If you’re a recruiter, it’s no secret that you’re always scouting for the best in class people to fill your open roles. What I’m about to say is that candidate qualifications vary tremendously depending on the industry, as well as other factors. While the pandemic has solved one thing – making jobs accessible from all over the globe, others are still to follow. There still are pay gaps large enough and stereotypes that we are yet to break down, but we’ve definitely made a huge step forward in democratizing the workforce and making jobs accessible.
The more we’re shifting towards a global workforce, the better companies have to advertise their jobs in a competitive market, where differentiators are almost unanimously people-centric.
So let’s go through the two most common issues HR professionals experience in finding the best talent available:
Probably the most important one is the very competitive landscape
Especially if you’re working in tech or IT or even complementary industries to these ones, you’ll know that the increase in offer and the finite demand are the source of all evils. Aside from salary and work benefits which very often come with the job in these fields, one thing companies can do is be bluntly honest about their values and the way they see collaboration.
This is the only path to success if you’re looking to recruit long-term candidates who become and integrating part of your team, who share your values, your objectives and whose career paths can only be amplified through your collaboration.
What the current global situation has changed is that these cliche things that companies should generally offer have suddenly become real, meaningful and decision makers. Both millennials and GenZ know what they’re looking for, are incredibly motivated and career oriented and the best practice for a company is to market themselves as what they are. In my opinion, this honesty exercise is exactly what it means to put candidates first.
Of course companies benefit from this relationship as well – investing in new candidates is an expensive internal process and businesses have started to understand the true value of attracting the right talent. But mainly the process is oriented towards candidates and towards building a climate of trust and a valuable partnership.
Building a strong pipeline of quality talent is increasingly demanding
This one’s equally tricky. Generally, building a pipeline requires a thorough understanding of the business environment you’re operating from, but also an in-depth analysis of what talent looks for. Most of the professionals who are career-driven have understood that a work-life balance, for instance, is crucial for long-term productivity and for mental health.
Paying attention to these profoundly humane aspects is crucial, as it shows that you’re truly interested in the wellbeing of your team. It’s no longer an assumption, happier employees are more productive in the workplace, and it’s in the benefit of companies to build an ecosystem that’s friendly and easy to follow in the long run.
However, communicating in a very transparent way what the company’s internal policies, perks and career paths are makes for better quality when it comes to talent attraction from the beginning of the recruitment process.
One very frequent mistake that companies make is to communicate all these benefits during the recruitment process, when candidates have very legitimate questions about the day to day workplace atmosphere. But moving this type of communication at the beginning of the process shows thoughtfulness and respect for candidates’ time. This way, employers can be more mindful with professionals they’re currently screening, by making sure their priorities align.
A CareerArc’s candidate Experience Study revealed that nearly 60% of job seekers had had a poor candidate experience. As a result:
- 63% of these candidates reject a job offer;
- 72% of these candidates tell others about it, either online or in-person;
- 64% of these candidates stop purchasing goods and services from that employer.
Sounds bad, right? A poor candidate experience has more impact than we think and should be in focus for each recruiter and manager.
Having this in mind, we invested a lot in finding the right tools and elements that keep the candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process.
We use a human-centric approach, identifying pain points and motivators, and then we transform the insights into attractive features.
Bonus: How you lose candidates and what you can do to fix this:
There are several ways to engage talent throughout the entire lifecycle, from their first contact with your company until their very last day.
First impressions matter
So the application process is very important for the candidates – even if you want to capture as much information from them as possible, it’s important to make sure that they can apply in less than 5 minutes. On average, 80% of job seekers abandon their intention of applying for a job if the application process is complicated.
Through Jobful, the candidates can upload their CV in one click and apply to the jobs that are suitable for them.
Not enough information on the process
One of the biggest frustrations for candidates is the fact that they don’t receive enough information throughout the recruitment process. 81% of candidates say the main thing that would improve their experience is more regular updates (CareerBuilder).
That’s why we have introduced a notification system from which you can set predefined and automated messages to be sent to candidates based on their evolution on the recruitment process or just to keep them informed about the process.
Another platform for every step of the way
If you have many steps in the recruitment process, it’s important to keep just as many stages in the same place. You can lose a lot of candidates if you send them assessments on different platforms, using different interfaces.
Through Jobful you can send assessments or challenges to the candidates and you or the hiring manager can see and evaluate their performance directly on the platform. You can create different types of assessments and to evaluate different types of skills.
Beside these, it’s essential to keep candidates engaged, offering them positive emotions through transparency, recognition, rapid next steps, skill-proving challenges, and rewards throughout the end-to-end process. That’s why we are using a gamification framework to make the entire process more engaging, fun and human.
The candidates spend more time on the platform preparing, testing and responding to company-branded academies & challenges, actions by which they receive points representing the platform currency to buy experiences or goodies. The two techniques continuously generate pretested and proactive candidate pipelines.
What do you say? Do you want to try something different? Let’s chat.
