Are you dreading the recruiting process for an open position? One wrong hire can cost your company’s bottom line and impact company culture, and finding the perfect match may oftentimes feel impossible.
“60% of businesses worry they’ve hired the wrong person.” – The Global Recruiter (5 December 2024)
There’s a disconnect somewhere along the hiring pipeline that’s resulting in matching the wrong candidate with the wrong job. Hiring is hard enough with so much at stake, but clearly, there’s room for improvement that could ultimately make recruiters’ jobs easier.
Recruiting is one of the most high-impact items on a manager’s task list, so no wonder they find it stressful. The average cost of a bad hire is 30% of the employee’s annual salary.
6 Frequently Reported Hiring Problems
Why is recruiting so painful? Here are some recruiting challenges we’ve heard.
1. Hiring managers aren’t trained to interview.
Good interviewers are part journalist and part therapist. They know how to build relationships and get meaningful information in an hour. Without training, hiring managers talk too much and ask weak questions. Uncertainty about who the strongest candidate is leads to procrastination or making decisions based on gut instinct or level of industry experience, which often produces mis-hires. Just as employees aspiring to join your company should be qualified, your hiring managers need to be trained to find the right ones.
2. Contingency recruiting is failing
Contingency recruiting—where companies only pay if a recruiter successfully fills a role—used to make sense. But the model is showing serious cracks.
People now change jobs every year or two, and the fees are becoming egregious. The competition among contingency recruiters is cutthroat, and hiring managers often pit them against each other. This creates a bad hiring and work culture that can impact the quality of work, not to mention employee happiness. The executives and hiring managers we know are generally unhappy with the quality of hires they get from the contingency model because the first recruiter to submit a candidate typically gets the credit, even if they’re a bad fit. It’s an unpredictable method that needs to go – case closed.
3. Poor candidate experience
The applicant tracking system is a punch line. Hiring managers know the candidate experience stinks, but it’s not as simple as just deciding to treat candidates more respectfully.
Most organizations have not allocated the resources necessary to improve the candidate experience. Corporate recruiters are overwhelmed with the volume and unprepared to improve the level of service. Hiring managers have to fit recruiting into their normal work, often while taking on the additional work generated by an open position. The norm is for the candidate experience to be poor.
4. Unsatisfactory job descriptions
Poor job descriptions can make it almost impossible to sift through every submitted resume. This can make a recruiter spend more time looking through submissions than continuing the hiring process. For one, generic descriptions with attract the wrong candidates and can confuse the right candidates if they can’t figure out the specifications. If your description seems like it could be copied and pasted, people will pass right over it. Don’t sound too corporate, and convey company culture so people will vibe with you just from a description.
5. The “hit the ground running” syndrome
Hiring managers sometimes refuse to hire anyone they have to train and are still searching months after a green recruit would have been trained and up to speed. While the hiring problem here may seem that the perfect candidate doesn’t exist, your issue may simply be that you’re setting unnecessarily hyper-specific expectations. Passing on eager recent graduates who are ready to learn could prove to be a major mistake for your company.
6. A shortage of recruits
There just aren’t enough software developers, project managers, or nurses to fill all the openings. It’s like a game of musical chairs in reverse. The technology sector is becoming extremely competitive, and it can be hard for recruiters to sift through recruits based on skill. The healthcare industry is experiencing employee burnout, an aging population of employees preparing for retirement, and low compensation for some roles in the industry. By 2028, the U.S. is expected to be down 0.6% in healthcare workers, though this varies by state.
How to Solve Your Hiring Woes
You don’t always need an external consultant to come in and restructure your hiring processes. There are several recruiting tips that leaders and HR departments can follow to solve hiring problems.
- Train hiring managers in effective interviewing techniques. Make it an essential competency for management.
- Explore different models of recruiting, including third-party recruiters paid by the hour rather than on a contingency.
- Re-design the hiring process from the candidate’s point of view. Pay attention to your employer brand, and start thinking of candidates as customers. Allocate the resources to do this. How about a Candidate Success Team? Re-design all your job postings to attract candidates.
- Develop strong job descriptions based on specifically what the successful candidate will have accomplished in 6 months or a year, and hire for those skills instead of a laundry list of “must-have” qualifications.
- Educate hiring managers on the value of employees with “skinny resumes” and those who are “overqualified.”
- Build your employer brand and company culture so that you stand out among the competition. Having a strong employer brand used to be a “nice to have”. Now, it’s a business necessity. There is a strong opportunity for employers to stand out since many organizations are playing catch-up in this area.
Need Help Hiring Great Talent?
Managers succeed because they hire great people. Businesses fail because they fail with people. Companies have been pushed into bankruptcy because they didn’t have adequate staff to operate. More people are now leaving the workforce than coming in, so the pain of recruiting must be addressed. Otherwise, that pain might be the symptom of an illness that could kill a company.
If you are needing help with your recruiting process, BestCompaniesAZ offers a variety of services, including interview training, sourcing, recruiting, and more! Contact us to schedule a time to talk.
