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Initially, the outbreak of COVID-19 created major economic setbacks and instabilities, creating mixed implications worldwide for the industry. Prior to the pandemic, only a few companies were practicing remote work. Since then, the industry has been forced to embrace the employment of permanent remote workers, contract-based skilled workers, and big organizations have steadily increased their contingent workforce. With regions like South Asia growing much more adaptable at remote working, there has also been a shift toward the automation and digitalization of hiring processes.
Recruiting Challenges Faced by Recruitment Teams
The global Recruitment and Staffing market reached approximately $490 billion in 2021 with a CAGR of 1.6% in a highly competitive landscape. Recruitment teams are tasked with hiring high volumes of qualified candidates in a very short amount of time. The combination of short-term hiring goals to fill immediate openings and long-term goals to create a talent pool that requires ongoing engagement with candidates has become tiresome for recruiters. Recruitment agencies face a wide range of challenges daily.
Here are some considerations to help you analyze why your conventional recruitment strategy is not working, and why it’s high time you scale up:
- Talent Sourcing: A recruiter’s first task is to find candidates that match their given job profiles. Staffing professionals have to repetitively go to individual job boards, social media sites, and career site applications to find candidates and then manually go through each profile/resume and be the judge.
- Job Marketing: Marketing jobs is a recurring process that requires you to update all job posting channels to attract talent. When a recruiter markets a job individually in each channel, it is highly time-consuming. Productivity dips, while budgets and time spent increase by handling each job board and site separately.
- Manual Database Management: Bulk hiring requires a high volume of candidate data, and database management requires meticulous status updating for each candidate. Conventional methods of managing these applicant lists include creating separate folders for each talent group (e.g., folders name: Java Developers, Full-stack, Python, etc.) and using excel sheets to track the respective pipeline status for each.
- Duplicate Profiles: When data is managed manually, one of the major problems is duplicate profiles. Without visibility of the entire system and a lack of centralized access, recruiters often find profiles with the same information in different files, resulting in confusion for the hiring team.
- Compliance(GDPR): During the recruitment process, one of the biggest challenges faced by recruiters in regions like Europe is to meet compliance and privacy requirements such as GDPR, which is designed to protect how candidates’ vital information is being accessed and used by staffing agencies. Maintaining such confidentiality and following compliance regulations is one more roadblock to making the recruitment process faster.
- Candidate-Driven Market: Today’s market is completely candidate-driven. Candidates can make or break the brand of an organization. Candidates have to be constantly engaged to create a long-lasting relationship that supports a positive candidate experience. Building a talent community for your talent pool is key to driving a successful recruitment strategy. Staffing agencies have to spend a lot of time sending personalized emails and text messages to thousands of candidates.
- Screening and Onboarding: Screening candidates correctly involves many interview sessions and questionnaires. Small businesses often struggle without automated interview scheduling and e-onboarding processes.
- Lack of Performance Metrics: When HR teams lack data analytics of the performance of each recruiter, it is difficult to accurately measure the overall organization’s performance. The number of submissions, onboarded candidates, conversion rates, and conversion time cannot be calculated ad hoc without making the system ineffective and inefficient.
The Solution: Automation
Automation enables recruiters to avoid major pitfalls and helps them to focus on increasing their conversion rate, which leads to higher ROI and savings for your hiring budget. An ATS can parse resumes, source candidates, automate scheduling, send bulk mailers, and give you the most suitable candidates matching your job requirements. It can also help you build a robust talent container, maintain talent communities, and streamline candidate engagement by using automated communications – all while meeting compliance regulations.
Not sure how to choose an ATS?
Here’s a quick read on how to choose an ATS that fits your business.
