Check out the list of the top 20 recruitment challenges HR professionals will face in 2020. Are you ready to face them? Our best practice recruiting tips will help you prepare for a challenging time ahead.
We wanted to know what challenges will HR professionals face in 2020, so we did extensive research. We talked with our customers, CEOs’, recruiters’ and other HR professionals, asked around the talent acquisition community and consulted global talent acquisition studies and research. 🤓
From there, we have identified some of the major challenges in the world of talent acquisition and came up with this list of the top 20 challenges HR professionals will have to tackle in 2020. However, we didn't stop there!
We also wanted to know how the most successful HR professionals plan to tackle these challenges. 🤔 What are their best practices and expert tips? We listened and we learned. We also did some brainstorming of our own and came up with great new features for our recruitment software TalentLyft.
➡️ Ta-daaa! 🎉 We now have a brand new version of TalentLyft - our powerful recruitment software with all the features you’ll need to tackle your biggest recruitment challenges in 2020. If you haven’t tried it out yet, schedule your free demo ASAP!
We’re very excited to share the biggest recruitment challenges HR professionals will face in 2020 as well as the expert insights and practical tips for solving them. So let’s get started! 🙂
Here is the list of the top 20 recruitment challenges, followed by practical tips for solving them:
An overwhelming majority (75%) of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job, according to LinkedIn. And if they don’t like what they see, they won’t apply or accept your job offer. Corporate Responsibility Magazine has found that 75% of people would not take a job with a company that had a bad reputation - even if they were unemployed!
Solution
💡 What?
In order to build your employer brand, you need to define and implement an effective employer branding strategy. You need to tell a compelling story about your company, showcase your company culture and get candidates excited to join your team.
✔️ How?
Create an attractive, responsive and branded career site and career blog, where you can present your employer brand and show candidates why your company is a great place to work. You’ll do that by presenting photos of your employees and your office, sharing employee testimonials and writing about the interesting projects and new technologies your teams are working with.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyft has a user-friendly website builder created especially for recruiters. With TalentLyft’s Recruitment Marketing solution you can create your perfect career site in just a few minutes. And don’t worry, you don’t need to have any programming or designing skills to set it up - it’s a “drag and drop” system. Plus you can choose from many beautiful, customizable templates! Pretty awesome, right? 🙂
The talent shortage is the No. 1 hiring challenge today. A study by the National Federation of Independent Business has found that 87% of HR professionals reported “few or no qualified applicants" for the positions they were trying to fill.
Unfortunately, this problem will only get worse. According to the McKinsey Global Institute study, in 2020 companies in Europe and North America will need 16 to 18 million more educated employees that are going to be available.
Solution
💡 What?
You will have no other choice than to enter the war for talent and compete with other companies to snatch those candidates that are qualified.
✔️ How?
92% of people would consider changing jobs if offered a role with a company with an excellent employer brand, according to CR Magazine. The problem is, all your competitors will be bombarding the same qualified candidates saying they are the best employer. How can you stand out? The answer is - through employee referrals! Qualified candidates trust their friends more than your recruiters.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft's Sourcing solution, you can easily create automated referral campaigns. With just one click, you can send personalized emails to your existing employees asking them to recommend great candidates. From then on, everything is automated. TalentLyft will automatically generate unique referral links for you to track who recommended which candidate.
Due to the lack of qualified candidates, employers who want to fill their open positions with great candidates will have to look beyond their employees’ social networks and local communities. They have to find a way to expand their candidate reach in order to find those rare hidden gems.
Solution
💡 What?
In order to reach a wider pool of talent, you’ll have to extend your presence across all the possible channels and places. In other words, you should start building a multichannel recruitment strategy.
✔️ How?
Make sure that job openings will be advertised across different places and channels, including multiple free and paid local and global job boards, different social networks, internal and external employee referrals, your career site, career events, college and professional networks’ newsletters, forums, etc.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyft’s Recruitment Marketing solution is specialized for effective job marketing. With TalentLyft, you can post your jobs on multiple free and paid local and global job boards with just one click. You can also share your job opening on different social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, XING, etc.
The way things are going, soon there will be no job seekers - only passive candidates. According to LinkedIn’s research, 70% of the global workforce is made up of passive talent who aren’t actively job searching and the remaining 30% are active job seekers. Scary statistics, ain’t it?
The good news is that most (up to 90%) of these passive candidates are interested in hearing about new job opportunities, as reported by LinkedIn.
Solution
💡 What?
Since passive candidates aren’t actively looking for a job, you won’t find them checking out your career site or job boards. Instead, you have to go where they are - on social media. According to the LinkedIn survey, half (49%) of all professionals are following companies on social media with the intent to stay aware of their jobs.
✔️ How?
You need to utilize the power of social media and start promoting your employer brand on social media. This doesn’t mean just posting your job openings across different social media networks. You should also share stories, photos and videos that present and promote your company as a great place to work. You should also organize different recruiting events (such as meetups, hackathons, workshops, etc.) and invite potential candidates to attend them.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Recruitment Marketing solution, you can create a specialized landing page dedicated to your recruiting events. You can also share your recruitment content and job openings across different social media networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, XING, etc.
As reported by Glassdoor, 76% percent of hiring managers admit attracting the right job candidates is their greatest challenge. They are wasting their precious time by going through tons of applications from candidates that are not a good fit for their open positions.
Solution
💡 What?
You need to refine your hiring process in order to attract the right type of candidates from the start. You need to attract the right job candidates to apply, and discourage all the rest from applying!
✔️ How?
Start by stating clear and precise job requirements in your job descriptions and job advertisements. Use your career blog to write about your company culture and present everyday life at your office. That way, potential candidates will be able to select themselves in or out of your hiring process by themselves. You should also add qualifying questions to your application form. It is a simple, but effective way to weed out candidates who are not a good fit for your job opening.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Recruitment Marketing solution, you can easily present your employer brand on your career site and your career blog. You can highlight the perks and benefits you offer to your employees and feature videos about your company culture. You can also write articles where your existing employees talk about their typical day at work. That way, you can show candidates how would their day look like if they worked at your company. You can also interview your existing employees and present their career path and development opportunities at your company.
A talent pool is a database of candidates interested in working for your company. By building a talent pool, you can fill your job positions in less time with less money, because you already have candidates to choose from. The question is - how to build a high-quality talent pool filled with great potential candidates?
Solution
💡 What?
Invite potential candidates to join your talent network and learn more about your company as an employer and stay up to date with your company’s open job positions.
✔️ How?
Create a simple (and short!) application form for your talent network. Add “Join our Talent Network” form to different places (for example: top of your career site, end of your career blogs, social media posts, Facebook career page, LinkedIn company page, next to your job openings, etc.) to reach potential candidates and ask them to join your talent network.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Recruitment Marketing solution, you can easily create a special landing page on your career site that will serve as an invitation for joining your talent pool. For example, you create and promote landing pages for your recruitment events. Whether you are organizing a local career event, a webinar or a hackathon, you need a landing page for people to apply and enter your talent pool of potential future job applicants.
TalentLyft’s Talent CRM solution offers many different features for actively managing your talent pool, such as segmenting your talent pool, managing pool stages, sending engaging email campaigns, etc.
The right candidates are out there. However, without an efficient talent sourcing strategy, HR professionals spend countless hours and invest a lot of effort trying to find them, but with poor results. Recruiters find it very difficult to find high-quality candidates and obtain their resumes and contact information.
Solution
💡 What?
If you want to find high-quality candidates, you need to apply advanced talent sourcing strategies and proactively reach out to your potential candidates.
✔️ How?
Stop wasting time on manual sourcing and invest in powerful sourcing technology.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyft’s powerful sourcing solution combines Boolean search with machine learning for more powerful search results. It also uses artificial Intelligence to suggest candidate skills that match the role you are looking to fill. TalentLyft will search multiple sources such as LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Github and Stackoverflow to deliver perfect candidates right in your hands. Finally, TalentLyft also has a nifty extension that will automatically import perfect candidates and all their information straight into your database.
CareerArc’s candidate Experience Study revealed that nearly 60% of job seekers have had a poor candidate experience. As a result:
63% of these candidates reject a job offer (Source: Software Advice)
72% of these candidates tell others about it, either online or in-person (Source: CareerArc)
64% of these candidates stop purchasing goods and services from that employer (Source: CareerArc).
In short, if you don’t improve your candidate experience, you risk losing o not only your top candidates, but also your reputation, customers and money.
Solution
💡 What?
First, you need to audit your current employee experience. Then, you need to take the necessary steps to improve your candidate experience.
✔️ How?
According to CareerBuilder survey, an overwhelming 81% of candidates say that the one main thing that would greatly improve their overall candidate experience is employers continuously communicating status updates to them.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Talent CRM solution, you can keep your candidates in the loop by sending them relevant messages throughout your hiring process. You can snooze your candidates and be reminded to contact them at the right moment - for example, when their contract with their current employers comes to an end. You can also use our templates to send various personalized emails to your candidates - with just one click! You can even set up emails to be automatically sent when candidates send in their application or fall out of your hiring process. Ain't that amazing? 🙂
Continuous candidate engagement will be a key to recruiting success in 2020. Candidate engagement is the process of continually communicating with your candidates. Your goal is to get potential candidates interested in working for your company and keep them engaged until the right job opportunity comes up.
Solution
💡 What?
You need to create an effective long term strategy for engaging both active and passive job seekers. You need to deliver the right message to the right candidates at the right moment.
✔️ How?
Engage with your active and passive candidates through all channels. Reply to their comments and messages on social media, send them engaging email campaigns and invite them to your recruiting events.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Talent CRM solution, you can easily create email campaigns that will keep your candidates interested and engaged. You can set up personalized campaigns based on different segments of your talent pool and different stages of your hiring process. You can also schedule your email campaigns to make sure that your message will be delivered to the right candidates at the right time. Finally, with advanced analytics will show exactly which candidates have opened and read your emails.
Hiring for diversity and inclusion will be a priority for HR professionals in 2020. According to LinkedIn’s research, 78% of HR professionals say that diversity is the top trend impacting how they hire. Additionally, 67% of job seekers said a diverse workforce is important when considering job offers, as reported by Glassdoor.
Solution
💡 What?
Implement recruiting strategies focused on finding, attracting and hiring diverse candidates.
✔️ How?
Source for diverse candidates by adding terms like “employee resource group” and “ERG” to your Boolean search strings, along with phrases related to different types of diversity-focused networks (such as “black,” “Latino,” “disabilities,” “women in IT,” or “LGBTQ”).
To find diverse candidates, you should also try posting your jobs on diverse niche job boards, such as Diversity Working. Reach out to college and professionals organizations focused on diversity. Ask your existing employees for diverse referrals.
To get diverse candidates interested in joining your company, make sure to highlight your company’s dedication to diversity. Present quotes, photos and video testimonials from your existing diverse employees on your career site and social media profiles.
To make sure that your selection process is fair and objective, you should conduct structured interviews.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Recruitment Marketing solution, you can showcase your company’s diversity practices on your career site as well as write about it on your career blog. You can also create a personalized landing page dedicated to each diverse group of candidates you want to target, such as: veterans, autistic people, ex-offenders, LGBTIQ people, people over 40, people with disabilities, etc.
With TalentLyft Sourcing solution, you can easily find diverse candidates.
With TalentLyft's Applicant Tracking System, you can conduct structured interviews and use scorecards to evaluate candidates fairly and objectively..
With TalentLyft’s Hiring Analytics solution, you can automatically track and measure your diversity and inclusion metrics.
Resumes with white-sounding names receive 50% more calls for interviews than identical resumes with black-sounding names, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Solution
💡 What?
Implement different strategies for eliminating bias from your recruitment process. Educate your HR professionals to avoid bias sneaking into your hiring process.
✔️ How?
Standardize your interviewing process. Make sure that you ask all candidates the same questions. That way, you can compare them based on the same criteria and choose the best candidates instead of the most likable ones. You should also offer diversity training to help your recruiters and HR managers learn how to avoid bias in recruitment. Finally, have a diverse interview panel. Including diverse people into your recruiting process will help you uncover unconscious biases and improve the fairness and equality principles of your recruitment process.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Applicant Tracking System, you can create scorecards and use them to evaluate job applicants on previously set criteria, which lessens the chance of bias affecting your hiring decision. TalentLyft’s Applicant Tracking System enables effective team collaboration. With TalentLyft, recruiters can easily share their opinions and evaluation of candidates via notes and comments, thus significantly reducing the chances of making an irrational hiring decision.
Recently, a talent acquisition field has been undergoing a shift from traditional hiring models toward collaborative hiring methods. Modern hiring process is based on the effective collaboration between executives, hiring managers, recruiters, recruitment marketing professionals, IT experts, etc. Additionally, with more and more people working remotely from different sides of the world, ensuring effective team collaboration is becoming more and more challenging.
Solution
💡 What?
Implement an effective collaborative recruitment and hiring model.
✔️ How?
First, gather your whole team together and establish clear hiring criteria and define must haves and nice to haves for a certain position. You should also allow each team member to share their impressions on every candidate. Finally, make sure that all your team members have efficient tools that enable them to communicate effectively and timely.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Applicant Tracking System, you can assign different roles to each of your team members to control who has access to what info. You can share info about candidates with team members who need them. You can even share candidates’ profiles with internal or external parties who are not TalentLyft users! You can also create rich applicants profiles, use collaborative scorecards to evaluate your candidates, add notes and make comments about the candidates.
Even though many companies struggle with attracting and engaging high-quality applicants, some still haven’t been able to streamline, simplify and automate their hiring processes.
Solution
💡 What?
Streamline your selection and hiring process to save time and money.
✔️ How?
Start by finding your hiring bottleneck and improving them. Streamline your hiring workflow and simplify candidate tracking. Through extensive automation, your hiring process can shift from a pain point to a consistent and streamlined process.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLyft’s Applicant Tracking System, you can easily track and manage candidates’ progress to make your hiring more streamlined. You can also streamline your hiring workflow by using existing software’s hiring stages or create your own to best match your hiring process.
According to Career Builder research, 74% of employers admit they’ve hired the wrong person for a position. This comes as no surprise considering that up to 78% of resumes are misleading and up to 46% contain actual lies, according to Criteria Pre-Employment Testing’s research.
Unfortunately, a bad hire can cost a company upwards of $50,000, as reported by Career Builder! 😧 A bad hire can cause a significant loss in revenue, productivity and cause problems with employee morale and client relations.
Solution
💡 What?
Implementing the most effective candidate selection practices will ensure that you will choose the right candidate for your open job position and your company culture.
✔️ How?
Using different skill assessment tests, scorecards and implementing interviews and assessment plans will enable your hiring team to evaluate candidates efficiently and choose candidates that best fit the job and company culture.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
With TalentLfyt’s Applicant Tracking System, you can customize your hiring and assessment plans based on specific needs for certain job position. You can also use customizable, interactive and structured scorecards. Finally, you can order tests from your favorite external assessment providers and receive results without leaving TalentLyft.
If you want to snatch top candidates, you need to hire fast. How fast? Well, according to ERE Medis’s research, top candidates stay available on the job market for 10 days only. Robert Half’s research has also found that a whopping 57% of job seekers lose interest in a job if the hiring process is lengthy. Unfortunately, 70% of companies take anywhere between 1 to 4 months to make a new hire, as reported by LinkedIn.
Solution
💡 What?
The message here is clear: You need to drastically shorten your hiring process.Otherwise, you will have to face the cost of delayed recruitment process.
✔️ How?
Stop wasting your valuable time on unnecessary and ineffective administrative and manual tasks. Tasks like sourcing candidates, reviewing and parsing their resumes, scheduling interviews and ensuring timely and personalized communication with candidates should be automatized, not done manually.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyfts’powerful Sourcing solution will help you find qualified candidates in just a few clicks. If you already have a list of candidates that you want to import in the system, you can do so using bulk upload. Once you find your perfect candidates, TalentLyft’s parsing system will read different resume formats and organize them on the candidates’ profiles. With TalentLyft’s Applicant Tracking System, you can automate job disqualification, email responses, tasks and reminders. You can also save time by completely automating your interview invitations and scheduling.
Hiring analytics is a core business initiative that can help your company achieve its business results. According to a Global Human Capital Trends study by Bersin by Deloitte, 71% of companies see people analytics as a high priority in their organizations. If your HR team isn’t data-driven and well versed in hiring analytics, you’re missing an opportunity to help your company gain a competitive advantage in the market.
Solution
💡 What?
Develop a data-driven mindset in your hiring team. If you want to get a clear picture of your whole recruiting process, you need to track and measure key recruiting metrics. Focusing on data will enable you to make better and more informed hiring decisions and improve your productivity and success.
✔️ How?
Start by defining your targeted recruitment metrics and tracking them regularly. By measuring every step of your hiring process, you can get valuable insights and make strategic decisions based on real data. That way, you’ll stop wasting resources on efforts that don't work.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyft Analytics solution automatically tracks and monitors all the important hiring metrics. This data is shown in a comprehensive, but easy to understand the form of attractive visual reports. Reports generated by TalentLyft provide useful and actionable insights into your hiring strategy. You’ll know exactly what works best, and what needs to be improved.
Job applicants provide a lot of personal and potentially sensitive information and trust your company to keep it secure from hacks, breaches and other intrusions. Since the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rolled out in 2018, hiring EU candidates has become quite complicated.
Solution
💡 What?
You need to take special, additional measures to stay fully compliant with all the requirements of the GDPR and other data security rules and obligations.
✔️ How?
You need to carefully study all the relevant data security legislation and comply with it rigorously.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyft will enable you to stay compliant and protect candidates’ personal information with minimum effort. When you turn on the GDPR compliance package, you'll be able to set the data retention period and define your privacy policy to get started. That's about it, as everything else is handled automatically by TalentLyft. With TalentLyft’s Applicant Tracking System, you can assign different roles to each of your team members to control who has access to what info.
It’s the year 2020 (soon enough). Hiring by using Excel spreadsheets and email is simply not viable in this modern tech era. Even if you’re using a specialized recruitment software such as Applicant Tracking System (ATS), the chances are it is already outdated. Relying solely on your ATS to recruit candidates in 2020 is a recipe for disaster. Legacy recruiting software and applicant tracking systems often fall short when faced with the demands of the modern hiring process.
Solution
💡 What?
Utilize all the benefits modern technology can offer.
✔️ How?
Invest in a modern, easy to use all in one recruitment software.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyft is the next generation of modern recruiting software. TalentLyft is user-friendly, mobile optimized and built to provide great candidate experience. Powered by machine learning and AI, TalentLyft enables you to source candidates from multiple channels, create an attractive company career page, engage with active and passive candidates and automatically track and measure your hiring data.
Technology is changing the world as we know it, and that includes how we hire. Modern recruitment technology offers the promise to advance and make hiring easier and more effective. While this is indeed exciting, the adoption of these new technologies can become overwhelming and scary.
Solution
💡 What?
Ready or not, if you want to be successful at hiring in 2020, you need to adopt the latest recruiting technology solutions.
✔️ How?
Invest in a modern, easy to use all in one recruitment software.
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
We are proud to say that TalentLyft has the best ever customer support. Our Head of Customer Success Bruno and his dedicated team will provide you will all the support and guidance you need to easily integrate the latest recruitment technology.
With the proliferation of different recruitment solutions, it has become necessary to integrate multiple recruitment software into a major talent acquisition system. The problem is that this integration is rarely seamless.
Solution
💡 What?
Integrate different recruitment solutions under one, powerful platform.
✔️ How?
Invest in a modern, easy to use all in one recruitment software with powerful integration options. Mkae sure to choose the best recruitment software there is!
➡️ How can TalentLyft help?
TalentLyft is the world’s most complete Talent Acquisition suite. TalentLyft integrates Applicant Tracking, Recruitment Marketing and Talent CRM under one powerful platform. TalentLyft also integrates with a variety of partner sites, including job boards and external HR tools. TalentLyft’s robust API makes integration with other tools simple and easy.
