The U.S. currently has the lowest unemployment rate in the last 50 years. And while that’s great news for virtually everyone, it has made the job of recruiters equally tough. Not only has the saturated job market pushed salaries higher, it has made it extremely tough to attract top-tier talent to your organization.
Here are the 5 recruitment challenges all recruiters face and our solution to each one of them.
Recruitment Challenge #1: Finding the Right Talent
A good portion of any recruiter’s life is spent searching for talent on LinkedIn – exploring connections and browsing company profiles hoping to find the right match. The saturated current job market makes it even harder, as traditional means like job boards are essentially useless.
Solution: A better approach would be using some data providers to offer deeper insights into the industry talent pool. If you know which person holds which title in what organization, it makes it much easier when you go headhunting for a similar profile.
Recruitment Challenge #2: Passive Candidates
Even if by chance, they find the right candidate on LinkedIn, the most they can do is drop an Inmail message. The problem is, the response rate of LinkedIn Inmail is abysmally low at around 10-15%. That means if you reach out to 10 people, only one would respond. Factor in the saturated job market and your chances are even lower. Also, there are a certain category of candidates who are open to job changes but simply do not respond to cold outreach.
Solution: Replace Inmail messages with more aggressive and personal outreach. The reason most recruiters can’t get directly in touch with their prospective candidates is that they can’t find their contact information. In that case, use SalesIntel’s Chrome extension to quickly find the contact details of all the candidates you are interested in simply by visiting their LinkedIn profile.
Recruitment Challenge #3: Cost of Bad Hire
There have been numerous surveys and research on the cost of each new hire for a company, with estimates ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reason, in most cases, remains the same: recruiters fail to accurately gauge the skills of candidates. To be fair, that’s not entirely their fault as there is only so much you can test in one or two interviews.
Solution: Rather than trying to assess their skills in an interview, recruiters should give more weight to each candidate’s background. For instance, if you are hiring a Red Hat developer, a candidate is more likely to have requisite skills if they work in a company with Red Hat in its tech stack. Most data providers also offer technographic data that can be used to shortlist companies with desirable tech stacks and, by extension, employees from those firms.
Recruitment Challenge #4: High Attrition
The only thing worse than hiring a bad employee is repeating the same mistake over and over again. Basically, high attrition is caused by one of two factors: either you hire bad employees and have to fire them or you hire good ones but they soon leave because they aren’t satisfied. In any case, high attrition can take a huge toll financially (think hiring and training costs) while causing consistent instability in the work environment.
Solution: This is kind of tricky. While you can take measures as explained above to mitigate bad hire risks, there isn’t a universal solution for keeping good employees from leaving. The best you can do is use some employee engagement tracking tools to see which employees are disengaged and make proactive decisions accordingly.
Recruitment Challenge #5: Recruitment Costs
The cost of recruitment depends largely upon the number of hires, associated training, and if applicable, external fees. Even by modest estimates, a single hire can cost thousands of dollars. If any external recruitment agency is used, the cost may as well double depending on the job profile. This is one of the key conundrums HR managers face – finding candidates is tough and time-consuming but outsourcing is expensive.
Solution: Get a robust recruitment tool. If only you can make the task of finding and prospecting candidates simpler and efficient, there is no need to pay hefty fees to recruitment agencies. The tools mentioned above serve the same purpose. Get a data provider for in-depth research and shortlisting and the RevDriver Chrome extension for quick prospecting and you’ll never be short of talent.
Closing Remarks
Yes, the job market is tough for recruiters at the moment but that doesn’t mean you have to spend exponential time and resources finding the right talent. All you need is the right tool. SalesIntel is the finest of them.
With over 4 million human-verified contacts, 41 million technographic data points, and a FREE Chrome extension to export LinkedIn contacts, it is all you need to create and sustain your Talent pool. Free trial now to get started.
