Overnight, technology has dramatically changed recruitment. While headhunters and staffing firms are still getting used to the new normal, challenges have arisen that require intuitive solutions to keep businesses competitive in today’s labor market. Luckily, many of these challenges are just warped iterations of problems that recruiters and staffing agents have always faced. Let’s discuss five of the most common ones along with solutions to them that fit the ongoing digital revolution.

Challenge 1: Limited local talent

Employers all over the world are having difficulty finding suitable candidates in their areas.

Solution: Diversify your candidate sources and expand your search

More than 73% of job seekers today are only passively looking for a job. And with remote work becoming more common, the competitive job market is beginning to require that you search beyond your own backyard in pursuit of the right talent. Luckily, this comes with benefits such as increasing the quality of your hires as well as cutting back on your time to fill. With the right automation tools, you could have millions of job seekers discover your job postings every day through Google, Facebook jobs, and LinkedIn. Moreover, If you choose to hire international employees, it can also help you tackle bias by introducing a more diverse set of cultural backgrounds, work experiences, and skills to your organization.

Challenge 2: Scarcity of qualified candidates

The problem that most recruiting firms and businesses face today is how to attract top talent and place highly qualified candidates in the right roles. In fact, more than 80% of headhunters say employer branding significantly impacts their ability to attract talent.

Solution: Prioritizing quality over quantity

Recruiters’ top priorities are maintaining a high-quality candidate pipeline and a reputable employer brand. Applying due diligence even at the earliest stages of the recruitment process is one of the most important steps for avoiding unsuitable hires. This can be done with automated features, like resume parsing, screening, and pre-employment assessments, that are designed to weed out unqualified applicants faster.

Challenge 3: Candidate experience

Reaching out to each and every applicant is a monumental undertaking, and too much of a recruiter’s time is spent on engagement and maintaining a positive candidate experience.

Solution: Communicate precisely and concisely

Today, practically the entire recruitment process is digital. As a result, it’s critical to have open lines of communication with prospects and develop a good rapport with them to maintain a low candidate drop-off rate. That requires nurturing prospects and keeping your talent pipeline engaged with creative employer branding content. In fact, 83% of candidates say it would greatly improve their overall experience if employers provided a clear timeline of the hiring process. Communication is the key.

From the early stages of hiring, you can easily manage your organization’s incoming and outgoing communication threads from within our applicant tracking system’s automated emails, mass messaging solutions, phone bridge integrations, and more.

Challenge 4: Substandard job ads

Attracting the right talent is critical to your company’s future success. One area of focus is enhancing the creativity factor in job descriptions themselves. Insufficient and vague job descriptions will not only discourage good candidates, but can also attract many applicants that are underqualified for your open roles. This leads to you and your team wasting valuable time and resources in eliminating these inappropriate candidates.

Solution: Better job descriptions and AI matching

We all know hiring the best talent starts with attracting the best talent. The challenge is finding the balance between clearly describing the job’s requirements and giving potential candidates a sense of your company’s culture. Ensure your advert will be displayed by search engines like Google by using the most effective job title and other relevant keywords that help convert a view or visit into a submitted application. Make sure to include these necessary keywords in your ad copy, page title, and meta description as well.

Speed up your recruitment process with branded job description templates, and refresh the job ads you publish on your careers site and job boards to better attract the right people. This allows you to build a better talent pool that an AI matchmaker like Zoho Recruit’s “Zia” can sift through much easier as the content you list in your job descriptions are directly related to the skills candidates list on their applications. Not to mention that there’s the chance of grabbing attention from passive candidates who care about your mission and have similar values as your current workforce.

Challenge 5: Complicated performance metrics

Without proper tracking metrics, recruiters are finding it difficult to improve their hiring strategy.

Solution: Optimize your recruitment data

Every great hire gives you an opportunity to broaden your network, build new relationships, and spot talent for the future. Predictive analytics in recruitment helps you to reduce cost per hire and find talent faster. Improve the quality of your candidate database and get a head start on filling more of your open roles with recruitment data analytics. The more open positions you have, the more essential analytics become when measuring KPIs and boosting your overall strategy.

Final thoughts

To compete in today’s market, it’s time to stop guessing and start using data and technology to hire. Zoho Recruit’s talent acquisition system is streamlined, simplified, and backed by data. With its advanced recruitment analytics, you can analyze each of the challenges above and refine the solutions to fit your business down to the most granular levels.

Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to engage with any passive or active candidates you want on your team. Learn more about Zoho Recruit.