Oct 7th 2020
6 recruitment challenges and how to overcome them
Hiring is one of the most exciting things companies do.
But it’s also the hardest. Hiring managers are stretched with tight budgets, lean teams and limited time, and although the reward is great, the list of challenges seems never ending.
Here are the 6 most common recruitment challenges we hear about at Tempo – and how to overcome them.
1: Finding high quality candidates
While most companies don’t struggle with the size of their talent pool (in fact, that’s a challenge of its own), many struggle with the quality of it. Particularly for junior or entry level roles, candidates apply despite the fact that they barely meet any of the criteria. As a result, hiring managers find themselves tired of the sifting process before it even begins. What should be an exciting part of the process, turns into an extremely boring game of finding a needle in a haystack.
How to overcome the challenge: Ask qualifying questions on application forms. By asking highly specific questions around your role or company at the beginning of the process, you’ll immediately get a drop-off of candidates who weren’t that interested to begin with. What’s more, the candidates that do come through can be screened on both their answers and their CV. Try Tempo’s Video Q&A feature where you can ask candidates to submit their answers via video. This gives you an even better feel of a candidate’s personality and role fit.
2: Building a strong employer brand
Most hiring managers agree that employer brand has a significant impact on attracting high quality candidates. The importance of responding to online reviews, writing a creative job description and having a remarkable careers landing page is widely acknowledged. However, these tasks often become a low priority because – guess what – there are more pressing matters to deal with, such as ensuring that open roles get filled. Additionally, many employer branding initiatives blend into a marketing function that not all hiring managers possess the right skills or tools to execute.
How to overcome the challenge: Start small, and be truthful and authentic in your interactions with clients, customers, suppliers – basically, anyone you speak to. Young candidates are savvy and they don’t expect everything to be perfect. But they do expect honesty, so be open about the good and the bad. Employer brand is how you present yourself to the outside world; it doesn’t have to be a marketing gimmick. When recruiting on Tempo, you can upload a company video and highlight key details about your company culture, dress code and benefits – the stuff that really matters for a new hire.
3: Attracting Gen Z candidates
Young candidates today are more ethically, politically and socially charged than ever. They have access to a plethora of tools and their expectations from employers are sky high. As a result, Gen Z are increasingly turning their backs on traditional graduate schemes and the idea of having one preset career path – it is considered an outdated concept, especially as more and more people want to support their side hustles and try multiple job roles throughout their careers. As if hiring wasn’t challenging enough already, there is now a whole new set of behaviours and demands to adapt to.
How to overcome the challenge: Attracting Gen Z candidates is a widely discussed topic and we’re sorry to say that no size fits all (really, sorry!). But, the candidate experience needs to be authentic, personable and enhanced by technology. On the Tempo platform, candidates are matched to jobs based on their experiences and preferences, and they love the transparency this provides. As everything happens in one place, candidates are able to always check in on the process, the latest feedback and whether they have been successful – without having to chase through various tools, emails and phone calls.
4: Minimising cost per hire
Hiring is expensive, and recruitment teams are rarely given the big shiny company budgets to play around with. One of the biggest mistakes companies make when calculating cost per hire is not factoring in the time spent. Job boards may look like a cheap solution, but once you include the time it takes to sift through CVs and conduct phone interviews, it’s a completely different story. The effort put into each individual hire is immense, and when you add up all the expenses, the cost per hire is a lot higher than you may initially think.
How to overcome the challenge: The hiring process needs to be simplified. The more tools you use, the more expensive – and time consuming – it becomes. Many traditional companies are scared to ditch the old processes, and as a result, hiring becomes tedious, expensive and overwhelming. Instead of generalist job boards and agencies, turn to specialist and vertical recruitment marketplaces that are experts in the roles you’re looking for. Tempo specialises in non-technical roles, such as sales, customer support, admin and similar, on a temporary and permanent basis. And what’s more – the entire hiring process from attraction to offer happens in one place.
5: Sifting through CVs
A large volume of CVs is not just a pain for hiring managers, but also for candidates. If you have received hundreds of applications for a role, it is impossible to get back to every single candidate with personalised feedback. Often in these cases, candidates hear nothing at all. This is a terrible candidate experience, which will damage your employer brand and sometimes even customer brand. Sifting through numerous CVs is a bit like being unable to use the phone while you’re connecting to the broadband – an outdated concept and something we shouldn’t have to worry about any longer.
How to overcome the challenge: As much as it’s important to be specific about what you’re looking for, candidates often don’t carefully read the requirements. Or they apply anyway knowing they don’t meet them, especially if you have a strong brand that people want to work for. Avoid large job boards if you want to get rid of unnecessary CV sifting. We understand why it’s an attractive idea as your job will reach millions of people, but really you only need it to reach the right people. As well as minimising cost per hire, turning to specialist recruitment marketplaces like Tempo will ensure that you only see candidates that are matched specifically to what you’re looking for.
6: Engaging passive candidates
Ongoing engagement with potentially great candidates is a difficult (if not impossible) task. It is yet another part of recruitment that blends into a marketing function, and because you’re already busy working your way through those hundreds of CVs in your inbox, it doesn’t get prioritised. What’s worse is the guilt of hearing about those big companies with unlimited recruitment resources and all of the cool stuff they do. It can feel like a fight you’ve already lost before you enter the ring.
How to overcome the challenge: You want to make sure that you become top of mind when talented candidates finish university or change jobs, but you’re not able to keep checking in on them. Tempo has an online community of candidates that we engage with on a regular basis through social media and through nudges via the platform. When posting a job, your match list of candidates will only include people that are relevant and actively looking for a job. By constantly engaging with candidates, we have a warm talent pool, ready for you to tap into at any time.
Tempo believes that work should be an adventure and recruitment the most exciting thing companies do. We’re on a mission to make it happen. Tempo is an end-to-end hiring platform connecting tens of thousands of people to temp and perm non-technical roles with the fastest growing, most innovative companies in the world. Start hiring today.