Recruiting Challenges

Recruiting Challenges: The biggest obstacles and some ideas about how to overcome them

When discussing the biggest recruiting challenges, there are lots of ideas about what the biggest issues actually are. There are even more ideas about how you can overcome them. In this article, I interviewed recruiters of all types (executive, IT, clerical) to find out what their biggest recruiting challenges are, and how they work to overcome them.

Recruiting Challenge #1: It’s a jungle out there!

The unemployment rate is low, companies all offer strong benefits plans, and base salaries are at an all-time high. In the jungle of job postings and canned job descriptions on tons of job boards, how the heck can you sell your company and your open position to a candidate who may be receiving offers from 2-3 other companies?

Recruiting Solution: Cut a path through the underbrush. You are a recruiter. Essentially, you are sales professional. You sell your jobs and your company to candidates who you know will be a good fit for your openings. You are an EXPERT. Use your expertise to research and find out how your candidates are motivated. If you are hiring a Java Developer, talk to other developers who currently work at your company and find out why they work there. Get on a user group forum and talk to Java Developers about what they want to do. Are they motivated simply by money? By benefits? By intangible rewards? By working on really exciting software projects?

Find out what your candidate pool is motivated by, and use those things to sell your job.

Recruiting Challenge #2: They’ve heard it all before…

Candidates get messages from recruiters every day. They get lots of calls. Sometimes they even get calls about the same job from multiple recruiters! In short, it’s annoying to them. How can you get past the classic recruiter stereotypes?

Recruiting Solution: Keep the relationship adult to adult. Would you buy a car from a ten-year-old child? Probably not. Why would a candidate work for a ten-year-old? They wouldn’t. Recruiters have a tendency to be what David Sandler likes to call an “adaptive child”. Once again, recruiters are essentially sales people. If you’ll notice, sales professionals tend to sell from a child-like state. This is because they have been conditioned to do so since childhood. “The customer is always right”, “telemarketing is a crime”, these are things that affect is on a daily basis. Recruiters fall into that trap of thinking that the candidate is doing them a favor by even talking to them.

This is not true. The fact is recruiters have a valuable commodity that they are selling to people who need the product. Candidates need jobs. They need benefits. They need to be in a positive work environment. Talk to them as an adult, or as a nurturing parent, not from the standpoint of an adaptive child. Be honest. Find out if the job is a fit for them. If it’s not, don’t tell them what they want to hear, just tell them it’s not a fit, and call the next candidate. Don’t fall into the trap of being the first born child who wants to do anything to make them happy.

Recruiting challenge #3: Time management is not just a catch phrase

The internet: It’s a blessing, it’s a curse. It’s here to stay, and it has drastically changed the way that recruiters source and recruit candidates. No longer do we put a sign in our window saying “help wanted” and wait for the first applicant to arrive. No longer do we put an ad in the paper requesting phone calls. We post jobs. We have online applications. We have company websites with career portals. How can a recruiter meet the challenge of sorting through hundreds of resumes that are sent via email, through job boards, and by online application?

Recruiting Solution: Two words: Automation and Methodology. I know, they sound a little dull, but keeping them in mind will save you a lot of time. Automating the receipt of resumes, storage of resumes and initial response to received resumes will save you a lot of time. Further automating your recruiting process by using automated basic qualifications management techniques like knock out questions will help you even more. Invest in a software product that will help you organize, respond to, and search resumes that you receive.

Methodology is another key. Use the same process for every applicant. Build it into your software product. Make sure all of your recruiting staff is using that methodology. It will make your recruiting life much simpler.

In conclusion, there are many recruiting challenges that each recruiter, no matter what type of positions they fill, must deal with each working day. Attracting the best talent, talking with candidates who think you can’t help them, and time management are things that every professional recruiter has to face, and each professional has their own way of dealing with them. In my role of recruiter, I found that they each reared their ugly heads and each required slaying on a daily basis! I think that the techniques and products discussed above will help HR and Staffing professionals meet these common recruiting challenges head on.

Jessica Hurff
Director of Relationships
BrightMove, Inc.
www.brightmove.com