Here’s Why Your Hiring Process Isn’t Working

The way we live out our work life is very different to how our grandparents – and even our parents – lived theirs.

We no longer commit to one company for 50 years, work our way up the ranks and retire with a pension and a gold watch. Instead, nearly half of millennials would rather quit a job after two years and move onto something new.

The constant chopping and changing means that employers are hiring more than ever before – and facing some major recruiting challenges along the way.

As IT recruitment specialists, we see a lot of employers across the UK and Europe stumble when trying to find potential candidates for specialised roles because their talent acquisition strategy is all wrong. By understanding common recruiting challenges and mistakes, you can build a foolproof recruitment process that places you in a stronger position than your competition.

From looking in the wrong places to neglecting to consider the candidate experience, this guide from Dynamic Search Solutions can help you understand where your hiring process is falling flat and causing you to miss out on the industry’s leading talent.

If any of the following applies to you, it might be time to re-think your talent acquisition strategy.

There’s no pre-screening process in place

The first step in the hiring process tends to involve an influx of CVs and out of them, only around 35% are actually qualified for the role. When we apply this to the IT industry, it’s likely that this percentage gets even smaller.

These CVs come straight to your hiring manager who then has to manually go through them, because there’s no filter to ensure candidates are of a certain quality before it comes your way. It’s a time-consuming, tedious task that can seem never-ending when the applications just keep coming.

It’s likely that you’re only spending 5-10 seconds scanning each resume; who can blame you when you have such a substantial stack to get through? The hiring challenges here involve ensuring you don’t overlook a quality candidate just because you’re in a rush. When you work with a recruitment agency, the pre-screening stage is done for you. Your recruiter will comb through each resume and approve a select handful of qualified applicants to send to you, freeing up your time and applying strict quality controls to the recruitment process.

You’re trying to fill a niche role

If you’ve ever tried to source candidates to fill a highly niche role, you’ll have come across some tough hiring challenges.

It can seem as though the pool of suitable talent has dried up and there’s no one that fits the bill. This often leads to the employer adjusting their job description to make it vaguer and appeal to a wider range of people. Which can then lead to a bad hire.

Enlisting the help of a headhunter gives you access to IT talent that you otherwise may not have found. A specialist agency partners with people that do possess the skill set you need and can connect you with those sought-after candidates.

Your recruitment process is too lengthy

Ideally, a foolproof recruitment process would be condensed to two interviews, as a maximum.

Think about it like this:

As you’re trying to set up a third or fourth interview with a candidate, so they can meet yet another company director, your competition has acted fast and has offered the very same candidate a position at their company. It’s true that the interviewee might have liked you and your company, they liked your culture and the fact that you’re an industry leader. No matter how great of a match it can seem, if you delay your offer for too long, it might be too late.

Contact a recruitment agency who can help you overcome common recruiting challenges such as missing out on the best talent due to a slow time to hire. They do that by screening candidates and passing the best over to you, so you don’t have to conduct as many interviews in-house. Your search partner will stay in regular contact with applicants throughout the recruitment process, to stay on top of any other opportunities that might be presented to them and notify you if you need to act faster.

Your HR department doesn’t have the relevant expertise

Generally, your HR department won’t be equipped with the right recruitment skills to create effective job posts and source the most ideal candidate, and quite often, we see businesses just post job ads on their internal website and then forget about them.

How can a recruitment agency assist your HR and hiring teams to build a solid acquisition strategy?

It starts with an in-depth conversation. Your recruiter will get to know exactly what you’re looking for, including what the role entails and which skills and experience are non-negotiable. 

Once they have a detailed brief, they’re better equipped to create and disperse job adverts. They can tailor ads and messages to be exactly what you’re looking for, by learning about your goals and refining the job description to ensure it attracts good match candidates.

The best candidates aren’t always looking…

Are you confident you’re looking in all the right places?

If you’re just targeting those people that are specifically searching for “IT security jobs”, for example, then you’re missing out on a massive pool of talent. The ideal person might not be actively looking for a new position – they could be content where they are. However, we know that that doesn’t mean they’re not open to something better.

Hire a headhunter who can pitch your job to the best candidates. By building rapport and finding out about the candidate’s motivators and what it would take for them to consider a new role, your dedicated recruitment agency could successfully connect you with people you might have written off at the start of your recruitment search.

Not only that, but a major hiring challenge comes with sourcing local candidates. Most employers want to attract local people, because a lengthy commute isn’t sustainable in the long term and can lead to high turnover. If your ads aren’t directed to the right locations, your recruitment process could go seriously off-track.

You’re not sure what motivates the candidate

Not every person looking for a new opportunity is driven by money alone.

It’s important to find out what motivates the client you most want to join your team. Is it training and progression, flexible working hours or something else? If you’re just pitching the role from a financial angle, they may lose interest.

On the other hand, if money is someone’s primary motivator, it’s important to understand why. Will they leave your company when they find an employer willing to pay more, or can you offer something unique?

Your executive search partner can do the research for you. They’ll have conversations with the candidate to unearth their real motivators, to ensure they’re culturally a good fit for your company and that you’re able to offer the employment they’re looking for.

You’re not taking your headhunter’s advice

If you’ve already realised the benefits of working with a specialist IT headhunter, then you’re moving in the right direction. However, so many employers don’t put their full trust in their chosen headhunter – and that’s where they’re going wrong.

The reason could be that you don’t spend any money until your recruiter has actually placed a candidate at your company. There’s no commitment because you haven’t invested any money yet, so you might consider working with multiple recruiters at once to see who can find you your specialist the fastest. After all, it’s a contingency-based service; wouldn’t that make sense?

Actually, in practice, this is the worst thing you can do. Instead, we recommend that you exclusively partner with one headhunter you can trust, because if you bring a talented recruiter into the process late on, it makes it harder for them to effectively sell the role to a candidate that’s already been approached by multiple recruiters.

Your recruiter becomes your eyes and ears on the ground – if you’ll let them. Invest time in one search partner and they’ll invest time in you because as the old saying goes, a recruiter can only be as good as their client! 

Secure top talent with a foolproof recruitment process

Overcome common hiring challenges by getting specialist talent acquisition teams on the case. Dynamic Search Solutions is a recruitment partner to businesses in the UK and across Europe, offering an efficient and streamlined hiring process that gets you first access to the industry’s most-skilled professionals.

To initiate a chat about any of your available vacancies, just call us on 0208 629 6000 or send us a message online. Remember that you won’t pay anything until we successfully place someone in the role, so make us your trusted partner in building your talent acquisition strategy.