Building your team can be a tall order. These are just some of the challenges you’ll face on your noble quest for talent. After all, forewarned is forearmed!
Competition
Fatigued as we may be from hearing about the war for talent, it is a war nonetheless. In this current hiring climate, candidates have their pick of companies, so you need to invest the time and resources into showing them why they should pick you over your competitors. Research shows that 78% of people would look into a company’s reputation as employers before applying for a job. Make sure yours measures up! Andrew Small, MD of Houzz, says it can be difficult to get your story and personality out there, especially when you’re scaling so rapidly.
“The biggest challenge in attracting talent is building our employer brand from scratch in new markets, and having the bandwidth and time to meet with enough people when we’re trying to move fast.”
Compatibility
Your hiring strategy should be about finding the right talent. The best companies don’t get caught up in the numbers game, they focus on reaching the highest calibre candidates as these will have the biggest impact on an organisation’s success.
Julien Deslangles-Blanche of General Assembly says when it comes to recruitment you need to be looking at a person’s potential to affect more than your workload. “Ensuring we are attracting and empowering the best talent is crucial. In any small team, a new member plays a powerful role in defining our culture and shaping our team. We look for team members who can shape the team while making it better.”
Availability
As work habits evolve, we’re seeing a lot more remote working, freelance jobs and global opportunities. As such, candidates have more freedom to travel and pursue their passion projects and are less concerned with securing the stability of traditional gigs. Ruth Penfold, Director of Talent Acquisition at Shazam believes recruiters need to think outside the box when sourcing candidates. “We have to hunt hard to have a steady pipeline of talent coming in to meet with us. So I guess the biggest challenge is finding new ways to interact with passive talent.”
Honesty
It’s natural for a candidate to sell themselves as much as possible at an interview. To make a good impression and ultimately secure the role, they may embellish some of those special skills and achievements. And it goes both ways, hiring managers are likely to play up the best parts of a job in order to convert their favoured candidate. Talent directors need to be forthcoming about both the benefits and challenges of a role, or they run the risk of high turnover.
Dee Murphy, Organisational Psychologist and Jobbio’s Expert in Residence says: “Companies should highlight the good, the bad and the fugly when showcasing what it’s really like to work with them; and employees should shout about their strengths and where they’ll add value, while also recognising where they’ll need help. Too often, candidates get caught up in the ‘marketing gloss’ and feel they were sold a dummy when the job or the environment isn’t what they expected.”
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