Recruiters,
The challenges you'll face may go beyong what you imagine!
Settle in, we present you a list of the top 22 recruiting challenges, with practical tips for solving them.
1. The Authentic Employer Brand Challenge
2. The persistent shortage of qualified candidates
3. The omnichannel approach to candidates
4. Targeting passive candidates
5. Fewer resumes but better resumes
6. Proactively creating a talent pool
7. Integrating marketing skills into your recruitment department
8. Delivering a memorable candidate experience
9. The challenge of continuous engagement
10. Prioritizing diversity and inclusion
11. The End of Racial Bias
12. Fluidity recruitment tasks across teams
13. Implementing a streamlined selection process
14. Managing "silver medals"
15. Shortening the hiring process
16. Leveraging data effectively
17. Securing Data
18. The need to reduce costs
19. Effective Adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
20. Influencer recruitment
21. The gamification of recruitment
22. Recruiting Gifted People
1. The Authentic Employer Brand Challenge
According to a study by Glassdoor, 75% of candidates take into account the Employer Brand before even applying for a job. In concrete terms, they spend between 10 and 30 minutes on the web to see what "comes out" about the hiring company.
If they don't like what they see or if they don't think it's genuine, they won't apply or accept your job offer.
Talentnow found that 50% of candidates directly index their choice on the reputation of the company.
In fact, half of candidates won't accept a job with a company that has a bad reputation or if their reputation seems less than authentic, even if the company offers a higher salary.
💡 The solution:
In order to build your Employer Brand, you need to define and implement an effective strategy to ensure that the messages being delivered match the reality of what your company can offer.
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Tell a compelling story about your company, highlight your company culture and make candidates want to join your team.
✔️ How?
To build an effective and authentic Employer Brand, you need to conduct in-depth work to identify your strengths (EVP) and weaknesses, and then be able to show candidates why your company is a relevant place for them to work.
Typically, this is accomplished by posting photos of your employees and your office. You'll share employee testimonials and write about interesting projects and new technologies your teams are working on.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you?
The Inbound Recruiting methodology is based on identifying the comparative advantages of your Employer Brand for several types of candidates (the famous personas). Thus, thanks to the workshop work that you carry out prior to a campaign, you can identify genuine areas of work for your Employer Brand.
In addition, the Super Agency has developed a unique offer to broadcast your Employer Brand message through influencers on social networks. This approach allows you to be present in the channel perceived as the most authentic by candidates.
2. The persistent shortage of qualified candidates
The talent shortage is one of the biggest challenges facing recruiters today. In the U.S., the phenomenon even has a name: "The Great Resignation."
According to a study conducted by Skillate, 87% of HR professionals reported "few or no qualified candidates" for the skilled positions they are trying to fill.
Sadly, it appears that this problem will only get worse. According to the McKinsey Global Institute study, in the 2020s, companies in Europe and North America will need 16 to 18 million more qualified employees than will be available.
💡 The solution:
To address this talent shortage, you'll have no choice but to enter the war for attention and compete with other companies to attract qualified candidates who fit your company culture.
According to TalentLyft, 92% of people would consider changing jobs if offered a role at a company where the Employer Brand message resonates with their deepest expectations.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help?
The first step in an Inbound Recruiting approach is to attract the attention of candidates through quality content.
From now on, it is necessary for a recruiter to propose something more than a simple job offer, even if it is well written: it is essential to respond to the real expectations of the candidates by building an editorial strategy around them (candidate-centric and no longer brand-centric approach).
3. The omnichannel approach to candidates
Employers who want to fill their vacancies with great candidates will need to look beyond the social networks and local communities of their employees.
They need to find a way to broaden their reach to find those rare gems.
💡 The solution:
The omnichannel approach is emerging as the most successful response to changing candidate behavior.
It aims to offer a candidate experience where each channel supports and reinforces the other, where silos disappear, making way for a fluid, candidate-centric journey.
The challenge is to create an almost unique and totally seamless candidate experience. Online and offline activities are converging to better understand candidates, refine their profiles, and deliver tailored and effective offers.
Start building an omnichannel recruitment strategy
✔️ How?
To do this, make sure that job postings will be published across different venues and channels, including multiple free and paid local and global job boards, different social networks, internal and external employee referrals, your career site, etc.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
Inbound Recruiting is, in essence, an omnichannel approach because it relies on in-depth candidate knowledge in several contexts.
It is about collecting a maximum amount of information about candidates' behaviors and expectations in order to offer a quick, personalized and relevant response regardless of the potential candidate's point of contact (digital, phygital or other).
4. Targeting passive candidates
According to LinkedIn's research, 70% of potential candidates are passive talent who are not actively looking for a job and the remaining 30% are truly active candidates. Surprising numbers, right?
The good news is that most (up to 90%) of these passive candidates are interested in new job opportunities, as LinkedIn rightly reports. So how do you reach them?
💡 The solution:
Since passive candidates aren't actively looking for a job, you won't find them checking your career site or job boards (or else in a very detached way, out of curiosity essentially).
Instead, you need to go where they are - on social media and search engines.
Also according to LinkedIn, half (49%) of all candidates follow companies on social media with the intention of staying up to date on their proposals.
Use the power of social media and start promoting your Employer Brand on social media.
✔️ How?
The answer to this challenge is not just by posting your job openings on various social media networks.
You also need to share stories, photos and videos that showcase and promote your company as a great place to work.
You should also host different recruiting events (such as meetups, hackathons, workshops, etc.) and invite potential candidates to attend. Bring life into your recruiting to "wake up" the passive!
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you?
The first step of an Inbound Recruiting campaign is to identify personas, which is a careful targeting of the most difficult profiles to source for a company.
This essential work allows us to identify original themes that are very attractive to passive candidates. From their point of view, they will have the feeling that they have come across your job offers "by chance" but this is not the case. It is the result of a clever combination of editorial relevance and SEO strategy.
5. Fewer resumes but better resumes
As Glassdoor reports, 76% of hiring managers admit that attracting the right candidates is their biggest challenge, rather than digitally attracting a large number of applicants.
They're wasting their valuable time reviewing tons of applications that don't match their open positions.
💡 The solution:
You need to optimize your hiring process to attract the right kind of candidates from the start to get more qualitative and less quantitative.
Incentivize the right candidates to apply, and discourage everyone else from doing so!
✔️ How?
Start by stating clear and specific job requirements in your job descriptions and job postings.
Use your career blog to write about your company's culture and showcase daily life in the office.
This way, potential candidates will be able to self-select in or out of your hiring process.
You should also add qualifying questions to your application form.
This is a simple, yet effective way to weed out candidates who are not a good fit for your job opening.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
Inbound Recruiting allows you to take the time to explain to your potential candidates what is expected for a job or a category of jobs, including their inherent constraints.
If, for example, the job you are offering requires night or weekend work, or regular travel, it is essential to describe it well in quality content (and explain why). This will save both recruiters and candidates from wasting their time.
6. Proactively creating a talent pool
A talent pool is a database of candidates interested in working for your company. This concept goes further than an ATS database, which usually contains contacts who have already applied.
In the case of a talent pool, it's mostly people who show interest, but don't necessarily want to leave a resume or enter, at the moment, into a formalized recruitment process.
💡 The solution:
By building a talent pool, you can fill your positions in less time and at a lower cost because you already have candidates to choose from.
The question is: How do you create a high-quality talent pool filled with quality potential candidates?
✔️ How?
Invite potential candidates to join your talent network to learn more about your company as an employer and stay informed about open positions at your company.
Create a short and simple application form for your talent network.
Add the "Join Our Talent Network" form in various places to reach potential candidates and ask them to join your talent network.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
By providing your candidate leads with quality content, you are able to convince them to join a talent pool, which then acts as a kind of pre-ATS "airlock" between candidate interest and application.
The tool we recommend to implement this talent pool is HubSpot.
7. Integrating marketing skills into your recruitment department
The right candidates for your company exist.
However, without an effective proactive talent search strategy, HR professionals spend countless hours and invest a lot of effort to find them, with random results.
Recruiters without marketing awareness have a very difficult time finding quality candidates and getting their resumes and contact information.
💡 The solution:
If you want to find high-quality candidates, you need to apply advanced talent search strategies and proactively reach out to your potential candidates.
✔️ How?
Stop wasting time on manual sourcing and invest in a truly effective sourcing approach, using tools such as Content Marketing, Social or even Marketing Automation.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you?
Contrary to what the word Inbound Recruiting might lead you to believe, it is mainly a marketing approach and not the actual recruitment. Marketing experts, like those at The Super Agency, can help you conceptualize and implement a true digital marketing strategy for your candidates.
8. Delivering a memorable candidate experience
CareerArc's Candidate Experience Study found that nearly 60% of job seekers have had a bad experience. As a result:
- 63% of these candidates reject a job offer
- 72% of these candidates tell others, either online or in person
- 64% of these candidates stop purchasing goods and services from that employer
💡 The solution:
Simply put, if you don't improve your candidate experience, you risk losing not only your best candidates, but also your reputation, customers, and money.
✔️ How?
First, you need to audit your employees' current experience. Then, you need to take the necessary steps to improve your candidate experience, both in the physical and digital worlds.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do that?
The candidate experience is at the heart of Inbound Recruiting. It's all about positively surprising your candidates during their first interactions with your Employer Brand, whether it's on social networks or on your career site.
9. The challenge of continuous engagement
Ongoing candidate engagement will be the key to your recruitment success in the future.
Candidate engagement is the process of continuously communicating with people who have the qualities you are looking for and whose personalities align with your operations and values.
💡 The solution:
Your goal is to get potential candidates interested in your company and keep them engaged until the right job opportunity presents itself.
✔️ How?
You need to create an effective long-term strategy to engage active and passive job seekers and deliver the right message to the right candidates at the right time.
Engage with your active and passive candidates across all channels.
Respond to their comments and posts on social media, send them engaging email campaigns and invite them to your recruiting events.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help?
The principle of continuous engagement is integral to the Inbound Recruiting approach. Inbound Recruiting aims to move the potential candidate along a path of engagement (often represented as a funnel) in order to convince them to apply for job offers that match their expectations.
10. Prioritizing diversity and inclusion
According to LinkedIn's study, 78% of HR professionals say diversity is the top trend impacting how they hire.
Additionally, 67% of job seekers said a diverse team is something they consider when considering job offers, as reported by Glassdoor.
💡 The solution:
You can implement recruiting strategies that focus on finding, attracting and hiring diverse candidates.
To find diverse candidates, you should try posting your job openings on diversity job boards, such as Jobinlive.
✔️ How?
Connect with academic and professional organizations focused on diversity. Ask your current employees for diversity referrals.
To entice diverse candidates to join your company, be sure to highlight your company's commitment to diversity.
Feature quotes, photos and video testimonials from your current diverse employees on your career site and social media profiles.
To ensure your selection process is fair and objective, you should conduct structured interviews.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
Part of the content produced in Inbound Recruiting methodology is educational, in that the articles, infographics and videos you distribute carry both your Employer Brand message, but also factual explanations of a topic. Diversity is a very broad topic, which can be endlessly declined according to the sectors of activity. It's up to you to find out how to be relevant on the subject (or call on our experts to go faster!)
11. The End of Racial Bias
According to a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, resumes with "white" sounding names (hard to define exactly what that is because it's perception, not reality) receive 30% to 50% more calls for interviews than identical resumes with "non-white" sounding names.
Implement different strategies to eliminate bias from your recruitment process.
This is not, for us, to judge the supposed racism of recruiters, but rather to point out that these are mostly well-identified cognitive biases, which can be acted upon managerially but also in the HR communication you put in place.
✔️ How?
Educate your HR professionals to prevent bias from sneaking into your hiring process.
Standardize your interview process by making sure you ask all candidates the same questions.
That way, you can compare them based on the same criteria and choose the best candidates over the nicest ones.
Also, offer diversity training to help your recruiters and HR managers learn how to avoid bias in hiring.
Implement objective recruiting techniques such as structured interviews.
Finally, conduct a diverse interview panel. Including diverse people in your recruiting process will help you uncover unconscious biases and improve the fairness and equality principles of your recruiting process.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
The issue of bias, especially related to the ethnicity of candidates, is complicated to address with short slogans.
It is certainly necessary to take the time to write blog posts on the subject, to give your vision of the problem and to explain the concrete actions you are implementing to put an end to racial prejudice.
12. Streamlining hiring tasks across teams
The modern hiring process relies on effective collaboration between executives, hiring managers, recruiters, recruitment marketing professionals, IT experts, etc.
And, as more and more people work remotely, it's becoming increasingly difficult to ensure effective collaboration between teams.
Implement an effective collaborative recruitment and hiring model.
✔️ How?
First, bring your entire team together and establish clear hiring criteria and define the must-haves and desirable elements for a certain position.
You should also allow each team member to share their impressions of each candidate.
Finally, make sure all members of your team have effective tools that allow them to communicate effectively and in a timely manner.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
When creating Candidate Persona's with our clients, we systematically ask this question to those who attend the workshop: "How many different people does a candidate see during the recruitment process at your company?" The answers are sometimes surprising - the maximum recorded is 12 people, which is total nonsense in terms of the candidate experience!
While internal organization is not strictly part of the scope of Inbound Recruiting, this approach does help ask some good questions.
13. Implementing a streamlined selection process
While many companies struggle to attract and hire quality candidates, some have yet to streamline, simplify, and automate their recruitment processes.
💡 The solution:
Streamlining your selection and hiring process will save you time and money, while increasing the chances of identifying quality profiles.
Streamline your hiring workflow and simplify candidate tracking.
✔️ How?
With advanced automation, your hiring process can move from a pain point to a consistent, streamlined process.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do that?
With HubSpot, it's possible to generate automated messages based on your candidates' behaviors in your digital career spaces. An effective technique called "progressive profiling" allows you to filter candidates very finely during the pre-selection phase.
14. Managing "silver medals"
According to a Career Builder study, 74% of employers admit to hiring the wrong person for a position at least once a year.
This is not surprising considering that up to 78% of resumes are misleading and up to 46% contain outright lies, according to the Criteria Pre-Employment Testing study.
One solution to this problem is to better consider the "silver medals", i.e. those who have gone through the recruitment process but whom you did not retain in the end. This management saves a lot of time.
💡 The solution:
Implementing the most effective candidate selection practices will help you choose the right candidate for the position and your company's culture.
✔️ How?
Using various skills assessment tests, scorecards, and implementing interviews and assessment plans will allow your recruiting team to effectively evaluate candidates and select those who best fit the position and company culture.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
Inbound Recruiting introduces the concept of digital marketing called Lead Nurturing, which is very effective in keeping in touch with candidates who might have been selected for a position.
15. Shortening the hiring process
If you want to attract the best candidates, you need to hire fast.
How fast? Well, according to the ERE Medis study, the best candidates, active or activated, remain available on the job market for just 10 days.
The Robert Half study also found that 57% of job seekers lose interest in a job if the hiring process is long.
Problem: 70% of companies take between 1 and 4 months to make a new hire, as reported by LinkedIn!
💡 The solution:
The message here is clear: you need to drastically shorten your hiring process. Otherwise, you will face the cost of a delayed hiring process.
Analyze your hiring process and ask yourself: are all the hiring steps really necessary? Are we looking in the right places to fill our candidate pipelines? Are we communicating quickly with candidates and each other?
Stop wasting valuable time on unnecessary and inefficient administrative tasks.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help?
Inbound Recruiting allows you to recruit proactively, in particular through the clever use of a talent pool.
The prior identification of profiles that could match your job offers allows you to develop workflows (present natively in HubSpot), in order to automate part of the recruitment process.
16. Leveraging data effectively
According to a Global Human Capital Trends study by Deloitte's Bersin, 71% of companies consider workforce analytics a high priority in their organization.
💡 The solution:
You can store data and export useful reports using systems like an ATS or marketing software like HubSpot.
You don't need to track all existing recruitment data: coordinate with operational staff to define a few metrics that make sense for your organization.
✔️ How?
By focusing on data, you'll be able to make better, more informed hiring decisions and improve your productivity and success.
Your database: a buzzing hive of opportunity
By measuring every step of your hiring process, you can gain valuable insights and make strategic decisions based on real data.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
Inbound Recruiting tools offer remarkable traceability, generating an unprecedented amount of actionable data. It is through the analysis of KPIs obtained by the talent pool that Inbound Recruiting is able to deliver a remarkable return on investment (ROI).
17. Securing Data
Hiring candidates provide a lot of personal and potentially sensitive information and trust your company to protect it from being hacked.
💡 The solution:
You need to take special and additional steps to stay fully compliant with all GDPR requirements and other data security rules and obligations.
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The collection of sensitive data is now much more regulated.
Hiring using Excel spreadsheets and emails is simply not viable in the age of modern technology.
Even if you use specialized recruiting software such as an applicant tracking system (ATS), it's most likely already outdated.
✔️ How?
Invest in modern, easy-to-use, all-in-one recruiting software like a CRM.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do that?
HubSpot, The Super Agency's recommended solution for Inbound Recruiting, takes a comprehensive approach to data security, privacy and control.
18. The need to reduce costs
Many companies are looking to reduce recruitment costs, which is not surprising given that standard fees range from 15-20% of the candidate's first annual salary.
💡 The solution:
Many fixed-price solutions are able to offer very good value for your media advertising, and some come with exceptional management systems that can help you with many other challenges recruiters face.
✔️ How?
You may have noticed that many of the biggest recruiting challenges can be solved with the help of recruiting technology and services. Fortunately, many companies that provide these types of services offer a free trial, so you can decide if they're right for your needs.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you do this?
By creating a talent acquisition channel based on SEO and a number of automated tasks, the final cost of recruiting can be significantly reduced, even though the initial investment may be substantial.
19. Effective Adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is changing the world as we know it, and that inevitably includes how we hire.
According to a recent Robert Walters survey on recruiting and AI, nearly 40% of recruiters want to use artificial intelligence to recruit their candidates.
💡 The solution:
AI offers the promise of progress and making hiring easier and more efficient. It is indeed capable of almost autonomously managing part of the recruitment process: initial brief, sorting of CVs, interviews and evaluation.
For example, the system serving as a virtual assistant developed by Google (Google Duplex) for scheduling appointments shows that appointment setting can be entirely managed by artificial intelligence.
✔️ How?
The technology around AI is progressing at a rapid pace! Many French startups offer innovative solutions to help recruiters in their daily tasks.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you with this?
The Inbound approach is based on the ability to contact potential candidates on a career site. This can be done through an AI-powered chatbot, capable of not only providing tailored responses to candidates but also generating candidate leads.
20. Influencer recruitment
This is nothing less than the latest service offered by La Super Agence!
We are convinced that this approach responds to the demand of candidates, especially in terms of authenticity and quality of content.
Influencers may be the future ambassadors of your employer brand
✔️ How?
The quality content you produce will likely convince a good number of candidates to take a close look at your company's EVP. Yet, the influencer approach to Employer Branding is certainly the best solution to appear credible and proactive to the hardest to reach talent.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you?
This approach is exclusively proposed by La Super Agence, the first Inbound Recruiting agency in France. If you are convinced that you will get good visibility for your job offers thanks to influencers, the best thing to do is to discuss it with us!
21. The gamification of recruitment
Good candidates are becoming scarce and in high demand, so in order to get more applications and attract the attention of new generations, make your recruitment more exciting.
💡 The solution:
Are you familiar with the term "recrutainment"? It is the fusion of the terms "recruitment" and "entertainment".
The goal is to implement one or more game systems in your recruitment process in order to attract the curiosity of your candidates, keep their engagement at a high level and thus make them want to apply.
This gamification technique of digital recruitment spaces represents an asset for your employer brand. It will improve the experience of your candidates, and offer you a better quality recruitment.
✔️ How?
Implementing games in your recruitment process can do a lot for you... as long as you do it the right way!
The important thing is to remain consistent between your job proposal and the games you want to implement.
Define the profile of candidates you want to attract for the position you want to fill and determine which game mechanics are the most suitable for them (competition logic, badge system, etc.).
The implementation of such a mechanic depends on the number of people you want to recruit, as well as the time you have to devote. It takes time and resources but it is very profitable!
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you?
One of the keys to Inbound Recruiting is candidate engagement, as mentioned in point 9.
Therefore, we offer our clients to go further than just publishing quality content: we help them to design their content to increase engagement through the use of game mechanics. This contribution is particularly effective when it comes to recruiting developers, or more generally people working in IT, where the proportion of gamers is higher than in other sectors.
22. Recruiting Gifted People
Companies lack people with atypical profiles, yet they are sources of many improvements in the functioning and development of teams.
💡 The solution:
High Intellectual Potential candidates are major assets for your company.
Their cognitive abilities, their innovative spirit, their foresight are all qualities that will allow your company to grow.
By taking an interest in them and targeting your research on this type of atypical profile, you will participate in the growth of your company.
✔️ How?
To attract HPI profiles, you need to interest them with specific content that will stimulate their desire to join you.
Think about your EVP (Employee Value Proposition) and its declination when looking for a High Intellectual Potential, because this type of profile engages with companies that fit them and in which they feel heard.
- How can Inbound Recruiting help you?
High Potentials require a lot of content, as they are able to read and analyze vast amounts of information at high speed. In addition, the question of corporate values is central for many HPI's, who are more than others looking to find meaning in their professional careers.
By meeting these expectations, Inbound Recruiting is probably the best strategy for recruiting HPIs today!
