ZD GUIDES | 10 Tips For Overcoming Recruitment Challenges

Quick Wins and Simple Fixes: 10 Tips For Overcoming Recruitment Challenges

What simple hiring tips can help you overcome your recruitment challenges without investing vast amounts of time or money? We asked ZD’s recruiters…

Trawl through the pages of this blog and you’ll find lots of ideas for improving your recruitment success. But even we would be the first to admit that, while defining your employee value proposition and employer brand may be important elements in overcoming hiring challenges, they’re hardly quick fixes.
So what is?

We asked Team ZD to give us some practical tips for recruiters to navigate recruitment obstacles successfully. We’ll get to what they told us in a minute, but first, why is it essential for businesses to proactively address recruitment challenges?

Why be proactive about finding recruitment solutions?

The simple answer is ‘so you don’t have to recruit reactively’, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

Reactive recruitment is a response to an immediate problem. Person A has handed in their notice and that means you’ve got four weeks to find Person B to take their place. Reactive recruitment is against the clock, and while that can increase the urgency and level of activity, there’s no guarantee the ideal candidate will be ready and waiting when you need them.

That risks forcing you to go with a ‘make do’ candidate, leaving the position unfilled or, at best, facing an awful lot more stress and heartache as you scramble to find the right person.

Proactive recruitment anticipates the needs you’ll have and puts plans in place so that you recruit more effectively (and more cost-effectively) when you need fresh talent. A number of the simple tips below can help you recruit proactively.

Simple, effective strategies for overcoming common recruitment challenges

1.  Understand what your candidates want

   You’ll have a shopping list of requirements for your new recruits, but they’ll have one too for what a prospective employer should look like. It’s important not to make assumptions here. Use your own employee feedback, Glassdoor and other sources to understand what people really want from a career with you. Then make sure you leverage that in your ads.

   Building that understanding now can help your recruitment click into gear more successfully when there’s an urgent requirement.

2. Launch an in-house referral scheme

   What better recommendation than people who already work with you? If you’re not yet running a referral scheme, it’s time to put one in place, especially since it can be the simplest, lowest cost way of proactively building a pool of talent you can tap into as need arises.

3. Run a local recruitment centre

   Wanting to hire significant numbers in one geographic area? Run a local recruitment drive advertised on social media and across local press and make it a bit of an event. An old fashioned tactic, but one that can work well in overcoming volume hiring challenges.

4. Improve the terms of your referral scheme

   Referral scheme not resulting in any referrals? Ask yourself why that is. Perhaps it’s a publicity issue. Maybe there’s a sense that the scheme has been neglected. Perhaps the rewards simply aren’t compelling enough.

   Whatever the answer, it’s worth addressing now rather than having to reengineer your referral system at a time when you need it to deliver results.

5. Streamline your requirements

   Here’s what tends to happen when a company writes a job ad. They use a previous ad as a template and then add their additional requirements to it. Next time, they do the same again. And so on.

   Before you know it, you have a list of ‘must-haves’ as long as your arm.
   Look again at what your ad asks for. Consider what you really need and thin it out accordingly. Then, operate a one in, one out policy for additional elements.

   This ensures your ads always open the field up to the largest pool of candidates, rather than limiting applications because candidates believe they don’t meet one of the competences that you don’t feel especially strongly about in the first place.

6. Remove bias

   You probably know about coding. That asking for an “aggressive negotiator” or someone “who’ll be always-on, 24/7”, for example, implicitly suggests you’re looking for one type of person (in this case, men) to the exclusion of others.

   Removing coded language from your ads is the right thing to do for a range of reasons. But looking at it purely from a recruitment solutions perspective, it also ensures you open your opportunities up to more candidates.

7. Don’t do ads like everyone else does ads

   There’s almost a default language of job ads, an expected way of talking. The problem is that when everyone posts their ads in the same way with the same language and similar visuals, it’s hard to stand out.
   So do it differently. Leverage your brand and, whether its voice is edgy, cosy, warm or sophisticated, create job ads in its image. They’ll feel more like you, and they’ll make more of an impact.

8. Interview fewer people

   Quality over quantity: it’s a mantra we’ve always operated by, because we figure that sending you five people you could happily say yes to is much better than sending you 30 candidates and expecting you to unearth the gold.

   Even if you’re not using us to support your recruitment, interviewing fewer people focuses the sift, reduces the time and cost of interview, and gets people in post faster.

9. Publish your interview questions

   What if, rather than hitting your candidates with a surprise selection of your carefully conceived questions, you told them what the questions were in advance?
   That’s what John Lewis has decided to do in response to fears that it may miss out on great talent that struggles with the traditional interview process.

10. Ask for help

    Ok, you’ll be expecting us to make this one of our hiring tips, but it’s important. One of the biggest recruitment challenges is that, in many cases, in-house HR teams have been trimmed and thinned so much that they simply don’t have the resource they need to hire as effectively as they would like.

    The solution isn’t necessarily to hand everything over to a recruitment partner, but it is important to build a relationship with a recruiter who can help out as much or as little as you need, as and when you need it.

    That might be something relatively self-contained like running an assessment centre or managing the first sift. Alternatively it might be full end-to-end support with a mass hiring exercise.

    The right recruitment partner won’t dictate the terms of the relationship with you, they’ll just be there to help you in overcoming your hiring challenges, whatever that help looks like.

Overcome your recruitment challenges with Zachary Daniels

Let us help with your recruitment. Talk to us.