The key challenges of talent acquisition
by Alice Thomson
hether you’re operating in an industry or country with a serious skills gap, or the opposite is true, and you find your HR team inundated with applications, talent acquisition is more challenging than ever before. Today, businesses need to utilise all the technology and resources available to make the best decisions at each stage of the recruitment process and overcome these tricky challenges.
Finding the right talent
It’s not unusual for a company to fall at the very first hurdle. Sourcing top talent is arguably the most important challenge to overcome; without the right talent pool to begin with, the rest of the process almost doesn’t matter. Just like Marketing, HR teams need to source in the right places to find the right candidates and deliver the right message at the right time.
Even more challenging is managing the sourcing process. For large and global enterprises this means managing hundreds of vacancies, of which there are potentially thousands of job boards, websites and social networks to source from.
To answer this challenge HR teams need to be utilising the right technology to help streamline the process and take out as much manual management as possible. An advanced HRMS like SucessFactors, for example, can provide a single platform to manage all job vacancies, job board and social network postings, and applications. Here’s some of the basic things you can look to implement and achieve to make your sourcing process more successful:
- A place to access and manage multiple jobs boards, social networks and more. For example, SuccessFactors Recruitment offers over 4,000 sources from all over the world.
- Look at more niche job boards and networks to find more relevant candidates for your job roles, such as university and college job boards.
- Today more and more candidates are using search engines like Google and Bing in their job hunt. Make sure your landing pages are optimised for SEO by using keyword and optimisation tools.
- If it’s not broken, don’t try and fix it. Look at historical data and metrics such as cost per hire, cost per application, total number of applications and the percentage of applications that turned into successful hires across all your different sources and channels. Build on the ones that have been most successful and look to optimise or simply drop the ones that aren’t working.
Delivering the right experience
In a world where everyone is a consumer and consumer expectations are higher than ever, experiences are increasingly important. The recruiting process is no different; the candidate experience you deliver could decide whether you keep that top talent through to the end. Keep the following in mind when developing your candidate experience.
Empathy
Consider the process from the candidate’s point of view and at each stage of the process. Depending on a variety of factors, such as the job role and the country, you may uncover areas that are potentially frustrating, confusing or both for the candidate. For example, leveraging more self-service tools to help keep candidates engaged could help make lengthy or long-distance processes easier and more enjoyable.
Personalisation
Look at ways to tailor the experience to the individual candidate. All employees want to feel recognised individually and potential candidates are no different, especially when it comes to top talent. For example, think about localising the language of your entire hiring process so deliver the type of warm and welcoming experience candidates will really appreciate.
Communication
Lack of communication can be a killer for keeping the best applicants around. Top talent simply won’t stay in the process if they don’t know what’s going on, where they are in their journey or even if you care. Keep candidates up to date with progress and offer a multichannel experience from desktop to mobile with responsive design and a single management platform to keep track of all your applications.
Feedback
Don’t forget to collect feedback from previous candidates to inform your future decisions. There’s no need to guess or use your gut when trying to empathise if you already have a pool of experts at your fingertips. Having a system to keep track of all your previous hires and applicants will come in handy for improving your process in the future.
Watch an overview of what amazing talent acquisition and candidate experience could look like with a HR management like SAP SuccessFactors Recruitment here.
Improving efficiency
Balancing efficiency and decision making is tough but mastering both can make significant difference to the costs and success of your hiring process. Streamlining your HR processes at the recruitment stage without sacrificing informed decision making or cutting corners that result in bad hires is one of today’s biggest HR challenges.
Of course, it’s not just cutting corners that can result in bad hires. The long-standing tradition of ‘trusting your gut’ and going on instinct simply doesn’t work for today’s serious enterprises. Why make a guess when you can make an informed decision based on facts? Avoiding bias is a huge challenge, but one that is relatively easy to overcome with the right data.
This is where leveraging today’s technology really pays off. Decision making needs data but managing and using this data needs to be efficient to be effective. A platform that can collect, collate and use this data with the help of AI is the best way of making today’s hiring process as efficient and effective as possible.
"Decision making needs data but managing and using it needs to be efficient to be effective"
Here’s some of the ways to overcome efficiency challenge today:
- Using automatic processes and AI to match applications to job descriptions and reduce the time it takes to find the most suitable candidates.
- Allow managers to communicate and collaborate better throughout the hiring process, such as managing job-posting approvals and offer acceptances on their mobile or desktop from anywhere in the world.
- Deliver interview feedback whenever and wherever you need to, whether it’s updating a candidate’s competencies during an interview or afterwards.
Managing the hiring process
The key to almost every challenge in the hiring process is unified management. A single place for your entire HR team and applicants to access all the materials they need is crucial to sourcing the right candidates, delivering the best experience and making efficient and informed decisions. While this may sound like a dream, it’s already very much a reality for thousands of companies using SAP SuccessFactors Today. Find out more about SAP SuccessFactors Recruitment here or contact us today.