The recruitment process has changed drastically over the last two decades. Years ago, you could publish an ad in a paper and hire someone qualified within a matter of weeks. Now, however, it can take a few months to advertise an opening, draw in qualified job candidates for interviews and evaluations, and select and hire a new employee. While these steps are all time-consuming, they are only a part of the work to be done in hiring; you also need to set aside time to define the role, determine a pay range, and onboard your new employee.
For companies experiencing the pressures of a longer hiring process, it can be helpful to get some insights on how the job market has changed – and to get a hand with recruiting. Luckily, Chester Recruitment can help with both! This blog will walk you through how the labour force has changed, how technological developments have shaped today’s hiring process, and how employee expectations have expanded – plus, our team is here to help you with all your recruiting and staffing needs when you contact us!
You Have More Quality Job Candidates To Consider
Highly skilled and educated workers are a huge asset for your company, but they can also be overwhelming to choose between during the hiring process. As more and more young people have been going to university and receiving career preparation in recent years, the pool of qualified job candidates has expanded – effectively drowning you or your HR department with qualified candidates!
While having many candidates for a role can be wonderful, it also means that your process will be longer. Compared to previous decades, your company is likely receiving more applications from basically qualified people for each job vacancy, and you will need more time to sift through these applications and conduct interviews than the companies of yesteryear did.
Technology Has Increased the Visibility of Your Job Vacancies
Not too long ago, advertising for a job vacancy looked like listing the role in a few newspapers and creating a few listings on online job boards. Today, however, there are many impactful ways to share the news about your job vacancies, including through social media.
In the UK alone, over 57 million people, or around 84% of the national population, use social media. This is a huge opportunity for companies; promoting job openings on social media can help get your brand and your vacancies in front of lots of eyes.
That said, social media recruiting also comes with new challenges. Social media can draw in many job applicants, qualified and completely unqualified, to your listings, adding to the number of applications you need to sort through. Additionally, social media and job sites like Glassdoor put your company, brand, and job openings on display, and, sometimes, lead jobseekers to pit them against those of your competitors. Since your company’s information is quite literally at potential job candidates’ fingertips, you need to spend time making sure your company is looking its best – which adds time to the whole recruitment process.
Candidate and Employee Expectations Have Changed
As workforce development and access to information on hiring have changed, so have workers’ expectations when it comes to salaries, development opportunities, benefits, and work-life balance. While a 9-5 job structure with limited basic benefits (insurance, holidays, sick leave) used to be the standard, today’s employees are increasingly searching for extensive benefits and work flexibility, and are particularly sensitive towards avoiding bad management and poor company culture.
If you or your organisation have offered well-qualified candidates positions, only for them to reject the job offer, it could that your company’s offerings don’t fully match what those candidates were looking for in a workplace, or that candidates got a bad impression of your workplace. Along with potentially impacting what your company will need to offer in terms of schedule flexibility, remote work policies, holiday schedules, and other benefits, these high expectations, and subsequent rejected job offers, can be part of what’s drawing out your hiring and recruitment timelines.
Get Support for Your Recruitment Process
With Chester Recruitment
Although the competitiveness of your candidate pool, the increased use of technology in recruiting, and the changes in jobseeker expectations may all be elongating your hiring process, these factors can’t really be mitigated. You’ll likely continue to pull in many candidates that meet basic job qualifications, and the reality is that your company needs to utilise technology and offer competitive employment packages to compete for the best candidates; swimming upstream against these changes won’t help you as much as investing in efficient hiring and HR processes will.
If your in-house HR team is struggling to vet and evaluate candidates or needs a hand with effectively advertising all your job openings, working with a job recruitment agency can help. Here at Chester Recruitment, we provide recruitment and staffing services to companies in many industries worldwide and are here to help provide the expertise you need to navigate the ever-changing standards for job recruitment. Just contact us to learn more!