How To Overcome The Talent Shortage Challenges

How To Overcome Talent Shortages in The Recruitment Landscape

‍Talent shortages continue to be a hiring challenge. Talent acquisition professionals are having difficulty filling roles. It used to be that skilled workers in high demand were hard to find. 

The COVID-19 pandemic continues presenting interesting challenges for the future of work. Remote work, hybrid employment options, easier access to global talents hasn’t reduced the talent shortage talent.

Lee-Martin Seymour, CEO and Co-Founder of Xref, and Matt Chippendale, Field Sales Executive at Bullhorn hosted a webinar where they discussed tactics based on their research and experience that will assist you to improve candidate experience, drive talent acquisition and deliver process improvement.

Talent acquisition is a priority and a challenge that requires different ways of thinking to overcome the challenge of talent shortage.

Innovation is the way how recruiters are sourcing and identifying talent. This is the secret that what could really help this industry overcome the challenges that we're seeing, in a really skills-short market.

Here are 8 ways to overcome talent shortage:

1. First impressions count

How many times do recruiters get a resume and take two days to respond, or they get a phone call out of the blue from a candidate, looking to make a move, and they block the call by asking for a resume before they can engage? We're humans, at the end of the day, and we need to engage from the very minute with these candidates because we just can't afford to delay the situation. So, we need to prioritise efficiency.

2. Find creative ways to become efficient

We can't hand off the art of being a recruiter to technology, that blocks us as humans from doing a great job. But we do need to find ways in which we can become far more efficient. 

I remember getting on a train with a candidate and taking the train home with them, and interviewing them on the way home because they had no other time to do it. I found myself on the wrong side of London, but I ended up with a fantastic candidate. So, whether it's manual or automated technology, we've got to find ways that prioritise efficiency.

3. Engage with new recruits

We need to continue to engage with the new recruits. We can't place people and forget about them. These people are the key to finding more great talent. There's some smart technology out there to really drip-feed our touchpoints with these candidates, and we need to find clever, smart, elegant ways of building relationships as humans, but also creating touchpoints over time, using technology.

4. Use the right tools

And we need to adopt tools that drive engagement, stop looking at things that are nice-to-haves, that are fun for six minutes. I think we need to look at business-critical toolsets. 

One decision we made eight years ago was to take the role of the job of referencing off of the line manager, who by the way hated it, or the recruiter who hated it, and give it to the candidate. The candidates love to be in control of their own destiny. That's what they're in it for. Tools like Xref, where we put the candidate in the driving-seat, allows them to have visibility and control over the outcome and provides efficiency to the recruiter, a fantastic hand-in-hand tool.

5. Automate when possible

Rather than you as a consultant having to remember to call or email a candidate after three days, three weeks and three months from point of placement, you can use technology to automate that process. 

When you look at technology enhancing the experience that the candidate has and you make recruiters better at the job that they do, that is when technology is really serving the purpose. 

6. Know exactly what your candidates are looking for

In a market where differentiating one's salary and business perks is no longer enough, what else could it be? What else can you tap into? Could it be training? Could it be that you offer flexible working hours, a comfortable distance from home? Is it culture, is it business structure, could it be an agile environment? 

More than ever, it's important to recognise what candidates are really looking for in a potential new employer, and it's really, really important to treat them as individuals rather than just taking this one-size-fits-all approach.

7. Build an employer brand and a personal and professional brand

As we all know, a really positive and consistent employer brand is critical to ensuring that you're getting the right message across to the right talent, and also at the right time as well. So, to build a strong employer brand, you need to have a strong understanding of what your existing employer brand is, what channels you are using to drive it, and then you can start looking at ways to improve it.

8. Reach out to passive candidates

I think that we've always had the division between a job-seeker that comes through seek and a passive candidate. And we all know as recruiters that passive candidates are gold-dust, and they take nurturing and relationship-building, and they're hard to find because they don't have up-to-date resumes and they're not on job boards. They're busy doing an excellent job in their organisations. 

In conclusion:

Adopt different ways to identify and find great talent. We're seeing is a real trend of people ditching the traditional ways of finding talent. And they're actually going back into their database of candidates that they've acquired in years gone by, to really tap into people with the right skills, that might not be actively looking for a job. We're seeing a really high level of success, and people being able to get the most out of the assets that they've already paid to acquire in years gone by.

So, we work in an industry of art and science. We need to use technology to back the science up, while we have the luxury of being the artists, being the humans and the storytellers in our industry because that makes the biggest difference. What we need to do is find the tools that will make our life easier. But find the tools that are business-critical, the ones that are enterprise-ready, the ones that delight you, your candidate and the experience that they have. Don't just get the ones that are nice-to-haves, that look pretty.