No matter the business or industry you’re working in, one of the leading endeavors that an HR manager has to oversee is the recruitment and development of new employees.
From scouring through 100s of CVs to whittling down the final list of candidates, an HR manager helps bring on the right team members and build strong departments.
With such an important function, there are several common hiccups in the road that HR professionals will run into. From finding the right candidates to ensuring that your hiring process is completely free from bias, a lot goes into recruitment.
In this article, we’ll turn to these major challenges, outlining each of them and pinpointing why they occur. From there, we’ll give you the best tip to neutralize these problems, helping you to overcome any issues in your recruitment process. You’ll be bringing on the best candidates possible to your team in no time.
We’ll cover the following areas:
- Bias in the Hiring Process
- Attracting High-Impact Candidates
- Knowing Who To Hire
Let’s get right into it.
1. Bias In The Hiring Process
Unconscious bias is something that plagues absolutely everyone. Over our lives, assumptions and stereotypes infiltrate our thinking, often subconsciously learned through absorbing media.
In the world of HR, this leads to major imbalances in the hiring process. Even over the last 25 years, the hiring discrimination against black candidates has not decreased.
Without education around unconscious bias, your HR managers could be unintentionally picking candidates that are more like them over the most qualified people for the job.
Not only does this lead to a weaker workforce, due to the fact that top candidates are passed over, but it also results in an inclusive workplace.
Inequality starts at the very lowest level. If your HR managers aren’t doing everything they can do to overcome unconscious bias, they’re contributing to a broken process that has to change.
How Do HR Managers Overcome This Challenge?
Undoing unconscious bias isn’t something that happens overnight. Even the best training in the world takes time. While enlisting anyone that’s involved in the recruitment process in bias training is a good idea, you should first try and make these biases consciously known.
By pinpointing areas in your business where you’re lacking in terms of diversity, you can use tech tools to generate data about biased hiring practices that have been going on in your company.
With this data, you can then explain to hiring managers and help them to understand their own biases.
Education is always the best option, with making people aware of their innate biases being the first step toward them noticing them and then neutralizing them.
Equally, you can use HR software to make the recruitment process as free from personal information as possible.
When unable to know anything about the candidate’s name, gender, sexuality, background, or any other personal details, you can create a much fairer process.
2. Attracting High-Impact Candidates
As the specificity of a role increases, the total number of applications that you receive will begin to shrink. With this reduced pool, you might have a range of ok or good candidates, but no one that could qualify as top talent.
Equally, you could receive so many applications that it becomes nearly impossible to sift through them all or to give them enough time for fair consideration.
This is one of the most common challenges that HR managers will face when attempting to fill a new role. Unfortunately, it’s also one that then leads to the time to hire extending indefinitely.
How Do HR Managers Overcome This Challenge?
One of the best ways to smooth out the hiring process is to make sure that you automate where you can. By getting a machine to move through CVs, you can save your HR department hours of their time.
Instead of having to think about each candidate individually, there are pieces of software that will generate the best candidates for the job, meaning your team can spend more time on the best candidates.
Another great way to increase the quality of applications is to make sure you’re beating out competitors in terms of salary compensation.
Please don’t fall into the trap of just stating “Competitive Salary” in your job description – people want transparency and will flock to you once you begin to show it.
3. Knowing Who To Hire
When your workforce needs extra hands, HR teams are often sent to hire new candidates without much information on who they should hire.
While they might know that a certain department is lacking talent, that doesn’t give much additional information about what skills are needed.
If an HR manager isn’t aware of what each member of each department offer, they won’t be able to prioritize certain complementary skills during the hiring process.
For example, let’s say a marketing department has a great base of writers that get all content swiftly created. Yet, this department really struggles when it comes to designing posts on the graphic side.
With this in mind, instead of hiring someone that has a general background in marketing, HR could focus on someone that shines in the graphics area, which would deliver a higher impact ROI for the team as a whole.
How Do HR Managers Overcome This Challenge?
Getting the lay of the land in terms of what departments currently have which skills isn’t an easy thing to do. Especially manually, this process is nearly impossible.
That’s where our HR tech stack comes in. An HR manager can choose HRIS software that allows them to get information about each department.
From looking at general productivity statistics to moving through how each department fairs in terms of their respective skill sets, HR tech tools are vital in giving your HR team enough information to hire effectively.
Final Thoughts
The world of HR is integral to any business, being the foundation upon which everything else is built.
Without a strong HR team that manages the recruitment process, your organization could struggle when attempting to bring on the best candidates for the job.
Luckily, with each challenge that presents itself within this world, there is a range of solutions that your HR department can turn to.
With more training and by utilizing HR tech tools, your team will be well on their way to acing the recruitment process.
From decreasing time to hire to filling positions with top talent from your industry, managing the recruitment process more efficiently is one of the best decisions your business can make.