Top Three Frustrations for Hiring Organizations

Posted: May 05, 2020

Is Your Company’s Hiring Process Efficient?

For the purposes of this blog, we’re operating under the assumption that your employer is either one of the best places to work in your industry—with an attractive compensation and benefits package to boot—or are well on your way towards achieving that.

If you are a company that employees should want to work for, then what becomes most critical is to build a hiring process that maximizes your ability to attract, recruit, and hire the best candidates.

The problem is that employers, especially growing ones or those responding to change in the marketplace, can struggle during the hiring process. When we spoke to our customers about the most common frustrations for hiring organizations, we heard some recurring themes:

1.  Complex, Unstructured Hiring Process  – Choosing the right employee is important. A study by MIT Sloan Management Review cited that it takes 8 weeks to onboard a new clerical employee, 20 weeks for professionals, and 26 weeks for executives. And the likelihood that a new hire jumps quickly to a new job at a different company is uncomfortably high. Research by staffing firm Robert Half concludes that 64% of employees favor job-hopping, and that number is as high as 75% for employees under 34 years old. Because of this, employers often react anxiously with regard to their hiring process. They respond to uncertainty with complexity, creating a process that has an unnecessary amount of interviews and hoops that candidates must jump through. The hiring process serves as a litmus test, and only the most serious will run the gauntlet. Worse, it’s unstructured: there’s not an agreed-upon timeline for each stage of the process, different candidates are at different points, and transparent communication with candidates falls by the wayside.
2. Unnecessarily Long Hiring Process/Missing Out on Quality Candidates – When you are looking for that perfect candidate—the one with the right combination of skills and experience,but who also appears to be committed to staying with your organization for the long haul—a process that laser-focuses on finding the perfect candidate becomes extremely long. The average interview process for a candidate is 23 days, up from around 13 days in 2011. These lengthy processes are one of the most common-cited frustrations for jobseekers, second only to not knowing what the process is, and where they fall within it. As a result, it’s imperative that once the A-level candidates have been presented and are officially part of the hiring process, the process should move with a healthy sense of urgency, communication, and feedback. When hiring markets exhibit uncertainty, in transitions from work at the office to telecommuting or recovery from economic recession, adding uncertainty to the hiring process only increases the likelihood that the best candidates may slip through your fingers. The longer the process takes, the more you risk losing those A-level candidates to another company. It becomes demoralizing for your organization when they are getting excited about a candidate, only to learn that another organization scooped them up before they completed your process.
3. High Application Volume is Hard to Manage – With how easy it is to apply to most jobs these days (simply submit a resume via email, or an online portal), a higher volume of applicants for preferred roles is to be expected. For growing organizations or those managing change, this becomes a major challenge. If you have 2-3x the applications you’re used to,how can you possibly sort through all the applications you receive, give them the attention they deserve, and efficiently choose which candidates to move forward with?

It’s Time to Modernize and Streamline Your Process. But How?

Given that long, unstructured, high-volume hiring processes exacerbate an organization’s inability to bridge the talent gap, it’s unsurprising that many are looking for solutions. The first place people often turn is technology and we often refer to the collection of technology used in hiring as a technology stack. Is your current hiring technology stack holding you back?

The burning question for many growing employers or those managing change, is this: should I implement an applicant tracking system (ATS)? In other blogs, we have tried to answer that question, address the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and also presenting some alternative solutions to improving your hiring process and increasing your ability to compete for high-level talent.

The burning question for many growing employers or those managing change, is this: should I implement an applicant tracking system (ATS)? We’re going to answer that question, address the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and also present some alternative process and increasing your ability to compete for high-level talent.

For information on how Info Cubic can alleviate your hiring frustrations, please contact us at 877.360.4636.