How to Overcome the Top Challenges in Recruiting

​​​​​​For the first time in a decade, client acquisition is not among the top three recruiter priorities. That place has been taken by candidate acquisition, digital transformation, and candidate experience, in answer to the recruiter’s leading challenges: talent shortage, digital transformation, economic uncertainty, and the aftermath of Covid-19, such as the rise in remote work and increased competition. 

Overcoming those challenges will require a human-centered approach to business growth. To strengthen their competitive advantage and create a winning candidate experience, recruiting agencies need to drive digital adoption of technology that supports process efficiency and a seamless user experience for both the recruiter and the candidate. 

Here’s how.

Candidate Experience and Nurturing

The wise recruiter knows that candidate experience should encompass the before, during, as well as after of the hiring process. 

The Before – Making Sure They Apply In the First Place

Sell to candidates like you sell to potential clients

Every salesperson knows the importance of reaching out to a potential client when and where they’re most likely to pay attention. The same should apply to recruiting talent. To save time and make the process more scalable, use a talent acquisition system to automate the process and monitor analytics to identify your top-performing channels. 

Invest in employer branding

Whether it’s through a LinkedIn message or a job ad, the best job posts let candidates identify immediately whether the opportunity is a good fit for them. Candidates will be looking for flexible working hours, a generous wellness package, the actual well-being policies in place, and, importantly, the principles, values, and culture that are manifested from the top down, starting with the CEO.

Create alignment between the job, the employer brand, and the recruiting process

All of the elements mentioned above need to be communicated coherently throughout the talent acquisition, recruiting, and hiring process. Otherwise, candidates may feel like they’re getting mixed signals about the company and the work experience there. 

The During — Make Sure Candidates Don’t Drop Out of the Process

Create a positive first impression

Now that the candidate is ready to apply, it’s time to look at their self-service experience.

- How simple and user-friendly is the application process?
- Is there a digital adoption solution (DAS) in place to guide the applicant through the process and answer their questions as they arise?

The last thing anyone needs is candidates dropping out because of too cumbersome, time-consuming, or confusing application processes. 

Be open about the remote and onsite company culture

As they go through the recruiting process, remote and onsite candidates alike expect to gain insight into their potential employer’s company policies and culture.

- Be open to meaningful conversations from the start, whether it concerns sustainability,
DEI, or any other candidate priority.
- Share relevant resources.
- Be honest about what has been done and where future improvements are needed.

Pay attention to the remote candidate experience

In an increasingly hybrid-remote business world, it’s important not to overlook the remote candidate experience. With a little creativity, that can be easily accomplished through content and virtual office walkthroughs.

Keep candidates engaged and informed

Simple steps like sharing agendas and resources before interviews, following up afterwards, and providing advice and regular updates throughout the recruitment process will make a big impact. 

Your Competitive Advantage- The After of Recruiting

A recruiting agency can stand out by making sure their process and candidate experience lead to employee retention. This is where the after of the recruiting process plays a pivotal role. 

Drive the perfect onboarding experience

It is important that the recruiter stays in touch with the new hire, enquires about their reception, and makes sure their responsibilities and management expectations are communicated clearly. It may also require guiding the hiring manager during the first weeks to make sure the new hire’s onboarding experience is a success. 

Gather insights from behind the scenes

Conduct smart, in-depth interviews with the new hires, applicants in the past year, staff leaving the company, and boomerang employees who left and came back. The keyword here is ‘smart’, particularly when it comes to exit interviews because people rarely give the real reason for leaving. The job-to-be-done interview method is a great starting place to uncover underlying motivations and struggles. 

Over time, the recruiter will be equipped with useful insights for the client about their new employee experience, the reasons they stay or leave, as well as how to remedy those.

Provide valuable feedback

For a truly exceptional candidate experience, the recruiter also needs to double as a career coach. They can help steer the candidate in the right direction and, if the offer didn’t come, provide valuable feedback to help them win the next opportunity.  

That way, they’ll build long–term relationships with candidates that: 
 
- Strengthen the recruiter’s brand and keep them top of mind when candidates decide to look for a new opportunity;
- Allow the recruiter to reach out to the existing candidate database with better results;
- Ensure higher speed and ROI delivered to the client.

The key to implementing all of this in practice is digital transformation. Without it, recruiters will struggle with an increasingly demanding and overwhelming process, teams will continue to work in silos and search for workarounds that result in poor data accuracy, and a competitive candidate and client experience will be too time-consuming to execute at scale.

Process Optimization- Setting and Measuring KPIs to Grow Your Business

Visualize the recruiting process from A to Z

Start by looking at every step in the recruiting process: communication with internal and external stakeholders, the tech used, processes applied, and the data available. Identify: 

- Where the pain points are for recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates;
- At which point candidates are dropping out the most;
- Which parts of the recruiting process take the longest to move through;
- Where roadblocks tend to occur;
- Where changes to capacity planning are needed;
- Where time can be saved by automating administrative tasks, providing email scripts and templates, triggering automatic updates, or integrating initial candidate assessment questions into the application system.

Set and analyze KPIs

To measure the success of your process optimization efforts, you need to analyze all the key metrics rather than just the classics like the number of CVs submitted or time to hire.

Useful KPIs to consider are:

- Sourcing channel effectiveness 
- Candidate dropout rate
- Application to interview rate 
- Interview to offer conversion rate 
- Time to decision
- Offer to accepted conversion rate
- Quality of hire 
- Employee retention rate 

Digital Adoption = Digital Transformation

Digital transformation starts with digital adoption. It requires a very user-centric approach and clarity of the job to be done for each piece of software acquired:

- What jobs will they help accomplish?
- Which tasks and processes need to be automated first? 
- How does the recruitment software fit within the existing tech ecosystem? 

Once the chosen solution is in place, the crucial question is: How easy will it be for the end users to learn and adopt? 

For best results: 

- Implement a paced, learn-as-you-go approach to driving process efficiency and digital adoption
- Set achievable goals
- Encourage user feedback and act on it
- Use real-time insights and dashboards to drive process efficiency and productivity

That’s where digital adoption solutions (DAS) are crucial. A DAS on AppExchange like Improved Apps, for example, can be used to:

- Embed practical tips like using boolean search to filter a candidate database more effectively.
- Add helpful tips and resources, such as a checklist of questions to ask the hiring manager to prepare the perfect job ad; T&Cs to be incorporated in the job application form; the candidate data that must be added; a list of candidate screening questions to avoid time lost in follow-ups, etc. 
- Send critical alerts to recruiters that an applicant matching all key criteria has just applied or that a job has been filled. 
 - Send data-triggered alerts to team leaders to check in with the recruiters falling behind on key targets.
- Guide candidates through the application process,
- And more.

The more clarity there is about the software’s job to be done, the easier it will be to motivate end users to adopt it. And the better the DAS, the more seamless and intuitive its adoption and ROI.

Ready to get started? Book a demo of Improved Apps to see exactly how.

About the author: Rachel Dance works at Improved Apps, a top-rated, award-winning, Digital Adoption Solution for Salesforce, helping to empower Salesforce users with up-to-date, personalized, contextual information and critical alerts, precisely when and where they need it.