Top 5 recruitment challenges facing teams right now

Staffing firms and agencies are constantly having to navigate market shifts and changing candidate and client expectations. Although the industry can be incredibly rewarding, there are many challenges that teams face day-to-day due to manual processes, heavy workloads and administrative tasks. This doesn’t leave a lot of time to build, nurture and maintain relationships when better engagement with candidates and clients has become a key competitive differentiator. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Advances in technology and cutting-edge tools are supporting teams in ironing out inefficiencies in their workflows, streamlining their recruitment processes, as well as optimizing their time to help achieve their goals, faster. It’s an exciting time to be working in the industry as teams revolutionize the way that they work and adopt new, innovative processes that maximise their output to drive better results.  

Top 5 recruitment challenges

Of course, every recruitment team is different and will experience unique challenges. Though after talking to a lot of businesses daily, we have identified some common roadblocks that are largely felt across the board, such as:

1. Structuring day-to-day activities

Recruitment can be fast-paced and competitive. Half the battle is knowing how to organize and structure your day, particularly when teams are tasked with reaching out to hundreds of prospects each week and manually track who’s replied and who’s not. 

The ultimate goal is to get engagement from target individuals, but if teams don’t know when to reach out with the right message, it reduces the likelihood of getting that all-important response. 

Tip: Try automated to-do’s that are synced with your CRM/ATS so that teams can stay one step ahead of contacts as they move through their own end-to-end journey.

2. Time management  

The administrative side of recruitment can be time-consuming. Manual processes like data input and activity tracking can be tedious which means many individuals don’t bother. This leads to poor data hygiene and an out-of-date CRM/ATS - an administrative nightmare.

Those that do bother end up spending far too much time trying to keep track of their output. This means they can’t focus on high-value tasks like refining their recruitment engagement strategies, adding the right level of personalization to their messages and analyzing data so they can make better-informed decisions. 

Tip: Automate away manual tasks so that your team has more time to spend on adding the human element to their recruitment.

3. Manually keeping track of who to follow up and when 

The amount of businesses we talk to whose teams only follow-up once is mind-blowing. Do you know how many opportunities are missed through forgotten follow-ups?

But manually keeping track of your outreach is a huge challenge. When you have to reach out to hundreds of contacts on a weekly basis, you have to remember to follow up with each of those target individuals that didn’t reply in 7 days' time, then repeat this process in a couple of weeks, a month and so on. This is fairly impossible to achieve with 100% accuracy and results in a leaky pipeline. 

Tip: Messaging sequences should be your bread and butter. Build a series of steps that combine email, LinkedIn, phone and more and add contacts to these nurturing cadences that run alongside your day-to-day activities.

4. Using tools not meant for recruiters work 

Many teams are using sales or marketing tools that aren’t fit for purpose. Not only that, they don’t integrate well with their existing tech stack which can actually increase the number of steps for any given task, rather than reduce them. 

In terms of outreach, email marketing tools or LinkedIn Recruiter don’t offer that level of hyper-personalization that can help you stand out. Some mass-mailing tools can be more harm than good, damaging email domains by directing emails to spam. 

Tip: Instead, try reviewing your tech stack and look for tools that fit the way you work so you can enhance existing processes.

5. Achieving a quantity and quality approach to outreach 

If candidates feel that they are being spammed by impersonal outreach, they are less inclined to respond. But recruiters often work on a quantity-based reward system instead of a quality-based one. This leads to candidates and clients feeling like they’re just a number, rather than actual human beings. But without the right tools, hyper-personalization at scale is difficult to achieve.

Tip: If your existing email sequencing tool doesn’t offer the level of complexity you need, research new technology that enables hyper-personalization at scale so that your team can stand out.

Interested in learning more? Head to the next blog in the series on 'recruitment engagement - what does good look like?'.