Why HR is struggling to find the right employees

In today’s job market, it’s not uncommon for employers to find themselves caught in the perfect storm of recruitment challenges:

• Record-low unemployment rates mean the pool of qualified, unemployed applicants has dried up
• Rising salary and benefits costs make competing in the pay scale race prohibitive
• Retaining existing employees becomes more difficult, creating a frustrating cycle of hiring and training.

Your organization may be unable to control some of those obstacles, but you can work around them with smart strategies for recruiting and retaining.

Passive prospects

It’s a candidate’s market. This is especially true in skills-driven industries, but it applies across the board if you’re in a market with a low unemployment rate. In fact, 86% of the most qualified candidates are already employed and aren’t actively seeking a job.*

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t target them as potential hires. If your business is relying only on traditional help-wanted ads or job fairs, you’re not reaching that key hiring pool. So how do you take them from passive prospects to engaged recruits?

Don’t wait for them to find you.

If your business isn’t aggressively targeting the demographics and attributes that make quality employees for your business, whether they’re actively searching for a job or not, you’re missing out on key recruitment opportunities. Social and digital are two of the most effective ad channels for targeting those audiences, and require less investment than traditional channels with better results. Learn more about recruiting success on social media in our free whitepaper.

Make sure you stack up well. 

Once prospective candidates find you, make sure they like what they see. According to 2018 research from Talent Now, 55% of job seekers abandon applications after reading negative reviews online. And over half of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation – even for a pay increase.* For that reason, reputation management and online presence is critical in a competitive job market. It’s also important to make sure your application process is user-friendly (i.e., accessible from mobile devices) and supports your company’s culture and onboarding practices.

Be responsive.

Your goal is quality, not quantity, when it comes to job candidates. It costs significantly less to retain good employees than to hire and train new employees. So attracting the right candidate is key. To do that, make sure your organization has an internal culture in place that promotes employee engagement, and an onboarding process that integrates that culture and prepares new hires for success. Not sure if your culture is where it needs to be? We can help answer that question.

_{*TalentNow, 2018}