Hiring managers are contineuosly challenged by the task of finding best candidates due to unreasonable demands, short deadlines, and broken or ineffective processes. In a recent webinar entitled “Is Your Recruiting Strategy More Like Go Fish or Minecraft?” hosted by the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Assocaition (RPOA), presenters Beth Miller and Richard Jordan list some of the top challenges that hiring managers currently face. Issues like fewer applicants and a smaller worker pool, tight deadlines due to last-minute recruiting, candidate drop-off, and difficulty finding the best talent available can make a hiring manager’s position a nightmare. Here is a more in-depth view of the top challenges of hiring managers.
1. There are fewer job applicants for open positions
With the ongoing economic recovery after the recession, unemployment rates are declining across multiple industries, resulting in fewer applicants for open positions and a more competitive hiring market. As a result, hiring managers need to work twice as hard to fill open positions. This challenge is unlikely to improve; rather, with the upcoming retirement of the baby boomer generation, the workforce will be significantly smaller than it has been in previous years, resulting in still fewer applicants for open positions.
2. Last minute recruiting
Many companies only hire when the need is great – they implement the hiring process reactively instead of proactively sourcing talent, which would allow hiring managers to more easily find the talent they need in an emergency. As a result, hiring managers are judged by increasingly tight and demanding deadlines, while participating in a far more competitive labor environment than existed even five years earlier. Also, hiring processes usually do not work quickly, which means that even after a hiring manager has found a likely candidate, the process of hiring that candidate and onboarding them can cause the hiring manager to miss his or her company-mandated deadlines.3. Drop off of candidates.
3. Drop off of candidates
A side effect of the increasingly scarcity of good talent in the market is that applicants have options. They are unlikely to participate in a hiring and applying process that they do not view as valuing their effort and time. As a result, some companies are experiencing a “candidate drop-off,” which means that candidates abandon their applications to a particular position partway through the process, often from frustration. This phenomenon can be particularly damaging for hiring managers if time and effort was spent on recruiting the candidate in question, only to lose him or her before the process is complete.
4. Managers are unclear on where to find the best talent
Companies have processes for sourcing, interviewing, and hiring applicants for open positions. However, the sourcing processes may not find the best candidates or have the hiring manager search for good candidates in the right places. Valuable time and resources can be spent without any return on investment if managers do not know the right places to look. If this is the case and a hiring manager is coming up against a deadline, he or she may go off process and utilize their own network, with people they trust, to fill the open position. However, doing this can create risks for the company, in terms of regulation, liability, and potential discrimination.
Hiring managers face serious challenges to quickly and effectively performing their jobs and finding the talent their organizations need. Some of these challenges can be directly attributed to broken or outmoded hiring processes. Some challenges, such as the lower unemployment rate, smaller applicant pool, and eventual smaller workforce are market conditions that the hiring manager must adapt to in order to be effective at his or her job. While the market conditions cannot be altered, hiring managers can make a push for a more effective recruiting process. Proactive, straightforward, quick hiring processes would do a great deal to removing the top challenges facing hiring managers.
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