#recruitment problems

If jobs are in demand, why is it so hard to fill them?

Over the past year, several industries have observed an increase in hiring difficulty. This significant change in recruitment has even caused companies to exit contracts by paying penalties as they cannot find the right workers to uphold their end of the deal.

Talent availability, or lack thereof, overtakes implementation costs or security risks as a top hindrance to establishing new technology. Firms believe that the talent shortage is the biggest snag to adopting new technologies. IT leaders who want to deploy new tools & resources to boost their business anticipate that the lack of qualified talent will prove problematic at some point.

This has helped spark a massive hunt for talent as companies loosen their purse strings to fill their ranks with skilled people. 

Read on to know more about the hiring problems companies are facing.

People are questioning if they even like their jobs

In the last couple of years, many employees have felt their relationships with their once-loved jobs deteriorate, as work has become remarkably different. Some found pre-existing disinterest amplified, while others discovered a new level of distaste for their positions or entire fields. The pandemic made them realize that life is too short to stay in a job they aren’t passionate about.

Business Insider India reports that from a pool of 1200, 4 in 10 people from tech backgrounds said that limited career progressions, inflexible working hours, and toxic work environments are some of the top reasons causing them to resign. 

Read how you can provide favorable conditions and retain your employees here.

Employment paradox

On the one hand, firms can’t seem to find candidates, and on the other hand, people can’t seem to find decent jobs. What is this dichotomy? 

Sure, there are many vacant roles, but that doesn’t automatically mean they are perfect for job seekers. This reflects the lingering issue in the labor market – the mismatch between the workforce and the open jobs.

Despite the talent shortage, employers continue to demand ‘several’ years of experience. Workers who have an employment gap of over six months, either because they switched fields or dropped out to care for a child or an elderly, are not even coming by the hiring manager’s desk. And using automated hiring software is filtering out qualified applicants that may be fit for the role. 

This rigidity in wanting a candidate with precisely the proper education, years of experience, or range of qualifications that perfectly fits a job’s requirements might be leaving behind an untapped group – the applicants who are ‘STARs’ – Skilled Through Alternative Routes. Not recognizing skills gained through alternative ways is failing these workers and failing you from finding the talent your company needs.

Another mismatch is people wanting remote working options and firms wanting them available in person. Candidates are exercising their right to work in a safe environment, and with COVID playing peek-a-boo, businesses are gradually opening their office doors. Candidates are open to expanding their job search for remote flexibility over attractive salaries, and 17% would consider quitting their job if they’re required to return to the office five days a week, according to Glassdoor.

People are stressed and burnt out

After an unprecedented 2020, employees are focused more than ever on their well-being, work-life balance, and finding meaning in their work. Data shows that 45% of people worked more hours during the pandemic, causing resignation due to burnout. 

This puts added stress on your remaining employees as they take on extra duties while you struggle to fill positions, making them spread too thin & burn out.

Working your existing workforce harder is not sustainable and certainly not the answer. If all your strategies to hire fresh talent have proven obsolete, it may be time you partner with a recruitment agency.

People want to be their own boss

With more people looking for flexibility, anxious about covid exposure, or simply disenchanted with pre-pandemic office life, it aggravates labour shortages in some industries and adds pressure on companies to revamp their employment policies. 

Professionals today have multiple choices, which don’t include joining another company but starting on their own. Some top talents prefer to lead a more nomadic life, work remotely as consultants, and are drawn to gig work rather than being pigeonholed in one organization. This is also one of the reasons why the job rejection rate has seen an upward graph.

Thanks to the pandemic, people had the chance to pause and re-evaluate their priorities. They are no longer settling for mediocrity; they don’t want to be rushed, they want time with their families, and they’re making some bold changes to achieve that.

The rise of the gig economy

Unstable employment and low job growth are the big reasons that most workers are getting job opportunities through freelance or contractual work. Our workforce is changing. Traditional employment lacks lustre. Millions are leaving their jobs daily. Contract-based roles are more attractive to millennials than permanent roles. Gig workers are in huge demand, and companies must adapt to this rising change. 

ASSOCHAM reports that India’s gig sector is expected to touch $455 billion at a CAGR of 17% by 2024. The startup ecosystem in India has seen rapid development, and hiring full-time employees lead to high fixed costs. Startups are hiring skilled technology freelancers on a per-project basis in engineering, product development, data science, and machine learning to bolster their tech platforms.

60% of tech-based companies are predicted to hire gig workers in 2-5 years. ​​MNCs are adopting flexi-hiring options, especially for niche projects, to reduce operational expenses after the pandemic. This tendency is significantly contributing to the gig culture in India.

Stiff competition

Competition is fierce for high-skilled professionals right now. Quality tech talent is hard to come by, and everyone is fighting over the same candidate pool.

Once you’ve proven your company’s mission and vision, think about other ways to attract talent. Think beyond salary and perks. It’s more than about money. You want to focus on what matters to your candidates and give them a clear direction, career progression, and rewarding work.

It’s valid that you want the right employee but what makes you the right employer? Think about that, and your chances of acquiring the best talent will increase exponentially.

Offer-shopping is the new norm

Today’s labour market favours the candidate. With abundant opportunities, job seekers are increasingly choosy. They are highly cautious about the new roles they are choosing. Most candidates are prepared to wait a few months longer to avoid making a desperate move.

The fear of job losses has diminished due to the upbeat mood of tech startups. The candidates maximize their salary offers by putting one offer against another offer. Offer shopping has become quite the norm and has been a massive challenge for organizations to onboard candidates.

Candidates in technical industries like IT are rejecting more offers than any other industry. These applicants are in high demand and can compare competing offers.

Every company is offering a maximum salary hike, but it often boils down to other factors. 

Ineffective interview process

The internet is awash with stories of job seekers becoming frustrated with companies that turn the interview process into a marathon. Candidates are pulling their names from consideration at firms with interview rounds as high as nine! Drawn out interview processes can negatively impact their interest in the role. This experience drives them to leave distasteful comments about your company on review sites anonymously.

If your recruitment process makes the applicants feel like they are being strung along, this could potentially harm the chances of attracting future talent. This indecisiveness provides the people with crucial insight into your company culture and drives them further away.

Final thoughts

Employees across all industries re-evaluated their relationships to their jobs after the pandemic briefly caused a global economic shutdown. People have largely decided they don’t wish to return to the old ways of working.

Your best strategy for winning today’s war on talent is to retain your skilled employees by fighting the top causes of employee turnover. The more you control the churn rate among your top players, the more robust your bench strength of home-grown talent who will bring long-term value to your enterprise.

With millennials mainly making up the global workforce, organizations will face increasingly transactional personnel, not hesitating to request greater flexibility in their working arrangements.

Now is also an excellent opportunity to reassess your employer branding. The pandemic drove firms to lay off employees without batting an eye, which left a bad taste. You must prove to the candidates again that you have their best interest.

Another method to get ahead of the talent shortage is proactive hiring. Not waiting until you have a vacant role but promptly filling your pipeline for rainy days. Establish meaningful connections with passive candidates, and your company will likely be the first they will consider when it’s time to change jobs.

As a product guy, I usually try to explore options to make things simple and easy. During my Internship I realized the recruiting process has a lot of disconnect and there is no way prospective employers could be reached easily. Also the whole process of submitting resume, personal information  and creating new usernames and passwords for some companies is too redundant. (For eg: Amazon, Ford). It is a cumbersome process to apply to companies on some portal and then try to reach the recruiters on LinkedIn.

Personal Experience: I interviewed with Amazon, for a tech role and I faced some challenges with the shared editor not displaying the code to the interviewer. Finally I had to open a google doc to paste my code to share with the interviewer. The whole experience of interviewing was a mess.

Problem Statement: Build an easy to use social platform for job-seekers and recruiters to be effective.

Methodologies and Action Taken

Once I started working at Monster.com as a product manager, I took it as an opportunity to talk to industry executives about the problem. When I discussed this problem with industry people, they all thought it was a good problem to solve but Monster is more focused on showcasing jobs to the job-seekers hence they were not ready to explore it further.

During my curriculum at graduate school at CMU in a web application development course we got an opportunity to develop an application of our choice as a month long project. Two of us decided to a build a social job board with features that will solve the above problem. Since most of us were techies, we focused on solving the problem for demography of people who are techies,who will probably be our early adopters.

I verified and collected requirements by talking to students from different schools at Carnegie Mellon University. I asked them questions about how they find the existing job application process, what would help them, what problems are they facing and what might help them.

Finally narrowing down on few critical problems, we added below mentioned features to solve them.

Job application status update:  Color code and abbreviation indicating the status of application in the hiring process.

Apply with default Resume: To apply to a job we need not fill or upload resume every time. It has a default resume stored if you dont want to use a new resume.

A private discussion board:  Job seekers and recruiters can discuss and schedule interviews for every job posted by recruiters.

A shared editor:  Where a recruiter can type a question for the JobSeeker to answer. Editor was capable enough to syntax highlighting to support Coding Interviews.

Google Hangout PopUp:  To avoid using multiple devices we wanted to use a single platform. Most Interviews involve having a phone call, we decided to use google hangout instead. To enable Video or not is upto the Job seeker and Recruiter.

Other small features to make life easier.