Imagine finding a great deal for your business. It’s a solution that can potentially solve many of your business problems. It will not only add value to your organization currently but can become an asset for your company for years to come. And so, you roll up your sleeves. You create a detailed brief, you meet the concerned stakeholders, you spend weeks or probably months scouting the market and controlling the processes, and then, at the last moment, the deal doesn’t work out!
Recruitment teams face this on a daily basis.
Let’s face it - Recruitment is difficult. It is the only business where the product on sale can change its mind! You can do everything right, and yet the candidate can back out at the last moment, often without giving any reasons, and all of a sudden you are back to square one. Months of effort, time, and money wasted.
Recruitment is tough. And it is only going to be tougher in 2020. With Gen Z entering the workforce, and job-hopping at an all-time high, expect the war of talent to only intensify this year. Here are some of the reasons why recruitment is going to be difficult in 2020, and what your organization can do about it:
1. Lack of qualified candidates
According to the SHRM, the average time to fill a job has increased by 62 percent for large global organizations. Another study by the National Federation of Independent Business has found that 87% of HR professionals reported “few or no qualified applicants" for the positions they were trying to fill. With modern jobs requiring dynamic skills, finding qualified talents in a tightening job market is the number one challenge for recruiters.
Organizations need solutions that can expand their database through a connected network of resources: job boards, emails, ATS, consultancies, referrals, career pages, etc. Chatbots that can automatically do the first round of screening to provide interview-ready candidates can address this major pain point of organizations.
2. Failure to attract the best-fit talent
Attracting the right talent starts by posting the correct job description. Organizations are often the culprits here with half-cooked, generic job briefs that often invite irrelevant applications and fail to engage the right talent.
Organizations need tech-based JD assistants that give them real-time feedback on their JDs to make them more detailed and relevant. This practice will also allow organizations to improve the candidate experience and present themselves as a great employee, which in return increases the overall quality of applicants.
3. Dependency on external sources
To tackle the challenge of the lack of qualified candidates, organizations often resort to external sources like job portals, consultancies, and social media campaigns. However, about 40% of the final hires are shown to be already present in the company’s internal database. Working with external sources while neglecting the company’s own database not only results in duplication of work but also increases the cost of hiring.
With the average cost to hire an employee increased to about $4,129, cutting down dependencies on external sources for recruitment can be a life-saver for organizations.
4. Traditional screening of candidates
Another way the recruitment team loses out on its valuable time is in the process of screening candidates. Manual methods not only waste precious time but also compromise on the quality of shortlisted candidates as the recruiter is not fully aware of the hiring manager’s needs.
Even in cases where organizations deploy an ATS, the process basically gives output based on a simple keyword search that neglects variations and doesn’t ‘understand the context.’
Automated screening, that understands variations in resumes and generates AI-based score to index candidates based on their skills and experience can save significant time and effort that can be used for more fruitful tasks.
5. Emphasis on candidate experience
One of the places where the recruitment team needs to focus their efforts is the candidate experience during the whole recruitment process. Right from the career page to scheduling the interview and candidate feedback, everything adds to the candidate experience.
As a study from Hay group reveals, long application processes put off 42% of applicants”. The same study also shows that 40% of candidates rejected the offer if they had any bad experience during the interview process.
Organizations need to invest in tech that can make their career pages and applications smarter and crisp. Automating the interview schedule is another way that not only improves the candidate experience but also saves the precious time of the hiring manager.
6. Ensuring diversity in the workplace
The recruitment team nowadays have to deal with the diversity issue on two fronts:
- They want to ensure that they have a diverse set of employees from different gender, communities, races, and regions.
- On the other hand, they need to ensure that there is no bias in terms of hiring or compensation opportunities based on any of the above traits.
Screening platforms that can encrypt the personal information of the candidates and prevent any bias from the recruiter based on the factor written above, can help organizations in including diversity in their workplace.
Skillate is an AI-based platform that is transforming the recruitment process globally. With solutions like Smart Chatbot, AI-powered matching, Automated resume parsing and indexing, Skillate is making recruitment Easy, Fast and Transparent.
