Let’s Think About Recruiters Wellbeing

This caused a significant shortage of recruiters for two reasons: 

1. First of all, current recruiters already working at the company are experiencing burnout by having too much work and the inability to meet the company goals.  

2. Secondly, companies are looking to expand their recruitment teams to meet business needs.

Ultimately, the surge for new staff is so high that companies struggle to find available recruiters. Moreover, experienced recruiters no longer want to work in recruitment due to their exhausting schedules and KPIs. And while we all talk about developer shortage, we completely missed the fact that recruiters are even more in demand at the moment. 

Amy Schultz, the global head of talent acquisition for the Australian software maker Canva, wrote in a recent post: "As of right now, there are 364,970 'Recruiter' jobs advertised on LinkedIn worldwide. For comparison, there are 342,586 'Software Engineer' roles open on LinkedIn worldwide." (source: LinkedIn)

So, what can we do to improve the current situation? What shift does the world of recruitment require to overcome current challenges in hiring recruiters and the rest of the workforce? 

The most prominent recruitment challenges

The talent shortage challenges have caused numerous additional challenges when it comes to pure recruitment practices. Here is what the world of recruitment is currently facing: 

1. A chronic lack of time 

2. Record employee turnover 

3. Increased importance of candidate experience

4. Limited resources to fill hard-to-fill positions 

When listing all these challenges, we can't help but wonder how anyone would even have the courage to work in the recruitment field at the moment. But, that is precisely why we believe there is a considerable need for introducing a shift in both mindsets and the way recruitment is performed. 

Ultimately, recruiters have difficulty performing tedious, repetitive tasks while figuring out new strategies to attract talent. That is why they face a chronic lack of time, causing them to decrease the quality-of-hire and negatively impacting time-to-hire - the two most important jobs for any recruiter. 

However, to make things brighter, there are multiple ways these things can change to make recruiters' lives easier and ultimately achieve better results (without experiencing burnout). Since we cannot change the nature of a recruiter's job, we can do our best to design tools to assist them in their everyday tasks. The digital transformation that the majority of the companies are aiming for is the only way for recruiters to adapt to an increased workload they will inevitably experience in the current and upcoming period. 

What can we do to decrease recruiters' stress?

While everyone talks about increasing productivity, they often neglect the recruiter's wellbeing and cognitive overload, which is why we have so many cases of burnout surrounding recruiters. 

Even more so, we have the irony of having people who are supposed to hire long-term employees to be the ones with the highest turnover rate. More specifically, research from American Staffing Industry suggests that every fourth recruiter will resign across one year, making the turnover rate at 25%! 

So, what can we do to decrease such numbers? 

The answer is that besides improving productivity, eliminating stress should be a top priority. 

And what would be a better stress release than providing them with the resources, tools, and knowledge to become better at their job without spending too much of their time on tedious tasks?

Here are some things that would work for the well-being and the productivity of recruiters:

1. Assist them while performing their day-to-day tasks

2. Help them set up a seamless recruitment process 

3. Enable them to reach relevant candidates

4. Help them establish and maintain a relevant employer brand

5. Simplify their recruitment marketing efforts

While companies cannot always hire extra staff to cover pain points that recruiters face in a day, it is the technology that could and should step in at that point. 

Creating technology designed for humans to hire humans

At the moment, recruitment tools are mostly designed in a dehumanizing manner. They mainly offer recruiters to systemize their efforts, gather applications in one place, and potentially easier communicate with their candidates. But, ultimately, they focus on improving recruiters' productivity in a very explicit sense of the word. 

However, we don't see that such tools result in higher satisfaction levels of recruiters. On the contrary, we see increased burnout, high turnover rates, and a chronic shortage of people working in the field.

Increased role of compassion AI assistants in recruitment

So far, we spoke about the need to build tools for increasing recruiters' productivity. But what if we said that tools could also decrease stress?

Technology has gone so far that it can be the extended empathic arm for all its users. The same technology is bringing more and more compassion and understanding recruiters need in their everyday jobs. Whether they are new to the company and want to continue the work of a previous recruiter with some guidance, or they need a helping hand in something they are currently not familiar with - the technology is there to recognize such moments and act accordingly.

That is where we see an immense role of AI entering the field. And no, AI would not be the one stealing their jobs, but it would be a great assistant in increasing productivity and releasing stress. This can be in the form of an emphatic message just when you need it or by giving you a concrete set of instructions on becoming better at what you are doing. It is like having an additional smart colleague here to help you overcome daily challenges. 

Sounds good? We also think so! 

That's why stay tuned for what's about to come from our development factory - it sure has a lot to do with making technology more aware of recruiters' wellbeing.