Top recruitment challenges for hiring managers include high recruitment costs, making the wrong hire, a lack of qualified candidates, and inefficient recruiting processes. Read on to learn how to navigate these challenges and hire with confidence with the help of TransUnion ShareAble for Hires.
Having to find, screen, and hire new employees while running your small business is a lot like trying to whip up a batch of flapjacks as you sprint on a treadmill—one wrong move and you could have a mess on your hands you may not ever be able to fully clean up.
Filling an open position in your small business is no small task. Hiring managers are often plagued by the same recruitment challenges: a lack of qualified candidates, time lost to inefficiencies, extensive recruitment costs — the list of headaches goes on and on.
In this article, ShareAble for Hires reveals actionable solutions for hiring efficiently, so you can keep your business running as quickly and smoothly as possible. Learn more about top recruitment challenges below:
- High Recruitment Costs
- Making the Wrong Hire
- Lack of Qualified Candidates
- Inefficient Recruiting Processes
1. High Recruitment Costs
You may not realize how expensive hiring a new employee can be until you run into this financial nightmare head-on. While recruitment costs vary by region and industry, the bottom-line number is shocking all the same: just the act of hiring one employee can cost you an average of $4,219.
There are plenty of expenses included in this number:
- job listing costs
- sign-on bonuses
- employee relocation costs
- recruiter fees
- hiring committee’s time
- employee screening
- onboarding and training processes
...and these aren’t even the tip of the iceberg.
The cost of recruitment is only increasing. As inflation rises—and the cost of living alongside it—you typically need to offer higher salaries in order to accommodate what the market is now demanding.
It’s clear that recruitment is monetarily expensive, but many business owners find it to be a huge time-suck, as well—Entrepreneur magazine says that small business owners spend up to 40% of their working hours handling tasks that don’t generate income, such as hiring.
Solutions to Battle the Rising Costs of Recruitment
Optimize your own business’ career portal
While there are free classified sites you can use to post job listings, they may yield less-qualified candidates. Job listing sites such as Indeed and LinkedIn are also available, but these can often be structured around expensive subscriptions.
Save your business some money by optimizing the career portal on your website. That way, applicants can easily apply on your company page without having to go to a third-party site.
As an added bonus, if a candidate applies through your site, it probably means they sought out your company and have an eager interest in coming aboard.
Ask current employees for referrals
Some employers choose to incentivize employees who recommend the company to people they know. While you may spend some money on bonuses or prizes for the referrer, this is a money-saving way to find quality referrals. Not only that, but if someone has a referral already in mind, it can cut down on the total recruitment time as a whole.
Recruit using social media
Although everyone uses social media, if you’re looking to attract young talent you must leverage it in your candidate search. Considering the massive amount of users on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, your post is nearly guaranteed visibility.
Not only should you share on your company’s profile pages, but ask all current employees to post it on theirs, as well. Consider paying to boost your post across more users’ feeds. However you do it, social media is a smart, affordable complement to your job site postings.
2. Making the Wrong Hire
One of the biggest recruitment challenges small business owners face is simply making the right decision of who to hire. Moving forward too quickly may result in an ill-fitting person on your team—but take too long to make a choice, and your best candidates could be hired away by your competitors.
According to CareerBuilder, firing an employee can cost up to $15,000. And your bottom line isn’t the only thing that takes a hit when that happens—it also results in an average 37% decrease in productivity, as well as a negative impact on employee morale and client solutions.
Always conduct a pre-employment screening before making a hire
No matter what position you’re hiring for, pre-employment screening should be standard protocol. A candidate may look great on paper, but turn out to have a background chock full of red flags. Your business is your lifeline—you need to protect it.
Conducting online background checks on your applicants can be quite illuminating. An employment credit report might reveal irresponsible finances, checking the National Sex Registry could prevent you from hiring a sex offender, and a criminal background check could help keep your current team members out of harm’s way.
Contact your potential new hires’ references
Candidates will usually list two or three references as points of contact. These people are generally notified in advance with the request of putting in a good word. Hearing glowing reviews of your candidate is great, but if they’re scripted or insincere, it can be hard to determine their reliability. Worse yet, their “professional” reference could turn out to be their family member or friend—not someone who can accurately speak to their work ethic.
One way to prevent a bad hire is to contact a “blind reference”—someone who wasn’t listed as a contact and who likely wasn’t warned in advance about the referral call. A spontaneous review is probably more accurate, less biased, and can help provide a better overall picture of your candidate.
Have your candidate complete a pre-hire project
Pre-hire projects use different questionnaires and assessments to test your candidate’s critical thinking skills, cognitive ability, personality, and more. When applicable, there are several different types of pre-hire projects you can consider incorporating into your hiring process.
For example, you might ask a candidate to take an online proficiency test on your software, product line, etc. to ensure their knowledge is up to par. In other circumstances, you could give your candidates a hypothetical situation and see how they come up with a solution. If you’re conducting a group interview, you can even coordinate a pre-hire project that requires teamwork and allows leadership qualities to shine.
Consider requiring your candidates to take a test or assessment to ensure their skills are up to par. This requirement can help you weed out under-qualified applicants, but be sure to issue the test prior to hosting a preliminary interview; they may otherwise feel like they’re wasting their time.
Pre-hire projects help your candidates showcase their abilities. By focusing on more than just charisma and interviewing ability, you’ll be better able to spot the best candidate.
3. Lack of Qualified Candidates
You post your job listing online, but all you hear is crickets. Or, worse yet, the moment your post is published, your email inbox becomes inundated with applicants—few of whom actually followed your instructions or met the role’s minimum qualifications.
According to a Glassdoor survey, 76% of hiring managers say that attracting quality candidates is their single largest recruitment challenge. The competition to draw in top applicants can be tough, especially considering the 10.9 million total amount of job openings in the United States.
Simplify your hiring process to find the most qualified candidates
Instead of wasting time sorting through batches of unqualified candidates or waiting on standby for your dream employee to walk through the door, try these suggestions to attract the top candidates and solve your recruitment challenges.
Streamline your application process
Don’t make applicants jump through hoops in order to apply for your open position—that’s a recipe for leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. While you want the questions on your job application to be thorough and informative, creating a questionnaire that’s too long could deter potential candidates from applying at all.
Focus on your brand
Company culture is critical for attracting quality candidates. Your future employee should be attracted to your company; they should want to work for you equally as much as you would like them to come aboard the team.
Serious job seekers will conduct thorough company research before applying for a job, scheduling an interview, or accepting an offer. According to Glassdoor, the majority of their online users say they read at least 7 reviews before forming an opinion of a company.
Most of the time, prospective hires will get their first impression of your organization through online reviews posted by past and current employees who speak about salary expectations, CEO approval, the interview process, and more. What applicants might learn could tip the scale as to whether or not they believe they’d be a good fit for the company. First impressions are so important, in fact, that organizations who invest in employer branding are three times as likely to make a quality hire, according to the same Glassdoor survey.
How do you boost your brand’s image? Leveraging social media is a great start. A well-curated profile promotes brand awareness and makes your company a salient stand-out in the minds of potential applicants. Make sure to monitor and tend to online business reviews, carefully ameliorating any negative feedback you might find. Update your website with workspace photos and establish a clear culture by identifying who you are, what you do, and how you do it.
Create clear job postings and descriptions
If your job descriptions are vague or ambiguous, you’re likely to attract the wrong candidates. Failing to list your hard (must-haves) and soft (would-like to haves) requirements could attract under-qualified people. In the end, you’re wasting your own time.
Additionally, if you don’t thoroughly describe the position, including day-to-day responsibilities, pay expectations, work environment, and the like, you might hire a candidate who wasn’t quite aware of what they were getting themselves into. This could lead to quick employee turnover, forcing you to repeat the hiring process all over and spend big money in the process.
4. Inefficient Recruiting Processes
When it’s time to hire, you may be exhausted just by the thought of having to go through the hiring process. On average, small business owners and hiring managers take 38 days to fill a vacant job position. This means that for more than a month, you and your existing staff members are picking up the extra workload while looking for someone new. Such added stress does more harm than good in terms of workspace morale.
After the back-and-forth and go-arounds within the hiring decisions, the job offer is finally placed—yet your favorite candidate is gone. Your candidate was snatched up by a competitor, and you’re now back to the drawing board facing the same recruitment challenges. According to Officevibe, top talent is available for an average of 10 days before being hired.
How to Improve your recruitment process.
Need to increase efficiency and speed up the hiring process? Here are some suggestions:
Skip traditional background checks
Of course, every new hire should be thoroughly vetted, but traditional background checks can take weeks to complete. Opt to use efficient online screening solutions such as ShareAble for Hires. Screening can be completed entirely from your phone, computer. or tablet. Once your job applicant provides authorization for a background check, ShareAble screens nationwide databases, sending you credit, criminal and ID-verified background reports to your inbox within minutes. When your business success is on the line, there’s no time to waste. Online screening can expedite your hiring timeline, getting you the qualified help you need, sooner.
Hold panel interviews
One-on-one interviews can take forever, especially when you want to take time to cover every questions possible. When everyone in the office has a chaotic calendar and can rarely squeeze a spare moment out of their day, it could be weeks before your candidate can speak with all necessary parties.
Instead, choose to hold panel interviews with groups of two or three. Not only does this shave time off the hiring process and help solve recruitment challenges, but it also allows each interviewer to play to their specific traits. Each person can ask designated questions, while others observe and listen to responses.
Panel interviews are great for efficiency, plus they encourage collaboration. Everyone needs to be on board with the right hire and feel confident the candidate will make a great addition to the team, otherwise, workplace harmony might be disrupted.
Hire from within your own walls
Instead of searching out external talent, why not consider promoting internally? Be sure any open job within your company is made known before it’s published publicly. This is one of the easiest solutions for recruitment challenges, as it’s a win-win for employers and employees. You might need to spend time filling the now-empty, lower-level position, but this should hopefully be less of a priority than finding top talent for an advanced role.
Bypass Recruitment Challenges and Screen Before Hiring with ShareAble for Hires
Don’t let recruitment obstacles get mixed in with your hiring process. With a bit of strategy and forethought—and the above solutions in your back pocket—you can attract and retain top industry talent every time your small business needs to bring new people aboard.
No matter how many recruitment challenges you manage to work around, the most unavoidable of them is simply choosing the best applicant for the job. That’s why it’s imperative to run a thorough online background check on prospective employees.
With ShareAble for Hires, you can get near-instant access to a person’s credit, criminal and ID-verified background reports. All you need is their email address, and you’ll soon be viewing FCRA-compliant reports with information you need to make a confident hiring decision.
ShareAble offer pay-as-you-go pricing for background checks because it’s designed for small business employers—people who hire sporadically. Plus, it’s the only online pre-employment screening that’s authorized for 100% of small businesses in the US. Create a free account and start screening today.
ShareAble for Hires.
Sign-up Now. Reports Now. Hire Now.
