In a world where technology changes in the blink of an eye and innovation lie at the core of everything, hiring has become a different ball game entirely.

Getting candidates hungry for innovation is tough, let alone convincing them to join and stay to propel business growth. Motivating talents financially does not cut it anymore unlike before, recruiters have to be meticulous during the hiring process to ensure the right candidate not only joins but also stays long enough.

The War for Top Talent.

According to a survey done by Mettl, 67% of large-sized organizations admitted that acquiring top talent is one of their biggest challenges. Also, over 74% of organizations agreed that attracting quality talent remains their biggest challenge, despite their best-known efforts and industry-wide best practices.

What could be the reason these organizations are not landing but missing out on top talent? Let’s take a look:

High Employee Satisfaction Rates

Sounds crazy right? As much as you want to retain top talent; so does your competitors. From offering the best working environment, avenues for growth via training to offering industry-best benefits; they do it all. Most high-quality talents are currently employed, hence, sourcing them is a challenge unless they feel a strong enough reason to switch places.

To attract such talent without sounding pushy, develop techniques to make them know that working for you is worthwhile, and what they really need for their career. Don’t try to sell it. Ensure it is beneficial to them, that way it is easier.

Tedious Recruitment Cycles.

Attracting quality talent is a wearying process. It involves scanning resumes, conducting interviews, assessing culture fit and all-alike. However, this process gets quality talent disinterested and even withdraw from the interview process.
In an era of instant gratification and multiple job offers, top candidates want the interview process over as soon as possible. When HR teams are unable to reduce the average time to hire, even quality candidates shy away. That stretches the recruitment process and results in high turnover rates later.
Adapting a structured interview process and using video interviews can greatly help in shortening interview cycles.

Location Preferences.

You might be willing to pay handsomely, have other factors on your side, but location can be a hurdle. Talents turn down good offers if their location preferences aren’t in line as the cost of relocation, and the stress that comes along doesn’t look worthwhile.
That doesn’t mean you can’t convince top-tier talents to consider a relocation. You can assure candidates that their overall life post-relocation will only change for the good, and not worse.

Full Reliance on Traditional Avenues.

If career sites are your primary place when looking to recruit candidates your recruitment strategy definitely needs a makeover. Although you can still find top candidates there, that strategy won’t work for the long term. You have to leverage on recruitment technology to source better. It’s 2019, invest in recruitment tools that can help you manage end to end recruitment, all under a single dashboard. A lot of time will be saved if you can manage all candidates, send interview invites, conduct interview assessments and roll out offers; all from a single place.
Nevertheless, it’s time to look harder at the talent that isn’t on career sites and can only be found through social channels, employee referrals, and even hackathons.

Values & Interests Overlap.

The moment a candidate walks-in for an interview, they start framing a perception about your organization. How you walk them through the position, the people and the company culture; it’s going to decide whether they would join or not. Even if they do, you can never be sure if they are going to stay or not. Understanding the values of candidates in order to match them with the company culture is paramount. A lot of people apply for jobs out of need but they leave due to mismatched values. Conducting a simple interest assessment or a skills and values assessment will help recruiters identify applicant’s motivation.

Not Building Talent Pools.

Most HR teams across the globe rely on “Just in Time” hiring and float requisitions. HR teams must get in touch with hiring managers to understand the requirements in advance so that the right talent doesn’t slip off.
James Conway, Head of Talent Acquisition at BambooHR says, “We’re in a lucky position where we have lots of quality candidates who apply, but we don’t have enough jobs to hire all of the people we interview. We’ve started building Talent Pools with these candidates. We stay in regular contact with them, how they’re liking their current job and potential openings here. When we have a position that’s going to open up and we think someone from our pool is a good fit, we won’t even open the position until we’ve brought them in. Sometimes, this makes our time to hire just a few days.”

He goes on to state how important it is to create an ideal candidate profile as a benchmark to know how potential hires are performing and whether they are worthy enough for the organization.

As it’s quite evident that once you start building a talent pipeline, not only you can have a list handy to close tricky positions, but you can also reduce your time per hire to bring down recruitment costs by significant margins.

Inadequate Talent Benchmarking.

You must know how top talent looks like and what role you want them to lead even before they are a part of your organization.
One of the major challenges companies face when attracting talent is that they don’t know what they are looking for. Organizations should look at their top-performing employees and create a benchmark for assessing qualified candidates.

Time to Up Your Talent Acquisition Skills.

There are other factors that come into play such as low brand value and high early attrition that keeps HR professionals from achieving their talent acquisition targets.

Talent acquisition in 2019 is undergoing massive changes and technology is playing a crucial role in refining talent acquisition. Therefore, HR teams must realize that changing their strategies is a lofty goal and only gradual changes are going to do the job. So, they must start with the low hanging fruits that can fix the bottlenecks in the talent acquisition strategy and work their way up. Also, it’s important to examine talent acquisition from the lens of technology and data to ensure the changes are done for the greater good, and not solely on instincts.