Why It's Hard To Find Qualified Candidates?

Recent studies have shown that recruiters feel it's harder to hire qualified candidates now than it was only 6 months ago. But with an availability of so much talent in the marketplace, it should be relatively easy to find candidates. Even passive candidates (approximately 80% of the workforce) are becoming interested in making moves. It's time to audit your hiring process. It could be that you're not finding qualified candidates because of the systems you've put in place.

Qualified candidates are out there and they're active in the job market right now. But it may be that your hiring process is preventing your recruiting team from recognizing their value. It's time to take a look at revamping the process from recruitment to hire. Don't let qualified candidates slip through your fingers because you've set up the recruiting process to exclude them for some arbitrary reason.

Is Your Hiring Process Preventing You from Finding Qualified Candidates?

Let's examine how your hiring process could be preventing you from finding qualified candidates:

You have no employer brand.
I love those anonymous job postings that usually say something along the lines of "Top employer seeks top candidate for xyz role." When you dig into the job posting, candidates come away confused. When an employer doesn't stand behind their brand, it is a red flag to candidates. These days, transparency is prized among candidates. They want to be able to search the business online, read reviews, and come away with a sense of what it might like to work for that employer. They don't want to be in the dark about a new job.


The job description is generic.
Ideally, all candidates will be great communicators who play well with others. But often times, the job description is so bland and generic that a candidate can't seem to get a sense for what they would actually be doing on a day to day basis. Yes, you're seeking a Product Evangelist, but what does that mean? How would they be spending their time? Candidates want to be able to envision whether they would really be successful or satisfied in the role prior to applying.


You place cultural fit above ability.
Often times, when there's a problem with a workplace's culture, they shift gears in recruiting. You start to see the hiring managers looking for someone with the right attitude to fit in. However, attitude doesn't always equate with a candidate's aptitude to perform the job. You can hire the nicest person in the world to do your payroll, but if they don't know the basics of the job, they could be doing more harm than good in their position. It's important that the recruiting team focus on finding a candidate that has a high aptitude to do the job first and then assess whether the candidate could conceivably fit into the team without disruption.


You hire in your own image.
Many hiring managers are guilty of hiring someone they see as a reflection of themselves. It's human nature to want to relate to someone, but it doesn't predict that the person will be a qualified candidate. Yes, they may be from a similar background, but does that background include the most important skills required for the job?


Only exact matches in years of experience are considered.
There really is very little difference between an employee with 9 years of experience and 10 years. But many recruiters make these arbitrary decisions that lead to qualified candidates being rejected. Is an employee with 9 years on the job and advanced skills truly less desirable than someone who has 10 years of experience and no crossover skills?


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Email Is The Best Practices for Recruiting Organizations

If there is a key area to borrow from the marketing side of the house, it’s in email marketing best practices.

• For 70% of Internet users, email is the primary form of communication with businesses. 
• One-third of marketers say their subscribers read emails on mobile devices 50% of the time. 
• Marketers rank the three most critical areas of email as content and design; campaign management; and contact management.
• AppliView provides the bulk email feature.

 Three important Email facts: 

• Email is not going anywhere as a key form of personal communication.
• Email and mobile go hand-in-hand.
• Email requires some type of management tool to be most successful.

Follow these “must-dos” for email best practices:

Email must be trusted. 

Ensure you are CAN-SPAM compliant. And before you hit send, keep these guidelines in mind:

• Confirm the list source to make sure your recipients have opted in to receive communication from you. 
• Give your recipients a way to opt-out or unsubscribe at the bottom of every email, a key 
• Familiarize yourself with best practice for subject lines . 
•  Ones that are deceptive or riddled with spam keywords will land you directly in the junk folder.
• Monitor your email performance, including unsubscribe and negative feedback, and make adjustments to your campaigns based on the results.
• Sending volume emails will come with negatives, as well as a percentage going to spam, so don’t get discouraged―learn from it!

Email must be relevant. 

• Make sure your subject line reflects the key content in the email to improve click-through rates once recipients open the email. 
• Keep messaging direct to your list; keep copy concise.

 Email must be human. 

• Candidates are people! They are exploring taking their career to your organization, and that means they need to connect with the people behind your employer brand. 
• Be as personal and authentic. 
• Always use an automated intro that populates the recipient’s name and/or previous action that triggered the email.
• Write your intros in a personal, one-to-one way.

Email must integrate with other channels and assets. 

• Your emails should be the distribution effort to promote your top content and owned assets, from job alerts to company news and blog content to social media channels and career site. 
• Make sure you link to your active social channels either in the header or footer of the email. 
• Cross-channel promotion will encourage candidates to engage in other ways.
• Design should reflect your career site and employer branding for consistent experience.
• Promote your talent network, monthly e-newsletter, etc. in your social channels and on your career site to drive organic sign-ups and grow your database.

Email must be strategic.

• Always use the right metrics to measure your email marketing tactics and assess their effectiveness and worth. Then, make adjustments accordingly. 
• Track conversion rates when promoting jobs or events, as well as key downloadable content pieces.
• Track click-through rates on specific content, like blog posts or white papers, featured in the email.
• Follow open rates month-to-month and tie back to content themes and subject lines.
• Shorten all your links to make sure they are tracked with your email provider! 

 Email must be multi-screen.

• Candidates are accessing their emails everywhere, from desktop to mobile to tablet. The user experience must be easy and responsive across all devices. 
• Use mobile responsive email design.
• Use distinguished hyperlinks to link out to the full information: You don’t need a complete paragraph or wordy headers to introduce content! 
• Make sure your emails open and images download across a variety of email providers, like Gmail, Outlook, etc.

Email must be purposeful.

• In both design and content! Don’t overwhelm users with a lot of calls to action and options. 
• There should be one main driving conversion or message in each email. 
• Make sure hyper links to content are clear, using underlining or different colors.

Email must be seamless.

• Yes, they should be as personal and transparent as possible, but they should also be professional, which means no mistakes! 
• Test your emails! Send tests to yourself or a small team to navigate the experience on different browsers.
• Check and open all links to external content to make sure they aren’t broken and direct to the right content.
• Make sure your images are loading properly from different email clients, browsers and devices.
• Check to see how your subject line and pre-header show up in the inbox. The full copy, or at least the key point, should be visible and make sure there aren’t any spelling errors!

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Technology Which Affects Candidate's Job Application Experience

Technology can be your absolute best buddy, or sadly, it can be your worst enemy.  Pretty sure we can all remember a time when we were excited to rip into some new tech gadget and were underwhelmed and/or frustrated by how poorly it actually performed compared to our expectations.
So, what are we getting at here?

Well, technology used in the hiring process is often your candidates first encounter with your company.  It can also determine how efficiently your hiring team can do their jobs.  So yes, technology in the hiring process can be you and your candidates best friend, or it can make the process absolutely miserable for all involved.

1. Frustrating Career Sites – Not only is it upsetting for candidate’s when they have trouble locating the careers section, once they are there, information about the company, culture, and benefits can be hard to find or non-existent.  Maybe the biggest downer is when finding the section to view open jobs and apply is like working through “Where’s Waldo”.  If it takes longer than a few minutes to find this information, you can’t expect candidates to to hang around.

2. Never-ending Applications – An application shouldn’t be long enough that it makes candidates feel like they are writing an autobiography.  Oh, and time for yet another dating reference.   You wouldn’t ask someone for their Social Security Number or any other personal information on a first date would you?  Well, that and other personal information should absolutely not be requested early on in the process.

3. The Candidate Black Hole – When the system isn’t set up to respond to candidates or even notify the hiring team that there are applications waiting, then this is where we have the dreadful black hole.   Candidates may be sitting in the system for weeks or months without one single notification that the company has received their application.

4. Difficulty Navigating the Screening Process – Weak technology in screening greatly affects how candidates view the process , as well as how well the hiring team does their job in this area.  Sadly, as the number of qualified candidates increase, this just gets more complicated.

5. Overall Implementation Issues – Some companies fail to implement technology that is designed to move candidates quickly through each hiring step, while also failing to communicate important information.  A long and drawn out process benefits no one.  Not the hiring team, not the candidate, and certainly not the reputation of the company.


We have solution for all above issues.


Please visit www.AppliView.com for more information

Only the Best Applicant Tracking Systems Can Do This

There are thousands of applicant tracking system in the current market and many of them doesn't have basic feature which every ATS should have. We have batter solution for you if you are starting your journey in recruitment field.
 
ATS Make Less Work For You, Not More

Plenty of ATS want to create tasks lists for you to keep track of, have you fill out forms for everyone you meet and expect you to be on track of several notifications from every facet of the hiring process. These systems are too crowded, and the time it takes to learn them, then micromanage every task isn't worth the things they free you from doing.
The best applicant tracking systems handle all of the tedious parts of the system, and help you perform tasks you wouldn't otherwise have time for, fixing some of the basic problems with recruiting as a result. For example, half of all candidates never hear back from the companies they apply to. Having automatic notifications that, if nothing else, let the candidate know you’ve received their application is one of the the most baseline features an ATS can have. They also help you set up notices for rejecting them once you've picked candidates to move on to the next stage of hiring, and so on. Automating these simple tasks should be the cornerstone of any good ATS.
 
ATS Put Everyone On the Same Page

They align employees, and make hiring a much faster, smoother process as a result. About 70% of employers rate teamwork and collaboration as “very important,” and this should apply to every process at your company. If your ATS doesn’t let you see the work everyone has contributed to your hiring, then you’re doubling back and doing unnecessary work. A good ATS should let others track the same candidates you are, and let them see which candidates you recommend. With everyone working on the same page, hiring goes by a lot faster.
 
ATS Help You Find Better Candidates

Speed is one thing, but quality is quite another. The best applicant tracking systems find the sweet spot between the two, leading you to the best hires possible in the shortest amount of time. A good ATS prevents you from overlooking good hires.

But how can an ATS help you sift through the bad hires and find the perfect new employee? By going beyond the resume. Many ATS use keywords from the job posting and match them to candidate resumes, eliminating those whom may have simply applied after seeing there was an opening in your company, and not the posting itself. But the best ATS do more than that.

They track more intricate metrics, do the background checks for you, and spread your job across social media channels, which can help you find more tech-savvy candidates who will provide you with better work in the long run. These are all automated tasks that help you stay focused on knowing the candidate without adding extra work, as well.


AppliView has everything you want in an ATS. We’ll help you find better candidates, hire them more quickly, and retain them for much longer. Sign up for a demo (No Credit Card Required) today and we’ll show how.