 2x increase in output, and 2x decrease in time to schedule. Imagine how much you could improve time to hire if things like scheduling were twice as efficient.
3. Reactive hiring
The challenge:
Recruiting is reactive for many talent acquisition teams. An open job requisition hits your desk, and you’re expected to fill the role quickly. Or, worse, you learn about a strategic growth initiative a little too late to develop and execute on a realistic hiring plan. As a result, you miss your growth goals and resort to utilizing expensive agencies.
The solution:
Get ahead for 2019 by driving strategic headcount conversations with your executive team now. Learn about growth goals, and consider how attrition will play into your hiring plan. Offer insights on the talent landscape and how it translates to meeting those goals, and share data around your team’s recruiting capacity and velocity. Put together a forward-thinking hiring plan, so you can proactively source and nurture talent. Since switching to a strategic recruiting model, BPM has proactively sourced 40 percent of their hires and saved $900,000 in agency fees.
4. Poor candidate experience
The challenge:
You spend so much time completing menial tasks that you don’t focus enough on your candidate experience. Qualified candidates are dropping out of your recruitment process and declining your offers—often causing you to go back to square one on your search, and impacting your employer brand. You simply have too much going on to help each candidate feel valued, and to pay attention to the best candidates in your pipeline.
The solution:
Gather candidate feedback so you can identify your team’s biggest areas for improvement. Often, productivity improves the candidate experience. Automate repetitive tasks, such as candidate outreach follow-up and 1:1 interview scheduling. Streamline candidate communications through templates and bulk actions. Send feedback forms to interviewers during scheduling, and automate reminders to complete them. Taking these small tasks off your plate allows you focus more on the candidate experience. Lever has streamlined and automated many of these recruiting processes for Medallia, and their candidate NPS® has increased by a whopping 33 percent.
5. Team collaboration
The challenge:
A successful recruiting strategy requires talent acquisition to work in unison with hiring managers and interviewers. But there’s often a disconnect. Hiring managers and interviewers don’t use the applicant tracking system, so they can neither see, nor contribute to, the vast amount of information it contains. As a result, a significant amount of your time is spent collecting and syncing data, relaying information, and chasing down feedback. All of this detracts from the candidate experience and better business partnerships.
The solution:
The right applicant tracking system can make all the difference in getting the rest of your company on-board. Many customers have switched to Lever for this exact purpose! Via email, calendar, and Slack integrations, let your team collaborate directly from the systems they already use. Different access levels ensure each person has access to just the right amount of information. Bazaarvoice has found that using Lever has increased company-wide adoption by 40 percent over their former ATS, and Bigfoot Biomedical has said, “even the CEO utilizes Lever to review candidates.”
Final thoughts
You certainly have your work cut out for you. Hiring has been tough for years, and doesn’t appear to be getting any easier. Do what you can now to plan for 2019, so you can hit your company’s growth goals. The right recruiting software can help in many ways—so consider making a switch if your current system isn’t up to par with your needs. Putting in the extra effort now can pay huge dividends as you begin hiring in the new year.
Want to see how Lever can help solve your key recruiting challenges, so you can hit your hiring goals in 2019? Request a demo.